Kitap 7
31
This is how it happens in love affairs, since in them one party pursues the other as a pleasant person to live with, but sometimes the other the one as useful, and when the lover ceases to love,he having changed the other changes, and then they calculate the quid pro quo, and quarrel as Pytho and PammenesThe distinguished Theban general, friend of Epaminondas. Pytho may be a dramatist of Catana, or a Byzantine rhetorician of the period. used, and as teacher and pupil do in general (for knowledge and money have no common measure), and as HerodicusBorn in Thrace, practised in Athens fifth cent. B.C.; tutor of Hippocrates. The Mss. give Prodicus (the sophist, who figures frequently in Plato), and possibly the text has suffered haplography, and both names should be read. the doctor did with the patient who offered to pay his fee with a discount, and as the harpist and the king fell out.
32
The king associated with the harpist as pleasant and the harpist with the king as useful; but the king, when the time came for him to pay, made out that he was himself of the pleasant sort, and said that just as the harpist had given him pleasure by his singing, so he had given the harpist pleasure by his promises to him.The story (also told in Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1164a 16) is related by Plut. De Alexandri fortuna 2.1, of the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse.
33
Nevertheless here too it is clear how we must decide: here too we must measure by one standard, but by a ratio, not a number. For we must measure by proportion, as also the civic partnership is measured. For how is a shoemaker to be partner with a farmer unless their products are equalized by proportion?
