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[5]
Therefore it was a fine saying of Antisthenes, when he heard that Ismenias was an excellent piper:
‘But he's a worthless man,’ said he,
‘otherwise he wouldn't be so good a piper.’ And so Philip1 once said to his son, who, as the wine went round, plucked the strings charmingly and skilfully,
‘Art not ashamed to pluck the strings so well?’ It is enough, surely, if a king have leisure to hear others pluck the strings, and he pays great deference to the Muses if he be but a spectator of such contests.
1 Philip of Macedon, to Alexander.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1916. 3.
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