CALLICLES: Yes, truly, and very good advice too.

SOCRATES: Well, my friend, but what do you think of swimming; is that an
art of any great pretensions?

CALLICLES: No, indeed.

SOCRATES: And yet surely swimming saves a man from death, and there
are occasions on which he must know how to swim. And if you despise the
swimmers, I will tell you of another and greater art, the art of the
pilot, who not only saves the souls of men, but also their bodies and
properties from the extremity of danger, just like rhetoric. Yet his art
is modest and unpresuming: it has no airs or pretences of doing anything
extraordinary, and, in return for the same salvation which is given
by the pleader, demands only two obols, if he brings us from Aegina to
Athens, or for the longer voyage from Pontus or Egypt, at the utmost two
drachmae, when he has saved, as I was just now saying, the passenger
and his wife and children and goods, and safely disembarked them at the
Piraeus,--this is the payment which he asks in return for so great a
boon; and he who is the master of the art, and has done all this, gets
out and walks about on the sea-shore by his ship in an unassuming way.
For he is able to reflect and is aware that he cannot tell which of his
fellow-passengers he has benefited, and which of them he has injured in
not allowing them to be drowned. He knows that they are just the same
when he has disembarked them as when they embarked, and not a whit
better either in their bodies or in their souls; and he considers that
if a man who is afflicted by great and incurable bodily diseases is only
to be pitied for having escaped, and is in no way benefited by him
in having been saved from drowning, much less he who has great and
incurable diseases, not of the body, but of the soul, which is the more
valuable part of him; neither is life worth having nor of any profit to
the bad man, whether he be delivered from the sea, or the law-courts, or
any other devourer;--and so he reflects that such a one had better not
live, for he cannot live well. (Compare Republic.)

And this is the reason why the pilot, although he is our saviour, is not
usually conceited, any more than the engineer, who is not at all behind
either the general, or the pilot, or any one else, in his saving power,
for he sometimes saves whole cities. Is there any comparison between him
and the pleader? And if he were to talk, Callicles, in your grandiose
style, he would bury you under