2.11: Censoring Homer

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See 376e-377d. They turn first to the sorts of things that should not appear in stories told to children being educated to serve as responsible guardians of the city. All but a few of the examples they are going to take up in Books II and III come from the narrative poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is hard to overestimate the importance of these poems to Greek culture in Socrates’ day. Schoolchildren commonly committed them to memory, much as schoolchildren commit the Qur’an to memory nowadays in many of the more traditional communities in the Islamic world. And just as Jews have always drawn together as a community to share public readings of Torah, so too Greeks at the time of Socrates gathered for public recitations of Homer by people called rhapsodes. So the ease with which characters in Plato cite passages from Homer should come as no surprise. It would have been perfectly normal for an educated fifth century Athenian. Imagine then what it might have meant in Socrates’ day to hold the Homeric poems up to criticism, to suggest that, uncensored, these poems are unfit for children being raised to be good. It bears remembering that Socrates was eventually sentenced to death by his fellow citizens on the charges of promoting unorthodox religious views and corrupting the youth.

Is it ever good to restrict what children are allowed to do? Why or why not?
Is it ever good to restrict what children are allowed to think and feel? Would you be in favor of sheltering children from stories describing the techniques and pleasures of sexual intercourse? From stories of rape? From stories of racial superiority and inferiority? From stories of mothers deliberately drowning their children? From stories of gods deliberately drowning other people’s children, or slaying the firstborn of entire nations? Why or why not?