The Ancient Quarrel

Between the Poets & the Philosophers

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But what shall their education be? Is any better than the old-fashioned sort which is comprehended under the name of music and gymnastic? Music includes literature, and literature is of two kinds, true and false.

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I mean that children hear stories before they learn gymnastics, and that the stories are either untrue, or have at most one or two grains of truth in a bushel of falsehood. Now early life is very impressible, and children ought not to learn what they will have to unlearn when they grow up.

We must therefore have a censorship of myths & nursery tales, banishing some and keeping others.

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Some of them are very improper, as we may see in the great instances of Homer and Hesiod, who not only tell lies but bad lies; stories about Uranus and Saturn, which are immoral as well as false, and which should never be spoken of to young persons, or indeed at all; or, if at all, then in a mystery.

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Shall our youth be encouraged to beat their fathers by the example of Zeus, or our citizens be incited to quarrel by hearing or seeing representations of strife among the gods? Such tales may possibly have a mystical interpretation, but the young are incapable of understanding allegory.

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If any one asks what tales are to be allowed, we will answer that weare legislators and not book-makers; we only lay down the principlesaccording to which books are to be written; to write them is the dutyof others.