Yes. Let us call it Eros. Art comes from the deep soul where a great force lives, and this force is sex and love and desire – desire for power, desire for possession, sexual desire, desire for beauty, desire for knowledge, desire for God – what makes us good, or bad – and without this force there is no art, and no science either, and no – no man – without Eros man is a ghost. But with Eros he can be – either a demon or – Socrates.

DEXIMENES

Socrates is a good demon.

CALLISTOS

But you do mean sex, don’t you?

PLATO

Not in your sense.

ACASTOS

Love, then.

PLATO

Love, what’s that? A tyrant loves power, a lecher loves women, Deximenes loves music, or it can be intellectual –

SOCRATES

Theaetetus loves mathematics

ACASTOS

You mean art comes out of a passion which can be either good or bad, and good art comes out of a good passion, but that’s just what I was saying, why it tells truth, and why it must be free, and why it does serve society, but not in Mantias’s way. Because of this passion, which is a kind of vision, artists can see truth and tell truth, they can tell more truth than anyone else, they can communicate it –

PLATO

So you think, I would like to agree, but art is more terrible, more ambiguous, no wonder rulers fear it and want to tame it, as Mantias does, and make it little and mean and small. Art’s so attractive, poetry transforms horror and wickedness into beauty. Art can make terrible things into wonderful things and that’s the biggest lie of all.

DEXIMENES

Call it a half truth. Can human beings bear more than half the truth? They’re lucky to have half. That’s what’s called escape and thank God for it!

PLATO

Escape! But we must not escape. Art is the highest escape route, it’s the last exit, and that is why it is the most dangerous.

DEXIMENES

Since few people ever get as far as your last exit I don’t think it matters very much.

CALLISTOS

But what are we escaping from?

PLATO

Art is dangerous to philosophy, it’s dangerous to religion. It masquerades as the whole truth and makes us content with something less. And people idolise it so, Deximenes said the theatre makes fools think they’ve understood something. The language of art can also make people who are not fools think they have understood something, it can make them stop going on.

CALLISTOS

Going on where?

PLATO

I think – I think that the human mind, the human soul is a vast region most of which is dark. There are different parts, different levels. There are dark low levels where we are hardly individual people at all –

Plato has come nearer to Socrates and speaks to him eloquently, almost like a lover. Socrates smiles.

ACASTOS intently listening

Is that Eros?

PLATO