2.11
Then don’t you remember saying just now in our conversation, when you wouldn’t give me leave to utter a syllable, that if a man doesn’t know how to manage horses, his horses are not wealth to him, nor his land, sheep, money or anything else, if he doesn’t know how to manage them? Now these are the sources from which income is derived: and how do you suppose that I can possibly know how to manage any of these things, seeing that I never yet possessed any one of them?
2.12
Still we held that, even if a man happens to have no wealth, there is such a thing as a science of household management. Then what reason is there why you should not know it? Exactly the same reason, of course, that a man would have for not knowing how to play on the flute if he had never possessed one himself and had never borrowed one to learn on.
2.13
That is just my case with regard to estate management; for never having possessed wealth myself, I have not had an opportunity of learning on an instrument of my own, and nobody has ever let me handle his, until you made your offer. Beginners, I fancy, are apt to spoil the lyres they learn on; and if I attempted to learn to manage estates by practising on yours, possibly I might spoil it entirely for you.
2.14
Ah, Socrates! rejoined Critobulus, I see you are eager to avoid giving me any help towards lightening the weight of my troublesome duties. Not at all, not at all, said Socrates, I am all eagerness to tell you all I know.
