Plato distrusted art as a dangerous deception. But his fear of images came from his appreciation of their the power. As every embodied being, Plato lived in an inescapable world of images and he used them powerfully to communicate his ideas, writes Radcliffe Edmonds.

Images are powerful; they strike our senses – whether through vision, hearing or touch – and they impress themselves on our minds. Plato is notorious for his distrust of images and the people who make them; his Republic is filled with discussions about banning the poets from the city and restricting what, when and how images can be circulated. But Plato’s suspicions stem from his appreciation of the power of images and his fears about how that power can be misused.

That same appreciation shows itself in Plato’s own use of images, not just his elaborate myths filled with vivid imagery of the torments of the afterlife or the shape of the heavens, but even in his chosen form of writing. The dialogue, the genre which Plato chose instead of the expository treatise, is a representation of conversations, filled with details of persons, places, and things imitated through the medium of writing. These images – of Socrates drinking the hemlock while his friends weep around him, of the drunken Alcibiades in the doorway trailing garlands of ivy and violets, of the charioteer of the soul pulling violently back on the reins when he catches sight of the beloved – all stick in the mind and the memory.