 Book X starts us off with a reaffirmation of a main deficiency of poets: their products “maim the thought of those who hear them.” And by means of the following schema, this is now connected to a development of the allegation (repeated at 602b6–8) that poets do not know what they are talking about. Socrates posits that there are Forms (or Ideas) of beds and tables, the maker of which is a god; there are imitations thereof, namely beds and tables, produced by craftsmen (such as carpenters) who behold the Forms (as though they were looking at blueprints); thirdly, there are imitators of the products of the craftsmen, who, like painters, create a kind of image of these objects in the world of becoming. The tripartite schema presents the interpreter with many  problems.[13]  Certainly, Socrates does not literally mean that poets paint verbal pictures of beds and tables. Subsequently, the scheme is elaborated so as to replace the craftsmen with those who produce opinion in the city (legislators, educators, military commanders, among others), and the painters with “the first teacher and leader of all these fine tragic things” (595b10–c2), that is, Homer. The poets are therefore “at the third generation from nature” or “third from a king and the truth” (597e3–4, 6–7).