Epinomis

it has become and full of craft, renders magnificence along with what is wise. Nor indeed prophecy at all, nor the art of interpretation:¹ for it knows only what is said, but whether it is true it has not learned.

Since, then, we see the acquisition of necessities 975d produced by craft, but none of these crafts making anyone wise, what comes after this would be left: a kind of play, imitative for the most part but in no way serious. For they imitate with many instruments, and with many imitations made by the bodies themselves, not altogether seemly ones, both in what is done in words and in all music, and in all the things of which painting is mother, many intricate designs of every kind being produced in many kinds of moist and dry stuff; and of these the imitative art presents no one who crafts them with the greatest seriousness as wise in anything.

975eWhen all things have been achieved, what remains would be help, of countless kinds for countless people: the greatest of them, and for the most things, the one called the art of war, the general’s craft, most esteemed for its use, needing the greatest good fortune, and 976a given by nature to courage rather than to wisdom. And what they call medicine, it too, I suppose, is help, against nearly everything with which the seasons, by untimely cold and heat and all such things, plunder the nature of living beings. But none of these is esteemed for the truest wisdom; for they are carried along without measure, guessed at by opinions. Helpers too, I suppose, we shall call pilots and sailors together; and let no one soothe us by proclaiming any man among them all wise; for no one could know the wind’s anger 976b or its friendliness, a thing dear to the whole pilot’s art. Nor, indeed, all those who claim to become helpers in lawsuits by the strength of their speaking, paying attention to characters with memory and the routine of opinion,² but who have slipped aside, outside the truth of what is really just.