Even before Plato's peremptory negation had directed thought to this way of issue, the literary criticism of Aristophanes was already full of the pedagogic idea: "What schoolmasters are to children, poets are to young men" (τοΐς ήβώσιν δὲ ποιηταί), he says in a celebrated verse[9] But we can find traces of it in Plato himself (in the dialogues in which he seems to withdraw from the too rigid conclusions of the _Republic)_ and in Aristotle, both in the _Politics,_ where he determines the use of music in education, and perhaps in the _Poetics,_ where he speaks obscurely of a tragical _catharsis_; although as regards this latter, it is not to be altogether denied that he may have had a sort of glimpse of the modern idea of the liberating power of art.[10] Later on, the pedagogic theory takes a form that was much affected by the Stoics. Strabo develops and defends this at great length, in the introduction to his geographical work, where he combats Eratosthenes, who has made poetry consist in mere pleasure without any notion of teaching. Strabo, on the contrary, maintained the opinion of the ancients, that it was "a first philosophy (φιλοσοφίαν τινα πρωτήν), which educated young men for life, and created customs, affections and actions, by means of pleasure." Therefore, he said, poetry has always been a part of education; one cannot be a good poet unless one is a good man (άνδρα άγαθόν). Legislators and founders of cities were the first to employ fables to admonish and to terrify: then this duty, which must be performed for women and children and even for adults, passed to the poets. We caress and dominate the multitude with fiction and with falsehood.[11] "The poets tell many lies" (πολλά ψεύδονται άοιδοί) is a hemistich recorded by Plutarch, who describes minutely in one of his lesser works how the poets should be read to youths.[12] For him too poetry is a preparation for philosophy; it is a disguised philosophy, and therefore delights us in the same way as do fish and meat at feasts, so prepared as not to seem to be fish and meat; it is philosophy softened with fables, like the vine that grows close to the mandragora, and produces a wine that is the giver of sweet slumbers. It is not possible to pass from dense darkness to sunlight; one should first accustom the eyes to moderate light. Philosophers, in order to exhort and instruct, take their examples from true things; poets aim at a like result, when they create fictions and fables.[13] Lucretius, in Roman literature, gives us the well-known comparison of the boys for whom the doctors "_prius or as pocula circum Contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore,_" in order to administer the bitter wormwood.[14] Horace, in certain verses of the Epistle to the Pisones which have become proverbial (perhaps his source for them was the Greek of Neoptolemus of Paros?), offers both views (that of art as courtesan and of art as pedagogue) in his "_Aut prodesse volunt aut deledare poetae ...