Manual trades and social contempt

Use in the book

Critias invokes three occupations while arguing that Hesiod cannot have meant every kind of making when he said work is no disgrace. The force of the examples depends on expecting the audience to recognize socially discreditable activities. This expectation belongs to Critias’ argument and should not be reported as Plato’s endorsement of a fixed ranking of occupations. His ensuing lexical reconstruction makes fine and beneficial production count as genuine work. The later discussion presses in a different direction: technically successful crafts still fail to establish happiness merely by being forms of knowledge. Leatherwork, metalwork, weaving and carpentry are examples of expertise whose relation to living well must be explained. A craft may thus be socially disparaged, technically real and insufficient for happiness; these are three separate assessments.

Places to read

1. 163b–163cCritias uses socially charged occupations to support his restricted reading of Hesiodic work.
2. 173d–174c2Ordinary crafts reappear when Socrates asks which knowledge is responsible for happiness.

Translation in this edition

The supplied “sit in a brothel” explains the Greek idiom rather than translating a separate noun for prostitution. A reader should not infer that the unattested word banausos occurs simply because the social issue is present.

ἐπ᾽ οἰκήματος

Attested: ἐπʼ οἰκήματος (epʼ oikēmatos). At or in a room; the conventional brothel-setting expression is one of Critias’ disparaged occupations. References: 163b. Lexical identification: expression / normalized lookup: ἐπ᾽ οἰκήματος. See Manual trades and social contempt.

σκυτική

Attested: σκυτικὴ (skytikē). The leatherworking or shoemaking craft; it would still supply footwear without knowledge of good and bad, but Socrates says these results’ occurring well and beneficially would be lost (174c–d). References: 174c. Lexical identification: lemma: σκυτική. See Manual trades and social contempt.

σκῦτος

Attested: σκυτῶν (skytōn). Hides or leather; cutting leather is Socrates’ first pointed example when he asks what specific expertise would make a knowledgeable life happy. References: 173d. Lexical identification: lemma: σκῦτος. See Manual trades and social contempt.

σκυτοτομέω

Attested: σκυτοτομεῖν / σκυτοτομοῦντι (skytotomein / skytotomounti). To cut leather or make shoes; literal private manufacture of one’s footwear is demanded by the hypothetical law, and Critias later includes cobbling among trades he disparages. References: 161e, 163b. Lexical identification: lemma: σκυτοτομέω. See Manual trades and social contempt.

ταριχοπωλέω

Attested: ταριχοπωλοῦντι (tarichopōlounti). Sell preserved fish; one of the occupations Critias disparages when interpreting Hesiod. References: 163b. Lexical identification: lemma: ταριχοπωλέω. See Manual trades and social contempt.

τομή

Attested: τομῆς (tomēs). Cutting; with σκυτῶν, leather-cutting, the first craft example testing which knowledge contributes to happiness. References: 173d. Lexical identification: lemma: τομή. See Manual trades and social contempt.

ὑποδεδέσθαι (hypodedesthai)

Be shod or have footwear on; a practical product of shoemaking remains even when knowledge of good and bad is removed. References: 174c. Lemma: ὑποδέω. See Manual trades and social contempt.

ὑποδήματα (hypodēmata)

Footwear or shoes; one of the goods every person would have to produce under a literal self-sufficiency rule. References: 161e. Lemma: ὑπόδημα. See Manual trades and social contempt.

Use in the book

At 131a–b Socrates distinguishes doctors and trainers, whose professional objects are bodily matters, from farmers and other craftsmen, whose expertise concerns the body's provisions. Neither kind of expertise, insofar as it is that expertise, supplies self-knowledge. If self-knowledge is temperance, none becomes temperate by that craft alone. Socrates then says this is why such crafts are thought menial and not a good man's subjects.

The formulation ties a familiar social judgment to the inquiry's newly established distinction of objects. It should not be paraphrased as the claim that craftsmen are incapable of virtue or can never learn to know themselves. The qualifying phrases concern what their existing crafts themselves supply. Nor does the remark cancel their usefulness: earlier examples repeatedly granted artisans and other experts superior authority within their own domains.

The tension is important. Craft provides the model of accountable competence against aristocratic pretension, yet its restricted scope is finally invoked in a socially disparaging judgment. A source-grounded account should let both features stand. At 133d–e the speakers also revise the prior allowance that one can know one's own things while wholly ignorant of oneself, complicating any simple fixed hierarchy of separate knowledges.

Places to read

1. 131a–131bThe crafts’ limited cognitive objects are used to explain their description as menial
2. 133d–133eThe earlier allowance of knowledge of possessions without self-knowledge is revised

Translation in this edition

“Are thought to be” preserves δοκοῦσιν and makes clear that the passage invokes a social appraisal. The edition’s note compares Xenophon, Oeconomicus 4.2–3, and Aristotle, Politics 1337b8–15; those parallels should not be taken as the literal argument of Alcibiades I.

βάναυσος

Attested: βάναυσοι (banausoi; 131b). At 131b: Menial, the social appraisal attached to crafts that do not themselves supply self-knowledge. Lexical identification: lemma: βάναυσος. See Menial crafts.

Use in the book

This is a revealing point in the refutation. The craftsmen have just defeated the generalist in the usefulness test: when help is needed, the doctor and pilot are preferred. Nevertheless, Socrates now appeals to the stigma attached to people who devote themselves to crafts. Useful expertise and high social standing are not automatically aligned in the world of the conversation.

The remark also turns the cultivated lover’s own standard back upon him. He proposed learning appropriate to free men and avoiding the slavery of absorption in one pursuit. If philosophy is simply earnest involvement in crafts, even on his selectively intellectual terms, its social description begins to look embarrassingly close to what he disdains. The argument’s practical objection and its status objection are therefore related but not identical.

Readers should resist two simplifications. The passage does not prove that manual workers are morally bad; the preceding conclusion concerns the proposed philosopher under the lover’s account. Nor does it simply abandon the concept of craft as unworthy, since the next questions speak of the same craft that improves and punishes, and the conclusion identifies a single governing craft with justice and temperance. The hierarchy among kinds of work is part of the problem, not an unexamined modern principle the reader must adopt.

The sting of “menial” is social and dramatic. It contributes to a discussion in which each lover wants admiration and one looks down on the other’s bodily pursuits. The move toward self-knowledge may be read as challenging that premature confidence about what makes a person worthy, though the dialogue does not explicitly criticize the prejudice itself.

Places to read

1. 137bκαὶ ὄνειδος εἶναι τοῦτο — The occupation is described as a disgrace.
2. 137bβαναύσους καλεῖσθαι — The contemptuous label is reported as what such people are called.

Translation in this edition

Edition note 23 cites Xenophon’s Oeconomicus 4.2 for the view that menial crafts are despised because they damage workers’ bodies. This supplies historical context as reported by the edition; the Lovers itself gives no physiological explanation here. The label should be attributed to the dialogue’s speech, not endorsed as a description of present-day workers.