[382d]
to avert the evil—as a
medicine? And also in the fables of which we were just now speaking owing to
our ignorance of the truth about antiquity, we liken the false to the true
as far as we may and so make it edifying.1” “We most certainly
do,” he said. “Tell me, then, on which of these grounds
falsehood would be serviceable to God. Would he because of his ignorance of
antiquity make false likenesses of it?” “An absurd
supposition, that,” he said. “Then there is no lying
poet in God.” “I think not.”
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.