 The poet is a visitor because mimetic poetry has no natural home in the philosophers’ town. Moreover he arrives offering to recite his poems. That they are his makes him a poet, that he comes to recite them makes him a performer. Thus he embodies the ambiguity built into Book 3’s definition of mimêsis. If the fate of imitative composition stands or falls with the fate of imitative performance, a reasonable worry about behaviors that young people experiment with balloons into an argument against a mammoth body of literature. In short, the ambiguity in Plato’s definition of imitation does not merely remind us (as Havelock argued) that he is witnessing the transition from oral to written culture. It makes Plato’s grand conclusion possible.