...when f ailing under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they...Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. . . . Therefore God takes away the minds of the poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses...

...when f ailing under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they...Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. . . . Therefore God takes away the minds of the poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses...

...Athens.'" In Plato's Ion, Socrates compares the nature of poetic inspiration to the "Bacchus maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they...influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right minds."" This is the state of enthousiasmos, when the reveler is possessed (entheos) by the god. This...

...they fall under the power of music and meter they are inspired and possessed — like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they...Dionysus, but not when they are in their right mind. The soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; they tell us that they bring songs...

...falling under the power of music and meter, Socrates warns in Ion, poets are "like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus" (534b). Poems in the ideal Republic, in turn, must be strictly regulated, since "there is a danger...

...with the gods or the heroes we may dare to compare him. The poet, says Plato (Ion, p. 534), "brings songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the muses; like a bee, he wings his way from flower to flower. The poet is a light and winged and holy thing,...