5
SIMON What about knowing the merits and defects of bake-stuffs and made dishes? Does that seem to you matter for an untrained man’s bumptious inquisitiveness? Yet excellent Plato says: When a man is about to partake of a banquet, if he be not versed in the art of cookery, his opinion of the feast in preparation is something deficient in weight. Plato, Theaetetus178D.
6
That Parasitic is based not only on knowledge, but on exercised knowledge, you may readily assure yourself from this fact: the knowledges that belong to the other arts often remain unexercised for days and nights and months and years, and yet the arts are not lost to those who possess them; but if the . parasite’s knowledge is not in exercise daily, not only the art, I take it, but the artist himself, is lost thereby!
7
And as to its being “directed to some end. useful to the world,” it would be crazy, don’t you think, to investigate that point. I, for my part, cannot discover that anything in the world is more useful than eating and drinking, and in fact without them it is impossible to live at all!
7
TYCHIADES Quite so.
8
SIMON Again, Parasitic is not the same sort of thing as beauty and strength, so as to be considered a gift,. like them, rather than an art.Again a thrust at Rhetoric, which some considered “vis tantum”; cf. Quintilian 2, 15, 2. TYCHIADES You are right.
8
SIMON But on the other hand, it is not want of art; for want of art never achieves anything for its possessor.Rhetoric is a want of art: cf. § 27, and Quint. 2, 15, 2. For example, if you should put yourself in command of a ship at sea in a storm without knowing how to steer, should you come safely through?
8
TYCHIADES Not by any means.
8
SIMON How about a man who should take horses in hand without knowing how to drive?
8
TYCHIADES He would not come through, either.
8
SIMON Why, pray, except because he does not possess the art by which he would be able to save himself?
8
TYCHIADES To be sure.
