Then Homer teaches gluttony, by making Odusseus, the wisest of men, say―― Best thing in life I count it, a heavy-laden board, While in the goblets ceaselessly the good strong wine is poured. Still worse are the tales of the lusts of Zeus or of Ares and Aphrodite, and of the covetousness of the gods. Gifts win the heart of gods: gifts win the heart of kings. Nor must the heroes be allowed to blaspheme. “My respect for Homer makes me shrink from saying it, but it is impious to state or to believe that Achilles was ready to fight against the river, a god, or that he dragged Hektor’s body round Patroklos’ tomb or slaughtered captives upon it, or that he gave to the dead Patroklos the hair which he had dedicated to the river god Spercheios.”[672] Nor must poets say that wicked men are enviable, if they are not found out, or that justice does good to others but is a loss to oneself. On the contrary, they must invent myths to establish the opposite, whether it be true or not, because it is profitable. Plato cares very little for literal truth in mythology; he is only desirous that the fiction should be improving and in accordance with sound ethics. It is impossible to know the truth, he thinks, about things primeval and the gods, so it is necessary to invent stories as near the truth as possible and such that they will be improving. The majority of men, as Isokrates also noticed, prefer myths to anything else; for their intelligence can only grasp ethical and metaphysical truths when they are embodied in stories and parables and fables.[673] These fictions, however, are like powerful drugs: their concoction must only be entrusted to competent hands, or the result will be deadly. The rulers of the State, the philosophers, must construct the national mythology, not unskilled and irresponsible persons like poets.[674] Plato himself gives a good many instances of such profitable myths; he enshrines in them, as in a popular form, many of his deepest beliefs, his psychology,[675] his views of the immortality of the soul,[676] his political theory that all men are not equal.[677] In his opinion mythology was the proper food for the unenlightened many who were incapable of philosophic certainty; the philosopher, by the light of his exact knowledge of ethics and metaphysics, was to concoct this food.