Plato, Alcibiades 2, section 147b

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[147b] So that his case aptly fits the saying of the poet, in which he complains of somebody or other that “Full many crafts he knew: but still
He knew them all so very ill.
”Margites, Fr.¹

Alcibiades
Why, how on earth is the poet's saying apposite, Socrates? For to my mind it has nothing to do with the point.

Socrates
It is very much to the point: but he, good sir, like almost every other poet, speaks in riddles. For poetry as a whole is by nature

1 Quoted from the mock-epic Margites, of which only this and five other lines have survived. The hero, Margites, became the proverbial type of a blundering idiot, and the poem was generally attributed to Homer.

Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 8 translated by W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1955.

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