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He is the enemy of the poets because poetry was declining in his

own lifetime, and a theatrocracy, as he says in the Laws, had

taken the place of an intellectual aristocracy. Euripides

exhibited the last phase of the tragic drama, and in him Plato

saw the friend and apologist of tyrants, and the Sophist of

tragedy. The old comedy was almost extinct; the new had not yet

arisen. Dramatic and lyric poetry, like every other branch of

Greek literature, was falling under the power of rhetoric. There

was no 'second or third' to Aeschylus and Sophocles in the

generation which followed them.