 Narrowing the process down to impersonation should make clear that Plato finds a sophist’s imitativeness to be much like a poet’s. Moreover this development neutralizes the suggestions that mimêsis has its good side. The imitative technê will have many manifestations, including those legitimate practices that the Statesman and other dialogues refer to; but the real work of mimêsis, the one that is worth defining and applies to dominant art forms, is mendacious impersonation. Where Republic 3’s taxonomy made imitation look like a freakish variety of narration, this use of a word both generically and specially excludes good imitation as the exception and the problem case. Essentially speaking the art of mimêsis is a bad and lying art.