Platos Gorgias
CALLICLES: Yes, truly, and very good advice too.
He knows that they are just the same when he has disembarked them as when they embarked, and not a whit better SOCRATES: Well, my friend, but what do you think of either in their bodies or in their souls; and he considers swimming; is that an art of any great pretensions?
that if a man who is afflicted by great and incurable bodily diseases is only to be pitied for having escaped, and is in no CALLICLES: No, indeed.
way benefited by him in having been saved from drowning, much less he who has great and incurable diseases, not of SOCRATES: And yet surely swimming saves a man from the body, but of the soul, which is the more valuable part of death, and there are occasions on which he must know how him; neither is life worth having nor of any profit to the bad to swim. And if you despise the swimmers, I will tell you of man, whether he be delivered from the sea, or the law-another and greater art, the art of the pilot, who not only courts, or any other devourer;and so he reflects that such saves the souls of men, but also their bodies and properties a one had better not live, for he cannot live well. (Compare from the extremity of danger, just like rhetoric. Yet his art Republic.)
is modest and unpresuming: it has no airs or pretences of And this is the reason why the pilot, although he is our doing anything extraordinary, and, in return for the same saviour, is not usually conceited, any more than the engi-salvation which is given by the pleader, demands only two neer, who is not at all behind either the general, or the pi-obols, if he brings us from Aegina to Athens, or for the lot, or any one else, in his saving power, for he sometimes longer voyage from Pontus or Egypt, at the utmost two saves whole cities. Is there any comparison between him drachmae, when he has saved, as I was just now saying, the and the pleader? And if he were to talk, Callicles, in your passenger and his wife and children and goods, and safely grandiose style, he would bury you under a mountain of disembarked them at the Piraeus,this is the payment which words, declaring and insisting that we ought all of us to be he asks in return for so great a boon; and he who is the engine-makers, and that no other profession is worth think-master of the art, and has done all this, gets out and walks ing about; he would have plenty to say. Nevertheless you about on the sea-shore by his ship in an unassuming way.
despise him and his art, and sneeringly call him an engine-For he is able to reflect and is aware that he cannot tell maker, and you will not allow your daughters to marry his which of his fellow-passengers he has benefited, and which son, or marry your son to his daughters. And yet, on your of them he has injured in not allowing them to bedrowned.
principle, what justice or reason is there in your refusal?