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ἔργον προκείμενον. The view of work and duty here presented recalls I 352 E—353 E. ἀκούεις. Phocylides, being dead, yet speaketh. The present ἀκούεις is just as legitimate as φησί, and well expresses the living voice of poetry in oral circulation. Heindorf (on Gorg. 503 C) misses the point of the idiom when he says that ἀκούεις is for ἀκήκοας; while Stallbaum's explanation ‘probas’ is positively wrong. The line, as restored by Bergk Phoc. Fr. 10, is δίζησθαι βιοτήν, ἀρετὴν δ᾽ ὅταν ᾖ βίος ἤδη. The Horatian ‘quaerenda pecunia primum, | virtus post nummos’ gives the meaning, if primum and post are understood in a strictly temporal sense. Phocylides' maxim is one of the earliest expressions of the all but universal cry χρήματα χρήματ᾽ ἀνήρ (first in Alcaeus Fr. 49 Bergk), which Socrates and Plato continually preached against. It will be noticed that Plato for his own purposes represents Phocylides as laying the stress on ἀρετὴν ἀσκεῖν rather than on δίζησθαι βιοτήν, where it really falls. τοῦτο: viz. τὸ ἀρετὴν ἀσκεῖν, as explained in the margin of A.
The Republic of Plato. James Adam. 1902. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
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