And are they temperate, seeing that they make not for themselves or their
own business only?

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 (The English reader has to observe that the word 'make' (Greek), in
Greek, has also the sense of 'do' (Greek).), said he; did I ever
acknowledge that those who do 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. 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