We have agreed, says Socrates, that the Guardians must be warlike and fierce in their defense against the enemies of the state. But we do not want them to turn against their fellow citizens. So we may liken their training to that of the family dog, who is trained to befriend his master and the familial circle, but who will courageously attack any threat to the family or, indeed, the neighborhood. So the dog may be said to possess a kind of knowledge; he does not, like a wild dog, attack at random from ignorance (amathia). The family dog may be said to be moral in the rude sense.
Thus, Socrates says, the future Guardians of the state must be educated morally; they must be instilled with good morals. We must therefore teach them stories of the heroes and the gods, much as our fathers did for us. But some of these stories must be modified, because Homer and the other poets and storytellers often tell us stories in which the gods commit bad acts, crimes, duplicitous homicides. Since the gods can do no wrong, these old stories must be false and, since children often identify with the figures of fiction, they may be liable to emulate the crimes of the gods as related in these false stories. And, besides, this attribution of crimes and sins and lies and schemes committed by the gods or God is wrong, since it is a given that God is truly good and given wholly to good; thus the attribution of things of evil to God is a lie and the poets who perpetuate such stories are liars.
