Two ways of caring for the body
SocratesAt any rate I think you have many times agreed and recognised that this business is, after all, a double one, concerning both the body and the soul, and that one of the two is servile, the one by which it is possible to supply our bodies, if they are hungry, with food, if they are thirsty, with drink, if they are cold, with clothes, bedding, shoes and whatever else bodies come to desire; and I am using the same images with you on purpose, so that you may learn it more easily.
For when someone can supply these things, being a retailer or a merchant or a craftsman of one of those very things, a baker or a cook or a weaver or a cobbler or a tanner, it is no wonder that a man like that should seem, both to himself and to others, to be one who cares for the body—seem so to everyone who does not know that there is, beside all these, an art, gymnastics and medicine, which is in reality the care of the body, and whose place it is to rule all these arts and to use their works, because it knows which foods or drinks are useful and which bad for the excellence of the body, while all these others do not know it. That is precisely why these, the other arts, are slavish, servile and illiberal in the business of the body, while gymnastics and medicine are by right their mistresses.