In books II and III of the Republic, Plato[1] pleads in favor of censorship of stories and tales for the youth of his city imaginative and utopian, and in particular for young people. of the “ruling” class called the Guardians. He claims that censoring certain tales, particularly those with violent themes or notions of change and transformation, would prevent the youth of the guardians from having their minds corrupted by vices, and thus rendered unfit to govern the utopian city. In some ways Plato is right, and in others Plato is wrong. By examining the story of Odysseus killing the suitors in Homer's Odyssey, and recognizing whether certain elements of the tale would be harmful or helpful to an aspiring ruler, we will see exactly what Plato correctly and incorrectly asserted. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayIn Homer's epic poem The Odyssey, the main character Odysseus returns from Troy to find his wife being courted by a group rich suitors, in order to acquire through marriage Odysseus' wealth and lands that he owned as king of Ithaca. In rage, Odysseus kills the group of suitors in bloody and gruesome detail. “Those who were accompanied by the cunning Odysseus, master of trickery, then began again to throw their sharp spears at the crowd of suitors. Eurydamas was then killed by Odysseus, the plunderer of the cities, and Amphimedon by Telemachus; also the swineherd's spear killed Polybius; then Ctesippus was killed by the cowherd, struck in the chest. » This is the kind of detail that Plato believes should be censored from the youth and the Guardians. In this respect, Plato is right, in that there is no possible benefit in spelling out the gruesome account of Odysseus's massacre of the suitors. Odysseus is seen as a hero and role model in the Odyssey, and his actions in this story would be reflected in the minds of young people as both noble and heroic to emulate. This type of violence is not what we want to see happening in the utopian city, much less being perpetrated by the city's leaders. The only possible benefit of telling this story is that it would reveal the truth of the world and its harshness to young guardians at an early age; however, this lesson can be taught by a multitude of other tales with much less violent detail. In this interpretation of the story, Plato is correct that it should be censored. It is important to note that the Hellenes living in Plato's time would have considered the Odyssey to be fiction, understood as being primarily for entertainment, but also as being essential for teaching important life lessons and for understanding and s identify with Hellenic culture. It is important to make this distinction because it allows us to discuss how the same story, which we have just concluded is not beneficial in any way, is beneficial to the mind of a young person in the utopian city. It is this benefit that the Hellenes would have recognized as the life lessons provided by the fictional Odyssey. Because the Hellenes recognized the epic poem as fiction (after all, it was a poem), they knew that the events occurring in the Odyssey were not an accurate reflection of real life. In this, storytellers could easily tell the story of a violent act, while immediately explaining afterwards that the act was not meant to be imitated in a literal sense, claiming that the author wanted to arouse emotion and/or or virtuous ideology through extreme details. In the Odyssey, the storytellers could indeed explain the violent actions of Odysseus as metaphors, by.