vocabulary only those were good workmen[31] who were engaged on good
work; dicers and gamblers and others engaged on any other base and
ruinous business he stigmatised as the "idle drones"; and from this
point of view the quotation from Hesiod is unimpeachable--

No work is a disgrace; only idlesse is disgrace.

But there was a passage from Homer[32] for ever on his lips, as the
accuser tells us--the passage which says concerning Odysseus,

What prince, or man of name,
He found flight-giv'n, he would restrain with words of gentlest blame:
"Good sir, it fits you not to fly, or fare as one afraid,
You should not only stay yourself, but see the people stayed."

Thus he the best sort us'd; the worst, whose spirits brake out in noise,[33]
He cudgell'd with his sceptre, chid, and said, "Stay, wretch, be still,
And hear thy betters; thou art base, and both in power and skill
Poor and unworthy, without name in counsel or in war."
We must not all be kings.

[31] See below, III. ix. 9.

[32] "Il." ii. 188 foll., 199 foll. (so Chapman).

[33] Lit. "But whatever man of the people he saw and found him
shouting."--W. Leaf.

The accuser informs us that Socrates interpreted these lines as though
the poet approved the giving of blows to commoners and poor folk. Now