[602b]
“Yet still he will none the less1 imitate, though in every case
he does not know in what way the thing is bad or good. But, as it seems, the
thing he will imitate will be the thing that appears beautiful to the
ignorant multitude.” “Why, what else?”
“On this, then, as it seems, we are fairly agreed, that the
imitator knows nothing worth mentioning of the things he imitates, but that
imitation is a form of play,2 not to be taken seriously,3 and that those who attempt tragic poetry,
whether in iambics or heroic verse,4 are all altogether
imitators.” “By all means.”
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.