rs 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. For 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, than 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 (Greek) of the good
you would call doings (Greek), 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, if you will
only tell me what you mean by them. Please then to begin again, and be
a little plainer. Do you mean that this doing or making, or whatever is
the word which you would use, of good actions, is temperance?

I do, he said.

Then not he who does evil, but he who does good, is temperate?

Yes, he said; and you, friend, would agree.

No matter whether I should or not; just now, not what I think, but what
you are saying, is the point at issue.

Well, he answered; I mean to say, that he who does evil, and not good,
is not temperate; and that he is temperate who does good, and not evil:
for temperance I define in plain words to be the doing of good actions.

And you may be very likely right in what you are saying; but I am
curious to know whether you imagine that temperate men are ignorant of
their own temperance?

I do not think so, he said.

And yet were you not saying, just no