Pericles (1.5-2.1)

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 Philip[*] 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.

Labour with one’s own hands on lowly tasks gives witness, in the toil thus expended on useless things, to one’s own indifference to higher things. No generous youth, from seeing the Zeus at Pisa[*] or the Hera at Argos, longs to be Pheidias or Polycleitus; nor to be Anacreon or Philetas or Archilochus out of pleasure in their poems.