- 开头部分
This passage is not a chapter of Plato's argument but the front matter of a Project Gutenberg edition of Jowett's translation of *The Republic*: title page, publication details (eBook #55201, July 26, 2017, updated April 1, 2026), credits, a transcriber's note on which editions were used (chiefly the 1888 third edition, with Stephanus numbering from a 1908 two-volume version), and a table of contents. It does not reach the dialogue itself, so the discussion of justice, the ideal city, the philosopher-kings, or the cave is absent. Page numbers appear in red and Stephanus numbers in the margin; sidenotes run down the left. A reader seeking Socrates's arguments will find none here.
- THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO … PREFACE.
This Preface, which opens the third edition of Jowett's translation of Plato's Republic, does not argue a philosophical question but explains the state of the published text. It records that the editor thanks his secretary Matthew Knight, Frank Fletcher and J. W. MacKail for their help with accuracy, credits Knight with the index, and notes that revisions affect roughly a third of the introduction and text. It then describes an arrangement for owners of the 1881 separate edition: on returning a perfect copy to a Clarendon Press agent, they may buy the new edition at half price. The Preface closes by announcing a planned revised edition of the remaining Dialogues within a year. It leaves the translation, the introduction's analysis, and the Republic's content to the rest of the volume.
- INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.（第 1/12 部分）
This opening section of Plato's Republic (Introduction and Analysis, part 1 of 12) situates the work as the greatest of Plato's dialogues, a centre around which the others are grouped, and the first philosophical treatment of method, education and ideal politics. It then sketches the dialogue's argument: the search for justice, first hinted at by the aged Cephalus, tested against proverbial morality through Socrates and Polemarchus, caricatured by Thrasymachus, and reduced to an abstraction by Glaucon and Adeimantus before being sought in an ideal State. It describes the five natural divisions of the work, the characters and their dramatic roles, and the Socratic method. Book I is analysed in detail, ending with Thrasymachus's claim that justice is the interest of the stronger. The later books, the construction of the ideal State, and the critique of poetry and the afterlife are only previewed here.
- INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.（第 2/12 部分）
This section of the Republic's introduction and analysis covers Book I's closing exchanges with Thrasymachus and the opening of Book II, where Glaucon and Adeimantus press Socrates to prove that justice is good in itself, apart from its rewards and reputation. It traces how Socrates turns Thrasymachus's claim that justice is the interest of the stronger against him, using the analogy of the arts: every art serves the good of what it governs, not the artist's advantage, and the just man is the skilled practitioner who does not seek excess. It concludes that justice and happiness cannot be separated, though the argument is partly indirect. Book II then sets out Glaucon's challenge, the ring of Gyges and the ideal contrast between the just and unjust man, and Adeimantus's critique of conventional morality and the poets. The section stops before Socrates begins constructing the imaginary State, and it leaves the later treatment of education, poetry and theology to other parts of the work.
- INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.（第 3/12 部分）
This section of the Republic (Book III, with the opening of Book IV) lays out how the guardians of Plato's ideal city should be educated, beginning with the purging of poetry and religious stories. Socrates argues that the myths of gods and heroes must be censored: the gods must never be shown as deceitful, quarrelsome or grieving, and fear of death and of Hades must be removed so that soldiers can be brave. Homeric figures such as Achilles and Priam are judged unfit models. The discussion then turns to style and narrative modes, concluding that the guardians should imitate only what is good and should not play many parts. Music is pared down to the Dorian and Phrygian harmonies, and gymnastic and diet are kept simple, with medicine and law reserved for real need. The section ends with the "noble lie" of the earthborn citizens and the division of gold, silver, brass and iron natures, and with the warning that guardians must own no private property. Book IV then asks whether the guardians are unhappy, answering that the city's aim is the good of the whole rather than their happiness.
- INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.（第 4/12 部分）
This section of the introduction and analysis to Plato's Republic, Book IV, takes up the question of where justice is to be found once wisdom, courage, and temperance have been identified in the ideal state. Socrates proposes a method of residues: wisdom resides in the guardians, courage in the soldiers, and temperance as a harmony running through all classes, so justice must be the remaining principle, namely each class doing its own business. The argument then turns to the individual, where the soul is shown to have three parts (reason, passion or spirit, and appetite) by the principle that contradictory effects cannot spring from one faculty, illustrated by thirst and by the story of Leontius. The conclusion is that the virtues of state and individual coincide, and the editor's commentary links this to Plato's wider metaphysics of ideas, while noting the unfinished "longer way" the dialogue leaves to later books.
- INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.（第 5/12 部分）
This section is the Introduction and Analysis to Republic Books V and VI, opening with the fifth book's new beginning, in which community of property and family are first maintained and the transition is made to the kingdom of philosophers. It takes up the communistic plan, its unresolved defects (the prohibited degrees, the lottery manipulation, the treatment of the lower classes), and the image of the three waves; it then moves to the figment of contingent matter, the first appearance of that idea in the history of philosophy. The analysis of Book VI begins with the philosopher's virtues, Adeimantus's objection that philosophers prove useless or corrupt, Socrates's parable of the ship's captain, and the corruption of rare natures by public opinion. It closes on the higher, longer method of dialectic, the sun, line and cave analogies, and the idea of good, which the commentary treats as a mere abstraction. Later dialogues and the seventh book's treatment of education are left to other parts.
- INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.（第 6/12 部分）
This section of the introduction and analysis to Plato's Republic covers the Allegory of the Cave (Book VII, 514–521) and the curriculum that leads the mind toward the idea of good. It explains the cave's parable of prisoners who see only shadows, the painful ascent to sunlight, and the return of the enlightened philosopher to govern. It then sets out the stages of education: arithmetic, plane and solid geometry, astronomy and harmonics, and finally dialectic, which alone reaches the first principle. The analysis reads the parable politically and philosophically, and discusses the dangers of premature or mistaken philosophical training. It ends with the shift to Book VIII and the decline of the perfect State into timocracy. The section does not treat the full theory of the forms or the later discussion of the Good in the Philebus in any depth.
- INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.（第 7/12 部分）
This section of the Introduction and Analysis to *The Republic* (Books VIII and IX) traces how the ideal state decays and how the individual souls shaped by each regime follow it. It opens with the "number" of human generation, a riddle the Muses set, whose neglect brings division and the decline of rule. It then moves through timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny, each derived from the one before by excess of wealth or freedom, and matches each state with a corresponding character: the ambitious lover of honour, the miser, the democratic man given to every passing pleasure, and finally the tyrannical man ruled by a single monstrous appetite. The conclusion is that tyranny is the worst form of rule and the tyrant the most wretched of men, governed by lawless desire. Terms such as "drones," "necessary and unnecessary pleasures," and the protector who becomes a tyrant recur. Problems of Plato's wider metaphysics and the philosophy of love are left to other parts of the book.
- INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.（第 8/12 部分）
This section of the Republic's analysis, covering the close of Book IX and all of Book X, takes up the question of whether the just man is truly happier than the unjust, and whether poetry, especially Homer and the tragedians, should have a place in the ideal State. It runs through the tripartite soul and the three kinds of pleasure, the ranking of the king, oligarch and tyrant by the number 729, and then the critique of imitation: the painter and poet are "thrice removed" from the truth and appeal to the irrational part of the soul. The argument moves to the immortality of the soul, arguing that only internal corruption, not bodily evil, can destroy it. It concludes with the myth of Er, in which souls choose their future lives and the just are rewarded after death. Related matters such as the education of the guardians are left to earlier books.
- INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.（第 9/12 部分）
This section of the introduction to Plato's Republic opens with Book X's assault on the poets, which resumes an earlier thread: having analysed the soul, Socrates judges poetry and the imitative arts to be remote from truth, appealing to the emotions and to tyrants. The argument then turns to the immortality of the soul, supported by the myth of Er and its vision of the afterlife, where souls choose new lives and drink from the river of Forgetfulness. Plato's hostility to poets is traced to the decline of Athenian drama, to Euripides as a sophist of tragedy, and to a contrast between philosophy and poetry, between universals and particulars of sense. The discussion concludes that art is not wholly without value, though it must be judged against a higher standard of truth. The section does not reach the Spartan and Pythagorean sources of the ideal state or the paradoxes of communism, which are taken up in the following part.
- INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.（第 10/12 部分）
This section of the Introduction and Analysis takes up Plato's proposals for community of property and, more controversially, community of wives and children, and asks whether the received notions of property and the family are the best possible. It opens by contrasting the ancient and modern sacredness of property with the earlier practice of common land, and argues that Plato's views may be an exaggeration of the Spartan commonwealth rather than a wholly alien idea. The discussion then moves to women's equality with men, set against the Athenian subordination of women, and to the marriage arrangements aimed at improving the race, which the author rejects on grounds of human feeling, the moral unity of body and mind, and the lessons of Sparta. The section concludes that Plato's error lies in forgetting what distinguishes man from the animals, and it closes with a note on the philosopher-king and the abstract study of the idea of good. Related matters of education and the ideal state's institutions are treated elsewhere in the book.
- INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.（第 11/12 部分）
This section of the introduction to Plato's Republic covers the middle and late parts of the Introduction and Analysis, moving through the philosophy of ideas, the place of the philosopher-statesman, the relation between state and individual, and Plato's theory of education. It opens with the discovery of great metaphysical conceptions such as the idea of good and argues that their value is often misjudged by their discoverers and by posterity. It then examines whether God stands above or below the idea of good, concluding that the two may be different modes of conceiving the same perfection. Plato's education is traced from music and gymnastic to mathematics and dialectic, and its continuation through later life is set against the modern world's neglect of self-education. The section ends by contrasting the Greek sense of fixed, legislated order with modern ideas of progress. Discussion of the Statesman and Laws is deferred to their own introductions.
- INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.（第 12/12 部分）
This final portion of the Introduction and Analysis compares Plato's Republic with his Laws and with later ideal-state writings. It argues that the Laws, though inferior in dramatic power and poetic form, contain more of the mature knowledge of life, and it sets out Aristotle's and Plato's own accounts of how the two works relate. It then traces the Republic's influence through Cicero's De Republica, Augustine's City of God, Dante's De Monarchia, More's Utopia, Bacon's New Atlantis and Campanella's City of the Sun, closing with reflections on ideals as guides to human conduct. The discussion ends with the Christian ideal of the Divine man, which Plato is said to have glimpsed.
- BOOK I（第 1/2 部分）
This section opens Book I of the Republic with Socrates and Glaucon detained by Polemarchus on their way home from the Piraeus, and moves into the house of Cephalus, where the old man reflects on old age and the consolations of wealth. It then turns to the definition of justice: first as truth-telling and repaying debts, as proposed by Simonides, then as doing good to friends and harm to enemies, which Socrates tests and rejects, arguing that the just man cannot harm anyone and that justice is not a kind of theft. The discussion ends with Thrasymachus bursting in to declare that justice is "the interest of the stronger," a definition Socrates begins to dismantle by showing that rulers may err about their own interest. The section stops before Socrates fully refutes Thrasymachus and does not yet offer his own positive account of justice; those developments, and the later dialogue on the ideal state, lie beyond this part.
- BOOK I（第 2/2 部分）
This section picks up Socrates' exchange with Thrasymachus, who claims that justice is the interest of the stronger and that injustice, practised on a large scale, is more profitable than justice. Socrates argues by analogy with the arts: the physician, pilot and shepherd, considered strictly as rulers, attend to the good of their subjects rather than their own, so no ruler qualifies as one who seeks the interest of the stronger. The argument then turns to why good men accept office, namely fear of being ruled by someone worse, and to whether the unjust can act together. It concludes that justice is wisdom and virtue, injustice ignorance and vice, and that the just soul lives well and is happy. Socrates ends by admitting he knows not what justice is. The later books take up the nature of justice in the state and soul.
- BOOK II.（第 1/2 部分）
This section of Book II opens with Glaucon pressing Socrates to show, not merely assert, that justice is better than injustice, and sets out the threefold division of goods: those desired for their own sake, those desired for their results, and those endured only for reward. Socrates places justice in the highest class. Glaucon then reports the common account of justice as a compromise between doing and suffering injustice, and tests it with the story of Gyges' ring, which he uses to argue that men are just only out of necessity. Adeimantus follows, showing that parents, poets and prophets praise justice only for its reputation and rewards, and he asks for an account of what justice does to the soul. Socrates agrees to proceed by constructing a State in speech, first to see justice on a larger scale, and the section ends as the city's basic economy, the division of labour, and the need for trade are being laid out. Questions of the soul's inner order are left to later argument.
- BOOK II.（第 2/2 部分）
This section of Book II, the second half, follows Socrates and Glaucon as they build the ideal city outward from its simple origins into a more elaborate state. It begins with the growth of trade, retail dealers, merchants, sailors and hirelings, and then sketches a "luxurious" city whose wants demand more craftsmen, servants, physicians and territory, which in turn leads to war. Socrates concludes that the guardians must combine a gentle nature with spirit, and that philosophy is the mark of such a guardian, which he illustrates with the dog's way of distinguishing friend from enemy. The passage ends by setting out how the young are to be educated, beginning with music and a censorship of the poets' tales, and it closes by insisting that God is good, unchanging and never deceptive. The discussion of justice and injustice is taken up later, and the detailed education of the guardians belongs to the following book.
- BOOK III.（第 1/2 部分）
This section of Book III of Plato's Republic, in the Socrates–Adeimantus dialogue, takes up how the young guardians should be taught the content of myth and poetry. It argues that tales depicting the world below as terrible, gods laughing or quarrelling, lamenting heroes such as Achilles and Priam, and divine or heroic wickedness must be censored, because they encourage fear of death, excessive emotion, and moral laxity. Truthfulness is required of rulers and the young, and temperance is tied to obedience and self-control. The discussion then moves from the matter of poetry to its manner, distinguishing pure narration, pure imitation, and the mixed style exemplified by Homer, and concluding that only imitation of virtue should be admitted, with the pantomimic performer sent away. It ends by turning to harmony and rhythm, retaining only the Dorian and Phrygian modes and the lyre and harp. The passage stops before the full account of rhythm, which is deferred to Damon, and leaves the question of justice and whether bad men prosper to later argument.
- BOOK III.（第 2/2 部分）
This section of Book III of *The Republic* covers the second half of Socrates' account of early education. It argues that music and gymnastic work together on the soul: rhythm and harmony enter the inner self and make a well-educated person graceful and good, while the ill-educated become ungraceful, and a true musician learns to recognise the forms of virtue and vice wherever they appear. Socrates then turns to gymnastic, condemning the heavy diet and sleepy regimen of ordinary athletes, the luxuries of Syracuse and Corinth, and the overgrown courts and medicine of a corrupt city, which he traces to Herodicus's invention of lingering valetudinarian care. The section ends by fixing the choice of rulers: the best guardians are tested from youth through toils, fears and pleasures, and a "Phoenician" tale of earth-born citizens of mixed metals is introduced, followed by the rules of the warriors' camp, where guardians hold no private property. The later selection of the philosopher-kings is left to Book IV.
- BOOK IV.（第 1/2 部分）
This section opens with Adeimantus's objection that Socrates's guardians are miserable, lacking land, houses, gold and silver, and it works through a reply: the State should be judged as a whole, not by the happiness of one class. Socrates argues that wealth and poverty both corrupt the arts, that the city must remain one and self-sufficient, and that education and nurture, especially music and gymnastic kept unchanged, form the foundation of order. The section then turns to the four virtues, locating wisdom in the guardians, courage in the soldiers who keep right opinion about what is to be feared, and temperance as harmony across all classes. It ends with the claim that justice is the principle of each person doing his own work, and it leaves religion and detailed legislation to Delphi and to the citizens themselves.
- BOOK IV.（第 2/2 部分）
This section of Book IV of Plato's *Republic* takes up the question of whether justice in the individual soul mirrors justice in the State, after the four civic virtues have been identified. Socrates argues that justice is the principle of each part doing its own work and not meddling with another's, a rule that holds for classes in the State as for faculties in the person. To test whether the soul has parallel parts, he sets out the principle of contradiction, that the same thing cannot act or be acted upon in contrary ways at once in the same part. Using examples of thirst, the archer's bow, and Leontius and the corpses, he separates reason, appetite, and spirit (passion), and concludes that the soul has three principles matching the State's three classes. The section ends by noting that justice in the individual is health and order, injustice disease, and that the earlier question of whether the just or unjust man is happier now seems ridiculous. It carries into Book V, where the five forms of State and soul are introduced. Detailed treatment of the ideal city's education and rulers is left to earlier books.
- BOOK V.（第 1/2 部分）
This section of Book V opens with Adeimantus demanding that Socrates explain the community of women and children among the guardians, which he had deferred. Socrates first argues that women should share the same nurture, education, music, gymnastic and military training as men, since the difference of sex matters only for bearing and suckling children. He then argues for the wider unity of the State: the greatest good is unity and the greatest evil discord, and a community of wives and children produces a common sense of "mine" and "not mine," so that the guardians feel one another's joys and sorrows as their own. The passage stops before the question of whether such a scheme is practicable is fully resolved, and it does not yet treat the rulers' breeding arrangements in detail beyond the outline given here.
- BOOK V.（第 2/2 部分）
This section of Book V, the second half of the discussion, takes up how the guardians of the ideal city should live and fight. It argues that the guardians, sharing women, children and property in common, will be free of the private quarrels and meannesses that plague ordinary households, and that their life is happier than that of Olympic victors. It then sets out rules for war: children accompany parents on campaign to learn their duties, cowards are demoted, honours go to the brave, Hellenes must not enslave or despoil fellow Hellenes, and internal strife is distinguished from war against barbarians. The section closes by introducing the claim that cities will not cease from evil until philosophers rule, and explains who counts as a philosopher: a lover of the whole of wisdom, who grasps the unchanging ideal of beauty and justice rather than merely their many changing instances. The fuller defence of this claim continues beyond this excerpt.
- BOOK VI.（第 1/2 部分）
This section of Book VI opens with Socrates and Glaucon weighing who should rule the State, and argues that the true philosopher, as a lover of eternal and unchanging truth, is the proper guardian because he alone can see the pattern of justice and goodness. It then sketches the philosophical nature, marked by truthfulness, temperance, magnanimity, good memory and a harmonious disposition, and Adeimantus objects that philosophers are in practice useless or corrupt. Socrates answers with the parable of the ship, in which a noble but dull captain is mutinied against by quarrelling sailors who see the true pilot as a star-gazer. He explains that the fault lies with those who refuse to be governed by the wise, and then traces why promising natures are so often ruined: their own virtues distract them, wealth and rank mislead them, and public opinion and flattery corrupt them, leaving philosophy neglected and dishonoured. The passage ends by asking which existing State could suit philosophy, and it leaves the answer and the method of training philosophers to the continuation of the book.
- BOOK VI.（第 2/2 部分）
This section of Book VI of the Republic takes up why philosophy is held in contempt and what the perfect ruler must know. Socrates blames the poor reputation of philosophy on pretenders who attack persons rather than study true being, and argues that the philosopher-ruler must combine rare gifts of quick intelligence and steady temperament, be tested in many kinds of knowledge, and above all grasp the idea of good, which he compares to the sun as the source of light and sight. The argument ends by dividing the visible and intelligible worlds into four sections, matched to four faculties of the soul: reason, understanding, faith, and perception of shadows. Key terms include the idea of good, dialectic, hypotheses, images, and the child of the good. The passage picks up from the discussion of education and the rulers, and it leaves the detailed curriculum of the guardians' training to later passages.
- BOOK VII.（第 1/2 部分）
This section opens with Plato's allegory of the cave: prisoners chained from childhood see only shadows on a wall, and the philosopher is the one released, who climbs toward the sun, which stands for the idea of good. Socrates argues that the soul must be turned from becoming toward being, and that education must redirect the eye of the soul rather than implant sight. He then surveys the propaedeutic sciences: arithmetic, valued for drawing thought toward pure number, then plane geometry, and an early turn toward astronomy, with a correction of the order of study to take solids before astronomy. The passage ends mid-argument, with the sequence of sciences still being set out, so the full treatment of astronomy and dialectic continues beyond this excerpt.
- BOOK VII.（第 2/2 部分）
This section of Book VII continues Socrates' account of the education of the future philosopher-rulers, moving from solid geometry and astronomy through harmonics to the culminating study of dialectic. It argues that astronomy should be pursued as an abstract science of true motions rather than by gazing at the visible heavens, and that the Pythagorean approach to harmony is likewise incomplete unless it reaches the rational principles of number. Dialectic is then presented as the coping-stone of all the sciences, the only method that proceeds by reason alone to the first principle, the idea of good, and it is distinguished from eristic, the contentious argument that corrupts the young. The passage sets out the graded divisions of intellect and opinion, the selection of naturally gifted students, and an age schedule running from childhood gymnastics to a fifty-year-old's mature service. It closes by summarizing the ideal State and its governors, male and female, and leaves the detailed mechanics of political office and the cave allegory's earlier content to the preceding and following passages.
- BOOK VIII.（第 1/2 部分）
This section of Book VIII opens with Socrates recapitulating the perfect State, then turns to how political constitutions decay. It presents the theory that every government is an unstable union that eventually splits, the way the ruling class of the ideal city will fall into discord through a faulty breeding number, and traces the resulting shift from aristocracy to timocracy, the rule of honour that Sparta and Crete exemplify. The discussion then sketches the timocratic character, a contentious and ambitious man whose love of money grows as his father's virtue is neglected, and moves on to oligarchy, where property qualifications exclude the poor and the state splits into two hostile cities of rich and poor. Its drones, the spendthrift ruined men who turn to crime, and the miserly oligarchic man who shrinks from public contests are analysed in detail. The passage ends as democracy emerges from indebtedness and extravagance, with the pauper class plotting revolution. The later stages (democracy's character and tyranny) are left to the remainder of the book.
- BOOK VIII.（第 2/2 部分）
This section of Book VIII, the second half of the chapter, traces how democracy degenerates into tyranny. It opens with the origin of democracy after the poor overthrow the rich, then portrays the democratic character as a motley, freedom-loving man who indulges every appetite in turn. Its argument moves from the oligarchic young man, whose unnecessary desires are fed by drones and rebellious allies, to the democratic man, and finally to the protector who, given a bodyguard, becomes a tyrant. Key terms include necessary and unnecessary desires, drones, the wealthy class and the people. The section concludes that excessive liberty naturally passes into the harshest slavery, and that the tyrant purges the good and rules by mercenaries. It ends the discussion of tyranny at Book IX's threshold and leaves the detailed account of the tyrant's inner happiness to the following book.
- BOOK IX.（第 1/2 部分）
This section of Book IX of the Republic, a dialogue between Socrates and Adeimantus (with Glaucon taking up a reply), finishes the typology of the soul and state by examining the tyrannical man, arguing that he arises from the democratic man through unchecked appetites and a "master passion" modelled as a drone, and that the tyrant is the most unjust and most miserable of men. Socrates first sets out the unnecessary, lawless appetites that wake in sleep even in good men, then traces the tyrant's career: debts, theft, violence against parents, and eventual rule by a faction that makes him tyrant over his fatherland. Analogies to slaveholders and to a man carried off into the wilderness illustrate the tyrant's fear and servility. The chapter then assembles proofs of the ranking (king, timocrat, oligarch, democrat, tyrant), first by the criterion of virtue and happiness, then by the tripartite soul's three pleasures, with the philosopher's experience taken as the authoritative judge. The second half of the book, which resumes the argument about pleasure and the philosopher's life, is not covered here.
- BOOK IX.（第 2/2 部分）
This section of Book IX, the second half of the chapter, takes up the ranking of the three kinds of life: the philosopher's, the honour-lover's, and the money-maker's. It argues that the philosopher alone has both experience of all three pleasures and the faculty of reason to judge them, so his verdict is the most trustworthy. It then distinguishes true pleasure from the mere cessation of pain, comparing pleasures to a grey-to-black contrast and comparing the sensual with the intellectual by degrees of being. The argument culminates in a myth of the many-headed beast, a lion and a man joined within one figure, used to show that justice is profitable because it subordinates the lower parts of the soul to the rational one. The chapter ends by describing the just man's self-regulated life and a city "laid up in heaven" as its pattern. It carries forward the refutation of Thrasymachus begun earlier and leaves the detailed city-constitutions to the preceding books.
- BOOK X.（第 1/2 部分）
This section of Book X of Plato's Republic opens with Socrates praising the rejection of imitative poetry from the ideal State and explaining why, now that the parts of the soul have been distinguished, that exclusion looks even more justified. Through the bed-and-mirror analogy it establishes a three-tier structure: the form made by God, the particular bed made by the carpenter, and the painted image made by the imitator, who is thrice removed from truth and knows only appearances. It then tests Homer's claim to educate mankind, arguing that no city or private circle was ever improved by him, and concludes that imitative art appeals to the irrational part of the soul and nourishes emotions that reason should govern. The passage ends with a conditional invitation for poetry to defend itself, and it turns to the immortality of the soul, which is deferred to the following part of the book.