have about the rhetoricians? To me there seem to be a great
many holes in their web.

PHAEDRUS: Give an example.

SOCRATES: I will. Suppose a person to come to your friend Eryximachus,
or to his father Acumenus, and to say to him: 'I know how to apply drugs
which shall have either a heating or a cooling effect, and I can give
a vomit and also a purge, and all that sort of thing; and knowing all
this, as I do, I claim to be a physician and to make physicians by
imparting this knowledge to others,'--what do you suppose that they
would say?

PHAEDRUS: They would be sure to ask him whether he knew 'to whom' he
would give his medicines, and 'when,' and 'how much.'

SOCRATES: And suppose that he were to reply: 'No; I know nothing of all
that; I expect the patient who consults me to be able to do these things
for himself'?

PHAEDRUS: They would say in reply that he is a madman or a pedant who
fancies that he is a physician because he has read something in a
book, or has stumbled on a prescription or two, although he has no real
understanding of the art of medicine.

SOCRATES: And suppose a person were to come to Sophocles or Euripides
and say that he knows how to make a very long speech about a small
matter, and a short speech about a great matter, and also a sorrowful
speech, or a terrible, or threatening speech, or any other kind of
speech, and in teaching this fancies that he is teaching the art of
tragedy--?

PHAEDRUS: They too would surely laugh at him if he fancies that tragedy
is anything but the arranging of these elements in a manner which will
be suitable to one another and to the whole.

SOCRATES: But I do not suppose that they would be rude or abusive to
him: Would they not treat him as a musician a man who thinks that he is
a harmonist because he knows how to pitch the highest and lowest note;
happening to meet such an one he would not say to him savagely, 'Fool,
you are mad!' But like a musician, in a gentle and harmonious tone of
voice, he would answer: 'My good friend, he who would be a harmonist
must certainly know this, and yet he may understand nothing of harmony
if he has not got beyond your stage of knowledge, for you only know the
preliminaries of harmony and not harmony itself.'

PHAEDRUS: Very true.

SOCRATES: And will not Sophocles say to the display of the would-be
tragedian, that this is not tragedy but the preliminaries of tragedy?
and will not Acumenus say the same of medicine to the w