![]() ![]() This reflection serves to remove the seeming contradiction there is in the conduct of the Athenians towards Aristophanes and Socrates. And thus Plato, by excluding the poets from his republic, banished the popular religion by a necessary consequence, to make room for his own and by that artifice secured himself from the hemlock of Socrates, who had fallen under the people's displeasure for explaining himself too freely against the superstitions of the ancient and prevailing religion. The philosophers, who were secretly ashamed of the gross errors of the people, privately taught a purer religion, cleared from the multitude of gods abandoned to vices and shareful passions. The first preserved the substance of the popular religion, established by customs and immemorial traditions, authorised by the laws of the state, and annexed to the public feasts and ceremonies. ![]() Pagans was divided between two schools, the poets and the philosophers. ![]() And this was indeed the secret motive of the law, by which he banished thein from the commonwealth. Plato therefore should have found fault with the religion, which supposed such gods, and not with the poet, who represented them under the idea commonly received. He described the gods in such manner as he bad read them from his ancestors, and as in his time they were generally believed to be. They were far more ancient than he, and made up a part of the heathen theology. They were both mistaken in this point, by not going back to the original source of the disorder. ![]()
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