Testing a builder
SocratesIf, then, Callicles, we were urging one another on to building works, intending to do some of the city’s business in public—to the greatest buildings, walls or dockyards or temples—would we have to look at ourselves and examine, first, whether we know the art, the art of building, or do not know it, and from whom we learned it? Would we have to, or not?
CalliclesCertainly.
SocratesThen second, this in turn: whether we have ever yet built any building privately, either for one of our friends or our own, and whether this building is fine or shameful. And if on looking into it we found that our teachers had been good and renowned, and that many fine buildings had been built by us together with our teachers, and many also of our own after we had parted from our teachers—then, placed like that, it would be the mark of people who have sense to go on to the public works; but if we had no teacher of our own to point to, and our buildings were either none or many and worth nothing, then surely it would be senseless to take on the public works and to urge one another on to them. Shall we say that this is rightly said, or not?
CalliclesQuite so.
SocratesThen so it goes with everything: in other matters, and also if we had set about practising in public and were urging one another on as competent doctors, we would surely examine each other, I you and you me: “Come, for the gods’ sake, what about Socrates himself—how is his body for health? Or has anyone else ever yet, slave or free, been rid of a disease through Socrates?” And I, I think, would be looking into other such things about you. And if we found that nobody at all had become better in body through us, neither foreigner nor native, neither man nor woman—for Zeus’ sake, Callicles, would it not in truth be laughable that people should come to such a pitch of folly that, before doing much in private, however we happened to, and getting much right, and training adequately in the art, they should, as the saying goes, try to learn pottery on a jar, and try both to practise in public themselves and to urge others like them on to it? Doesn’t it seem to you that it would be senseless to do it that way?
CalliclesI think so.