Why Plato, who was himself a poet, and whose dialogues are poems and dramas, should have been hostile to the poets as a class, and especially to the dramatic poets; why he should not have seen that truth may be embodied in verse as well as in prose, and that there are some indefinable lights and shadows of human life which can only be expressed in poetry--some elements of imagination which always entwine with reason; why he should have supposed epic verse to be inseparably associated with the impurities of the old Hellenic mythology; why he should try Homer and Hesiod by the unfair and prosaic test of utility,--are questions which have always been debated amongst students of Plato. Though unable to give a complete answer to them, we may show--first, that his views arose naturally out of the circumstances of his age; and secondly, we may elicit the truth as well as the error which is contained in them. He is the enemy of the poets because poetry was declining in his own lifetime, and a theatrocracy, as he says in the Laws (iii. 701 A), had taken the place of an intellectual aristocracy. Euripides exhibited the last phase of the tragic drama, and in him Plato saw the friend and apologist of tyrants, and the Sophist of tragedy. The old comedy was almost extinct; the new had not yet arisen. Dramatic and lyric poetry, like every other branch of Greek literature, was falling under the power of rhetoric. There was no 'second or third' to Æschylus and {clviii} Sophocles in the generation which followed them. Aristophanes, in one of his later comedies (Frogs, 89 foll.), speaks of 'thousands of tragedy-making prattlers,' whose attempts at poetry he compares to the chirping of swallows; 'their garrulity went far beyond Euripides,'--'they appeared once upon the stage, and there was an end of them.' To a man of genius who had a real appreciation of the godlike Æschylus and the noble and gentle Sophocles, though disagreeing with some parts of their 'theology' (Rep. ii. 380), these 'minor poets' must have been contemptible and intolerable. There is no feeling stronger in the dialogues of Plato than a sense of the decline and decay both in literature and in politics which marked his own age. Nor can he have been expected to look with favour on the licence of Aristophanes, now at the end of his career, who had begun by satirizing Socrates in the Clouds, and in a similar spirit forty years afterwards had satirized the founders of ideal commonwealths in his Eccleziazusae, or Female Parliament (cp. x. 606 C, and Laws ii. 658 ff.; 817).