But that Plato — for I now return to him — flowing on in just such a stream, soundlessly, is no less sublime, you cannot fail to recognise from passages in the Republic. ‘Those, then, who have no experience of wisdom and virtue, but live always in feasts and the like, are carried, as it seems, downward, and stray that way through life. They have never looked upward to the truth, nor risen to it, nor tasted any pleasure both stable and pure, but, like cattle always looking down, with their heads bent toward earth and toward the table, they graze, gorging themselves and rutting, and, in their greed for these things, kick and butt one another with iron horns and hooves, killing each other for insatiability.’ §1
This man shows us, if we will not slight the matter, that another road besides those mentioned tends to the heights: the imitation and emulation of the great prose-writers and poets of the past. Let us, my dearest friend, hold tight to this aim. Many men are inspired by another's spirit in just the same way as the Pythia is said to be when, drawing near to the tripod where there is a cleft in the earth that breathes, men say, a divine vapour, she is straightway made pregnant with the divine power and prophesies under inspiration. So from the great natures of the ancients there flow, into the souls of those who emulate them, certain streams as if from sacred mouths; and inspired by these, even the less Phoebus-touched share in the enthusiasm of others' greatness. §2
Was Herodotus alone Homeric? Stesichorus, earlier still, and Archilochus, but most of all Plato, drew off countless rivulets out of that Homeric spring into himself. We should perhaps need to give proofs, if Ammonius and his school had not already collected and recorded the particular passages. §3
The thing is no theft, but rather a casting from beautiful forms or fashionings or works of craft. And I do not think Plato could have flowered to such pre-eminence in his philosophical doctrines, or carried himself, as he often does, into poetic matter and phrasing, had he not striven, with all his soul, for first place against Homer, like a young challenger against one already admired, perhaps too contentiously and as if jousting at close quarters, but not without profit; for, as Hesiod says, ‘good is this strife for mortals.’ Truly that is a noble contest and crown of fame, in which to be even defeated by one's predecessors is no disgrace. §4