Charmides.
Socrates, Critias.
And are they temperate, seeing that they make not for Charmides.
themselves ortheir own business only? Socrates,
Why not ? he said.
No objection on my part, I said, but there may be a difficulty on his who proposes as a definition of temperance, 'doing one's own business,' and then says that there is no reason why those who do the business of others should not be temperate.
Nay, [1] said he; did I ever acknowledge that those who doand is quickly caught in contradictions by him. the business of others are temperate ? I said, those who make, not those who do.
What! I asked; do you mean to say that doing and making are not the same?
No more, he replied, than making or working are the same; "thus much I have learned from Hesiod, who says that 'work is no disgrace.' Now do you imagine that if he had meant by working and doing such things as you were describing, he would have said that there was no disgrace in them—for example, in the manufacture of shoes, or in selling pickles, or sitting for hire in a house of ill-fame? That, Socrates, is not to be supposed: but I conceive him to have distinguished making from doing and work; and, while admitting that the making anything might sometimes become a disgrace, when the employment was not honourable, to have thought that work was never any disgrace at all. ForHe tries to save himself by new distinctions. things nobly and usefully made he called works; and such makings he called workings, and doings; and he must be supposed to have called such things only man's proper business, and what is hurtful, not his business: and in that sense Hesiod, and any other wise man, may be reasonably supposed to call him wise who does his own work.
O Critias, I said, no sooner had you opened your mouth, tlian I pretty well knew that you would call that which is proper to a man, and that which is his own, good ; and that the makings (πoιήσεις ) of the good you would call doings (πράξεις) , for I am no stranger to the endless distinctions which Prodicus draws about names. Now I have no objection to your giving names any signification which you please,
- ↑ The English reader has to observe that the word 'make' (ποιεῖν) , in Greek, has also the sense of 'do' (πράττειν) .
