/lit/ - Literature

Why are so many ancient religious texts written in verse rather than prose? is it simply a consequence of the transition from an oral to a written tradition?

>half the authors he lists aren't even fascists

Do you think that this modern form of behavioral management is something endemic to liberal capitalism? that is, is there some structural logic that encourages panopticism + biopolitics, one that can be reversed through changes in political/economic structures? or, is it a necessary factor of managing mass-societies simply due to its efficiency and easy replicability? I have my own thoughts on the matter, but i'd like to hear someone elses.

Because they're pseuds who don't even know what a plato is.

>No one has posted the obvious answer
The Republic is doomed because bearing and barrenness of soul and bodies come not only to plants in the earth but to animals. On the earth when revolutions complete for each the bearing round of circles; for ones with short lives, the journey is short; for those whose lives are the opposite, the journey is the opposite. Although they are wise, the men educated as leaders of the city will nonetheless fail to hit on the prosperous birth and barrenness of your kind with calculation aided by sensation, but it will pass them by, and they will at some time beget children when they should not. For a divine birth there is a period comprehended by a perfect number; for a human birth, by the first number in which root and square indices, comprising three distances and four limits, of elements that make like and unlike, and that wax and wane, render everything conversable and rational. Of these elements, the root four-three mated with the five, thrice increased, produces two harmonies. One of them is equal an equal number of times, taken one hundred times over. The other is of equal length in one way but is an oblong; on one side, of one hundred rational diameters of the five, lacking one for each; or, if of irrational diameters, lacking two for each; on the other side, of one hundred cubes of the three. This whole geometrical number is sovereign of better and worse begettings. And when the guardians from ignorance of them cause grooms to live with brides out of season, the children will have neither good natures nor good luck. Their predecessors will choose the best of these children; but, nevertheless, since they are unworthy, when they, in turn, come to the powers of their fathers, they will as guardians first begin to neglect by having less consideration than is required, first, for music, and, second, for gymnastic; and from there the young will become more unmusical. And rulers chosen from them won't be guardians very apt at testing Hesiod's races and gold and silver and bronze and iron. And the chaotic mixing of iron with silver and of bronze with gold engenders unlikeness and inharmonious irregularity, which, once they arise, always breed war and hatred in the place where they happen to arise. Faction must always be said to be 'of this ancestry wherever it happens to rise. Once faction had arisen, each of these two races, the iron and bronze, pulled the regime toward money-making and the possession of land, houses, gold, and silver; while the other two, the gold and the silver-not being poor but rich by nature-led the souls toward virtue and the ancient establishment. Struggling and straining against one another, they came to an agreement on a middle way: they distributed land and houses to be held privately, while those who previously were guarded by them as free friends and supporters they then enslaved and held as serfs and domestics; and they occupied themselves with war and with guarding against these men.