P L A T O N I S

...in the soul, whom should we rightly question as to what kind and what quantity are sufficient? Here, when we were full of ambiguity, I said jokingly, "Do you wish that, after we are in this ambiguity, we ask those youths over there? Or perhaps are we ashamed, just as Homer Greek epic poet portrays the suitors, when they were unwilling for anyone else but themselves to draw the bow?" But when he seemed to take this poorly, I attempted to investigate by another path: "What kind of things," I asked, "shall we conjecture that a philosopher ought to learn, since he should follow neither all things, nor many?" The wiser one, taking up the conversation, said that those disciplines are most beautiful and most agreeable to the soul from which one attains the greatest glory in philosophy; but that the greatest glory is attained if one is skilled in all arts, or if not in all, at least in many, and especially those which are worthy of estimation, learning those before others which befit free men, and which are accomplished by the reason of the intellect, not by the service of the hands. Then I said, "Do you speak thus, as happens in the crafts? Where you would buy a craftsman for five or six minae Greek monetary units, but an architect for not even ten thousand drachmae Greek silver coins: for they are found very rarely throughout all of Greece region in SE Europe; do you say something of this kind?" He agreed and confessed that he meant that very thing. I soon asked him whether it were possible for the same man to perceive two arts in this way, let alone very many and great ones. And he said, "Do not think that I speak in such a way, O Socrates, as if it behooves a philosopher to master individual arts..."