Explores the differences between English "play" and Greek paidia, focusing especially on passages in which Greek paidia seems to imply an emotion, feeling, or mood (Hippocrates' Sacred Disease, depictions of personified Paidia on vases, etc.). Argues that this meaning of paidia is consequential for questions of aesthetics because play is regularly associated with singing, dancing, and music, and because Plato uses "play" as a category covering what we today think of as the "arts" (e.g. painting, sculpture, theater, music, dance, etc.). The eight chapters of the book are then overviewed. At the end, the concept of play (paidia) is disentangled from that of mimesis.