Ion

Socrates meets Ion, a famous rhapsode, a professional reciter of Homer, who has just won first prize at a festival and boasts that he understands Homer better than anyone. When Socrates asks what exactly he knows, it turns out that Ion's art is not a skill or a body of knowledge at all: poets and their performers, Socrates suggests, speak not by art but by divine inspiration, like a chain of iron rings hanging from a magnet, each one holding up the next.

One of Plato's shortest dialogues, written in the early fourth century BC, the Ion is a founding text in the long debate about poetry and inspiration. The translator is Benjamin Jowett, whose versions shaped how English readers met Plato. Compare Plato's Republic, which banishes the poets, and Aristotle's Poetics.

Plato (c. 428–348 BC) was born into an aristocratic family in Athens and became the devoted student of Socrates. After his teacher's trial and execution in 399 BC, he travelled, returned to Athens and founded the Academy, a school that lasted for centuries and counted Aristotle among its students.

Almost all his writings are dialogues in which Socrates questions his fellow citizens about justice, love, knowledge and the soul, from the Apology to the Symposium and the Republic. Known to Arab philosophers as Aflatun, he was read closely by al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd, and Western philosophy has been called a series of footnotes to him.