IonPlato

A short dialogue, perhaps the shortest Plato wrote, between Socrates and the rhapsode Ion, a professional reciter of Homer returning from a prize-winning performance at Epidaurus. Socrates asks whether Ion's excellence is a technê, a teachable craft with a definite subject, or something else. Ion insists he is an expert on Homer and on nothing else, which Socrates finds strange: if rhapsody were a real skill, it would give expertise in all poets, not just one.

Socrates then offers the explanation in the figure of the magnet. The Muse inspires the poet; the poet inspires the rhapsode; the rhapsode inspires the audience; each link in the chain hangs from the one above like iron rings from a lodestone. Ion's power is not his own; it is a divine possession. What Ion takes for knowledge is enthusiasm in the literal sense of being filled with a god, and it comes and goes without his understanding why.

The Ion opens the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy that the Republic develops at length. It denies that the poets know what they seem to know, treats their authority as borrowed and unaccountable, and grants them instead the honor of divine madness. No other Platonic dialogue puts the case against poetry so briefly or so politely.