gorgias   

the belief that she is of the highest value to them. Cookery simulates

the disguise of medicine, and pretends to know what food is the best

for the body; and if the physician and the cook had to enter into a

competition in which children were the judges, or men who had no

more sense than children, as to which of them best understands the

goodness or badness of food, the physician would be starved to

death. A flattery I deem this to be and of an ignoble sort, Polus, for

to you I am now addressing myself, because it aims at pleasure without

any thought of the best. An art I do not call it, but only an

experience, because it is unable to explain or to give a reason of the

nature of its own applications. And I do not call any irrational thing

an art; but if you dispute my words, I am prepared to argue in defence

of them.

Cookery, then, I maintain to be a flattery which takes the form of

medicine; and tiring, in like manner, is a flattery which takes the

form of gymnastic, and is knavish, false, ignoble, illiberal,

working deceitfully by the help of lines, and colours, and enamels,

and garments, and making men affect a spurious beauty to the neglect

of the true beauty which is given by gymnastic.

I would rather not be tedious, and therefore I will only say,

after the manner of the geometricians (for I think that by this time

you will be able to follow)



astiring : gymnastic :: cookery : medicine;

or rather,

astiring : gymnastic :: sophistry : legislation;

and

as cookery : medicine :: rhetoric : justice.



And this, I say, is the natural difference between the rhetorician and

the sophist, but by reason of their near connection, they are apt to

be jumbled up together; neither do they know what to make of