Charmides

both because of your age and because of the study you have given it. So if you agree that temperance is what this young man says, and take the argument over, I would much rather look into it with you, to see whether what was said is true or not.”

“I agree entirely,” he said, “and I take it over.”

“Good for you,” I said. “Now tell me: do you also agree with what I was asking just now, that all craftsmen make something?”

“I do.”

163a“And do you think they make only their own things, or other people’s as well?”

“Other people’s as well.”

“Then are they temperate, even though they don’t make only their own things?”

“What’s to stop them?” he said.

“Nothing stops me,” I said. “But see whether it doesn’t stop the man who laid it down that temperance is doing one’s own business, and then says there is nothing to stop those who do other people’s business from being temperate too.”

“Oh yes,” said he, “I suppose I agreed that those who do other people’s business are temperate, just because I agreed that those who make other people’s things are!”¹

163b“Tell me,” I said, “don’t you call making and doing the same thing?”

“No indeed,” he said, “nor working and making either. I learned that from Hesiod, who said that work is no disgrace. Do you suppose that, if he had called the sort of things you were mentioning just now ‘works’, and ‘working’ and ‘doing’, he would have said that it was no disgrace to anyone to cobble shoes, or to sell salt fish, or to sit in a brothel?² One must not suppose so, Socrates. He too, I think, held making to be something other than doing and working, 163c and held that a thing made may sometimes become a disgrace, when it does not