36 IDPH
we have decided that one man cannot in his life play many parts, any more
than he can act both tragedy and comedy, or be rhapsodist and actor at once?
Human nature is coined into very small pieces, and as our guardians have their
own business already, which is the care of freedom, they will have enough to
do without imitating. If they imitate they should imitate, not any meanness or
baseness, but the good only; for the mask which the actor wears is apt to be-
come his face. We cannot allow men to play the parts of women, quarrelling,
weeping, scolding, or boasting against the gods,–least of all when making love
or in labour. They must not represent slaves, or bullies, or cowards, drunkards,
or madmen, or blacksmiths, or neighing horses, or bellowing bulls, or sounding
rivers, or a raging sea. A good or wise man will be willing to perform good and
wise actions, but he will be ashamed to play an inferior part which he has never
practised; and he will prefer to employ the descriptive style with as little imita-
tion as possible. The man who has no self-respect, on the contrary, will imitate
anybody and anything; sounds of nature and cries of animals alike; his who-
le performance will be imitation of gesture and voice. Now in the descriptive
style there are few changes, but in the dramatic there are a great many. Poets
and musicians use either, or a compound of both, and this compound is very
attractive to youth and their teachers as well as to the vulgar. But our State in
which one man plays one part only is not adapted for complexity. And when
one of these polyphonous pantomimic gentlemen offers to exhibit himself and
his poetry we will show him every observance of respect, but at the same time
tell him that there is no room for his kind in our State; we prefer the rough,
honest poet, and will not depart from our original models (Laws).
Next as to the music. A song or ode has three parts,–the subject, the harmony,
and the rhythm; of which the two last are dependent upon the first. As we
banished strains of lamentation, so we may now banish the mixed Lydian har-
monies, which are the harmonies of lamentation; and as our citizens are to be
temperate, we may also banish convivial harmonies, such as the Ionian and pu-
re Lydian. Two remain–the Dorian and Phrygian, the first for war, the second
for peace; the one expressive of courage, the other of obedience or instruction or
religious feeling. And as we reject varieties of harmony, we shall also reject the
many-stringed, variously- shaped instruments which give utterance to them,
and in particular the flute, which is more complex than any of them. The lyre
and the harp may be permitted in the town, and the Pan’s-pipe in the fields.
Thus we have made a purgation of music, and will now make a purgation of
metres. These should be like the harmonies, simple and suitable to the occasion.
There are four notes of the tetrachord, and there are three ratios of metre, 3/2,
2/2, 2/1, which have all their characteristics, and the feet have different cha-
racteristics as well as the rhythms. But about this you and I must ask Damon,
the great musician, who speaks, if I remember rightly, of a martial measure as
well as of dactylic, trochaic, and iambic rhythms, which he arranges so as to
equalize the syllables with one another, assigning to each the proper quantity.
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