PLATO

I’m very sorry, but really, you’re all so unserious about art, as if it were a sort of side issue. As if one could say there’s the navy and the silvermines and the war and the latest news about Alcibiades and this and that and then of course there’s art and – But art is – in a way it’s almost everything – you don’t see how deep art is, and how awful it is!

CALLISTOS

I think your poems are rather nice.

SOCRATES

Explain yourself, my dear Plato, since you’ve found your tongue at last, and do it quietly.

PLATO

Art is full of horrible things which it makes us accept –

DEXIMENES

Life is full of horrible things, why shouldn’t art be?

PLATO

Life is accidental, art isn’t. You were talking about Achilles and how we all love him and we identify with him. But he slaughters all those Trojan prisoners beside the funeral pyre of Patroclus. And Odysseus whom everyone admires, when he comes home he hangs all the servant girls just because they went to bed with the suitors. And he murders all the suitors, and this ghastly blood bath is supposed to be great art –

DEXIMENES

Why shouldn’t he kill the suitors?

PLATO

There you are! Because it’s art you stop thinking! Because it’s art you can murder prisoners and hang silly helpless women and slaughter a lot of people who haven’t done any harm except hang around your house and propose honourable marriage to your widow, they didn’t rape her!

DEXIMENES

But such things happen in life –

PLATO

Yes, but why celebrate them in art? And I agree with Mantias about malicious laughter being evil. So why does Homer show us the gods laughing spitefully at Hephaistos? And this is the poet whom we’re all supposed to admire and love.

DEXIMENES

You admire and love him.

PLATO

Yes, but I’m irrational [ laughter ]. And we’re all waiting for Agamemnon to be murdered, we’re licking our lips at the idea of Clytemnestra using an axe on her husband –

ACASTOS

You said you agree with Deximenes –

PLATO

Yes, art is erotic, all art is erotic.

CALLISTOS

He means all good art.

DEXIMENES

No, he means all bad art.

PLATO

Even Sophocles –

SOCRATES

Wait, wait, wait, don’t just deluge us with examples. You have asked some interesting questions, but let us go along slowly as we have to do in philosophy and not just rush away after every new thing. Let us review our argument so far, and then Plato can leap off the end of it and spread his wings in the air. Callistos said that art was copying, then he said that it was like a map, then he said that it stirred up the emotions and was like music. And Acastos said that it was thinking and truthful vision. And Mantias said that it was rhetoric or propaganda. And Acastos was so shocked by this that he said it was religion.