ing to do with the same subject as legislation, and
medicine with the same subject as gymnastic, but with a difference. Now,
seeing that there are these four arts, two attending on the body and two
on the soul for their highest good; flattery knowing, or rather guessing
their natures, has distributed herself into four shams or simulations
of them; she puts on the likeness of some one or other of them, and
pretends to be that which she simulates, and having no regard for men's
highest interests, is ever making pleasure the bait of the unwary, and
deceiving them into the belief that she is of the highest value to them.
Cookery simulates the disguise of medicine, and pretends to know what
food is the best for the body; and if the physician and the cook had to
enter into a competition in which children were the judges, or men who
had no more sense than children, as to which of them best understands
the goodness or badness of food, the physician would be starved to
death. A flattery I deem this to be and of an ignoble sort, Polus, for
to you I am now addressing myself, because it aims at pleasure
without any thought of the best. An art I do not call it, but only an
experience, because it is unable to explain or to give a reason of the
nature of its own applications. And I do not call any irrational thing
an art; but if you dispute my words, I am prepared to argue in defence
of them.

Cookery, then, I maintain to be a flattery which takes the form of
medicine; and tiring, in like manner, is a flattery which takes the
form of gymnastic, and is knavish, false, ignoble, illiberal, working
deceitfully by the help of lines, and colours, and enamels, and
garments, and making men affect a spurious beauty to the neglect of the
true beauty which is given by gymnastic.

I would rather not be tedious, and therefore I will only say, after the
manner of the geometricians (for I think that by this time you will be
able to follow)

as tiring: gymnastic:: cookery: medicine;

or rather,

as tiring: gymnastic:: sophistry: legislation;

and

as cookery: medicine:: rhetoric: justice.

And this, I say, is the natural difference between the rhetorician and
the sophist, but by reason of their near connection, they are apt to be
jumbled up together; neither do they know what to make of themselves,
nor do other men know what to make of them. For if the body presided
over itself, and were not under the guidance of the soul, and the soul
did