ABSTRACT
The history which we have just brought to one of its momentary conclusions in the modern theory of mythic archetypes had one of its remote formal beginnings, we remember, in a Platonic dialogue where an ironic dialectician compelled a naive professor and reciter of poetry, a rhapsode, to make some damaging admissions about the kind of science or wisdom which either the rhapsode or his authority the poet might lay claim. The Ion was an early and simple preliminary to Plato’s more elaborate attacks on the illusionistic and emotive power of poetry in the Republic, Phaedrus and other mature dialogues. A few hundred years later in Augustan Rome we found the urbane lyric and epistolary poet Horace still talking—in a tradition of Peripatetic codifications—about dramatic and epic poetry and speaking casually about Socratic wisdom as a sufficient source of poetic content.
