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He himself ceased to be a poet when he became a disciple of

Socrates; though, as he tells us of Solon, 'he might have been

one of the greatest of them, if he had not been deterred by other

pursuits' (Tim.) Thus from many points of view there is an

antagonism between Plato and the poets, which was foreshadowed to

him in the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry. The poets,

as he says in the Protagoras, were the Sophists of their day; and

his dislike of the one class is reflected on the other. He

regards them both as the enemies of reasoning and abstraction,

though in the case of Euripides more with reference to his

immoral sentiments about tyrants and the like. For Plato is the

prophet who 'came into the world to convince men'-first of the

fallibility of sense and opinion, and secondly of the reality of

abstract ideas.