"'And therefore,' I said, "'Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why: and when reason comes he will recognise and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar."[Footnote: Plato, Republic III. 401.--Translated by Jowett.] This fusion of the ideas of the beautiful and the good is the central point in the Greek Theory of Art; and it enables us to understand how it was that they conceived art to be educational. Its end, in their view, was not only pleasure, though pleasure was essential to it; but also, and just as much, edification. Plato, indeed, here again exaggerating the current view, puts the edification above the pleasure. He criticises Homer as he might criticise a moral philosopher, pointing out the inadequacy, from an ethical point of view, of his conception of heaven and of the gods, and dismissing as injurious and of bad example to youthful citizens the whole tissue of passionate human feeling, the irrepressible outbursts of anger and grief and fear, by virtue of which alone the Iliad and the Odyssey are immortal poems instead of ethical tracts. And finally, with a half reluctant assent to the course of his own argument, he excludes the poets altogether from his ideal republic, on the ground that they encourage their hearers in that indulgence of emotion which it is the object of every virtuous man to repress. The conclusion of Plato, by his own admission, was half paradoxical, and it certainly never recommended itself to such a nation of artists as the Greeks. But it illustrates, nevertheless, the general bent of their views of art, that tendency to the identification of the beautiful and the good, which, while it was never pushed so far as to choke art with didactics--for Plato himself, even against his own will, is a poet--yet served to create a standard of taste which was ethical as much as aesthetic, and made the judgment of beauty also a judgment of moral worth.