Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were the educational textbooks of the Greeks which Plato sought to replace with his own work, the Republic. It was not merely that Plato wanted to replace older work with his own, rather his aim was to replace the mode of education from one of memorizing and quoting an ancient authority with the personal engagement using the dialectical method. At same time, he also sought to replace the rhetoric of seductively beautiful poetry which canonized falsehoods about the nature of the world with the sober and open-ended inquiry of questions and answers (leading to ever more questions) in prose. Thus Plato's attack on Homer was nothing less than a cultural paradigm shift from the heroic age of warfare to what Plato hoped would be an age founded upon the order of reason.
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