Some questions naturally spring from this broad theory of art, for example: what exactly is being imitated by the poet or artist? How is it being imitated, is the imitation a straight copy, a distortion or an improvement in some way? Finally this leads us to questions of the end of poetry itself, and its justification for existence, that is, why imitate at all and can we obtain knowledge and/or pleasure through it
Both Plato and Aristotle, the foremost philosophers of their time, arrived at widely different answers to the questions above. This is because art was held to be an imitation of nature or reality, and Plato and Aristotle's theories on nature and reality were widely different, as were their ideas on the mechanism of imitation. Their differing views on mimesis, as outlined principally in The Republic and The Poetics, were thus partly a consequence of their differences in their ontological and epistemological views of the world. There are other factors, too, which complicate the matter.
In Book II of The Republic, Plato begins a discussion of poetry which is concerned with gods and heroes. He condemns much of this poetry as lies, "and still further because their lies are not attractive" (Republic, II, p24). Many stories, Plato is saying, are not imitations of any reality but are outright falsities, on the grounds that since gods and heroes are by definition better than men, they cannot perform such atrocious acts as shown for example in Homer and Aeschylus (the examples in Republic 26-29). Such portrayals provide justification for men to commit such acts themselves, and therefore these misrepresentations of gods and heroes are harmful to a general populace.
Such poetry, then, is lies and may be an imitation, but it is not an imitation of any truth and therefore must be condemned. Imitation proper appears in the Republic in Book III, where Plato begins to consider the more complicated case of poetry concerning men.
