 Another essential step in the argument is the recognition that what Book 3 acknowledged as an exception to its critique, namely the imitation of virtuous thoughtful characters, is not apt to exist. Socrates has tragedy in mind (comedy secondarily) and observes that playwrights neither know the quiet philosophical type nor profit from putting that type on stage before spectators who came to the theater to see something showily agitated (604e–605a). At one stroke Plato intensifies his condemnation of mimêsis, no longer a dangerous technique when it presents the wrong kinds of people but a technique that seldom presents any other kind.