This text is part of:
389B - 392A A high value should also be placed upon truth. The medicinal lie may indeed be permitted to our rulers, in the interests of the State: but any others who lie are to be punished. To lie to the rulers is worse than lying to a physician about one's illness. Not less necessary is self-control, which will enable our citizens to obey the rulers, and to rule their own appetites. Homer frequently represents heroes and gods as lacking in this virtue—as insubordinate, gluttonous, lustful, avaricious, prone to revenge, and mean. The effect is to discourage in the young the virtue which we desiderate, and all such representations must therefore be forbidden: they are both impious and untrue. ἀλλὰ μὴν καὶ ἀλήθειαν ff. On the place of this section in the general plan of the Republic see App. I. θεοῖσι μὲν -- εἴδει. For the dative θεοῖσι see I 330 B note ἐν φαρμάκου εἴδει (cf. 11 382 C, D) implies the usual Socratic analogy between body and soul: see on II 380 B. οὐχ ἁπτέον κτλ. Cf. Laws 916 E ff.
The Republic of Plato. James Adam. 1902. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
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.