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But shall our superintendence go no further, and are the poets

only to be required by us to express the image of the good in

their works, on pain, if they do anything else, of expulsion from

our State? Or is the same control to be extended to other

artists, and are they also to be prohibited from exhibiting the

opposite forms of vice and intemperance and meanness and

indecency in sculpture and building and the other creative arts;

and is he who cannot conform to this rule of ours to be prevented

from practising his art in our State, lest the taste of our

citizens be corrupted by him? We would not have our guardians

grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious

pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and

flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a

festering mass of corruption in their own soul.