knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter. Certainly. And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man—whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyse the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation. Most true. And so, when we hear persons saying that the tragedians, and Homer, who is at their head, know all the arts and all things human, virtue as well as vice, and divine things too, for that the good poet cannot compose well unless he knows his subject, and that he who has not this knowledge can never be a poet, we ought to consider whether here also there may not be a similar illusion. Perhaps they may have come across imitators and been deceived by them; they may not have remembered when they saw their works that

And in the case of others, what they have spoken, in consequence of being moved, they have not yet perfectly worked out; and others by human conjectur...

Homer calls an artificer wise; and of Margites, if that is his work, he thus writes: "Him, then, the Gods made neither a delver nor a ploughman, Nor...

Socrates: I am conscious of my own inability ever to magnify sufficiently our citizens and our State. Now in this inability of mine there is nothing...

When, therefore, does the deception mentioned by you “ of speakingly boastingly ” take place. For when a certain error happens in the theurgic art,...