This idea did not drop from heaven, of course, but emerged from the social relations of a slave society in which the primary use of slaves was as domestic servants. (Remember that before Pillsbury Flour, before freezers, before Safeway, before Kraft and Nabisco, before washing machines and electric stoves, being rich was meaningful if and only if the riches commanded large levies of household servants. And the democratic revolution had freed the Athenian peasantry from all obligatory services to their betters, hence the only barely suppressed rage that reverberates through the urbane dialogues. So for the rich athenian, thought _did_ move matter. Let there be bread, he could say, and lo there was bread. And obviously the thought was morally superior to the mere vulgar drudgery of grinding the flour and baking the bread.
Most of the peasantry were occupied enough with existence that they could not come to Athens for public meetings, but they did very definitely rule their own villages. Shocking! or so at least Socrates appears to have thought.
See Ellen Meiksins Wood, _Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy_ for details on all this. A superb book. Even many marxists have bought the Platonic/Socratic myth of the idle mob.
And I can't leave the subject of Socrates without observing how utterly despicable is that widely cited Socratic claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. That could well have been emblazoned over the gates of Dachau.
Carrol