The Past and Present Society

The Greek Attitude to Manual Labour

Author(s): Rodolfo Mondolfo and D. S. Duncan
Source: Past & Present, No. 6 (Nov., 1954), pp. 1-5
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
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The Greek Attitude to Manual Labour1

IN

RECENT

YEARS THERE HAS BEEN

SOME MODIFICATION

OF THE

traditional view that classical antiquity in general despised manual

labourers(bdnausoi)and productive work (banausia). A good example
of this process of revision is W. Jaeger's judgment (Paideia I):
" Greece was the cradle of that humanity which holds work in the
highest esteem." Glotz, Schuhl, Farrington and others have helped
to show that in Ancient Greece there was a positive and a negative
attitude to labour, and that the latter eventually triumphed only as
a result of a complex of social factors: economic (the increasing use
of slaves and the consequent lowering of the conditions of the working
classes); political (the reaction of militaristic and aristocraticcircles);
and spiritual (particularly the influence of certain writers and
thinkers, some of whom, as P. M. Schuhl has said of Plato, reveal a
genuine blocagementalwhere labour and technical skill is concerned).
It must be pointed out, however, that during the early period from
Hesiod to Socrates, the Greek public conscience was favourably
disposed towards manual labour, and that this positive attitude
continued to exercise such force that even its opponents, such as
Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle, were unable to free themselves
completely from its influence.
It is above all the economic value of labour that is traditionally
emphasized. Only by work can man provide himself with the
necessities - and the luxuries - of daily life. Hesiod says that the
gods bestow worldly goods only on those who work to earn them, an
opinion shared by many others: Pindar, Epicharmus, Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides; minortragedianssuch as Agathon, Theodectes,
Philiscus, etc.; the comic poets Alexis, Antiphanes, Philemon,
Menander, Dyscolus; the philosophers Prodicus, Antiphon, Hippias,
Critias, Democritus, Socrates, etc. At the same time these writers
show a growing awareness of the moral value of labour: work is a
duty which man must fulfil if his life is to have justification and
dignity. And it is Hesiod again who first emphasizes this aspect of
labour, when he insists that not work, but idleness, is shameful, and
that the idler is a parasite,like the drone which devours the honey the
1 This article is a summary of conclusions arrived at in other studies of mine, and presented
more fully in one chapter of the book I have in preparation: La comprenione del soggetto umano
nella cultura an.tica.

PAST AND PRESENT

bees have toiled to produce. This view of work as a moral obligation

was later taken up by the Seven Sages, some of whom, like Thales and
Anacharsis, mentioned by Plato, devoted themselves to acquiring
manual skills, while others, like Solon, were the authors of laws
which insisted on the necessity of work. It is a view which reappears
in philosopherslike Antiphon, Prodicus, Democritus and Socrates.
According to Prodicus, the concept of work as a noble duty is
personified in Heracles, and that is why Heracles becomes the ideal
hero of the Cynics, whose influence is later merged into the Stoic
conception of life and work. But the attitude of the Cynics, those
" philosophersof the Greek proletariat,"along with that of Socrates,
seems to have influenced even Xenophon, in spite of his aristocratic
and pro-Spartan leanings. Thus in his Memorabiliahe too, like
Socrates, shows awarenessof the value and moral obligation of work,
just as much for free men as for slaves; and he echoes Hesiod - and
anticipates St. Paul (Thess. II 3) - in condemning idle parasites.
Plato himself, in Republic III 405-8, is critical of the privileged
leisured classes who boast of their liberaleducation,and suggests they
take as their model the carpenter, for whom life is not worth living
if he is not allowed to get on with his work. Elsewhere (Rep. 535 d)
he insists that even students of philosophy should love all forms of
work (philoponia),whether of the hand or of the brain.
Various historians of ancient thought have drawn attention, at
least in part, to these vindications of labour, but they have usually
ignored a third aspect which classical antiquity recognized: the value
of labour for the formation of the intellect and for the gaining of
knowledge. This aspect, not yet apparentin Hesiod, is first seen in
the Seven Sages, the inventors of mechanical instruments and
techniques, in whom the activities of hand and brain, of homosapiens
and homofaber, are fused and made one. At a later date, as Farrington
has shown, we find a typical representativeof this traditionin Hippias,
who considers his skill as a spinner, weaver, tailor, tanner, shoemaker,
smith, etc., an essential part of his encyclopaxdicknowledge, and
who already in the fifth century B.C., as Schuhl has mentioned,
devotes himself to the writing of treatises on all the arts, from music
to sculpture, from medicine to cookery. Here one senses an awareness of how the practice of a craft can help towards the discoveryof
nature'ssecrets.
I have studied on another occasion the influence of technical skills
on the formation of the outlook of the pre-Socraticnaturalists,and
on their interpretations of the processes and phenomena of the
physical world; while Farrington has drawn attention to the

THE GREEK ATTITUDE TO MANUAL LABOUR

Hippocratic treatise De Victu, which declares that the processes of

human arts hold the key to the understanding of the processes of
nature. It should be added, however, that the same writer basing
himself on the idea that man, being a creature of nature, all
unwittingly follows in his actions the identical processes and laws
that are universally operative in nature) goes on to affirmthat man,
by understandinghis own knownactions - known to him precisely
because he performs them - can then arrive at an understandingof
the unknown processes of nature. And so, anticipating Vico's
verum ipsum factum, he says that man "by understanding what he
does " can come to understand what he unconsciously imitates, i.e.
the laws and phenomena of nature. Labouris thus a way to, and an
instrumentof, knowledge; and its intellectualvalue is thus powerfully
affirmed.
Anaxagoras, writing at the saine period, and attributing man's
superiority over the animal to his possession of hands, seems to
understandthat by the art of manual labour man uplifts himself, and
that in creating new and better conditions of existence, man makes
himself, i.e. fashions his own progress and mental development.
Even Plato, who did so much to emphasize the opposition between
the contemplative and the active creative life of progress, shows in
Republic 424-5, Politicus 298-9, Laws 656-7, 797-9, that he is well
aware of the interdependenceand reciprocalrelations of all activities
and aspects of human life. Thus, change or stasis in one part
has repercussions on all the others, and produces in them identical
conditions of change or stasis. Every aspect of man's social life from children's games to fashions in dress, from modes of music to
labour agreements and trade and harbour regulations, from the
plastic arts to dietary regime, from the craft of the smith, cabinet
maker and farmer to the science of arithmetic and geometry - is
inextricably linked to every other. Thus on the one hand, in the
Republic and the Laws, Plato urges that change in every sphere
should be forbidden, in order to ensure the stability of the laws and
of the state: and in the Politicuson the other hand, vindicatesfreedom
of progress and change in the arts and techniques, in order to avoid
that ossification and stagnation which would mean the death of
man's spiritual life, and render human existence intolerable.
While acknowledging this connection between the modes and
forms of the active life of labour and the contemplativelife of science
and philosophy (both linked in their turn with the ethico-juridical
life of the citizen) he shows no clear awarenessof the direct effect of
labour in the formation and development of human knowledge.

PAST AND PRESENT

Such an idea, however, implicit in the Platonic insistence on the dual

nature of philoponia which he demands of students of science and
philosophy (Rep. 535 d), is explicitly developed by Aristotle.
Already hinted at in the Protrepticusof his Platonic phase, it
emerges clearly in the De Philosophiaof his transitionalphase, where
he gives the name of wisdom (sophia) to each of the five stages he
distinguishes in the growth of civilization: first, the introduction of
work and of the techniques required to satisfy the most pressing
needs of ordinary life; second, the introduction of the arts of
refinement and elegance; then, the creation of laws, the study of
nature, and finally, the contemplationof the first cause. Labour and
technical skills, then, are alreadyheld to be sophia. Later, in the
first chapter of the Metaphysics, Aristotle expresses this concept
more clearly, distinguishing two elements in labour: the invention
and supervision of the technique; and its actual execution. He
considers those who direct the work to be more gifted than those
who merely carry it out mechanically,never stopping to think of the
reason for what they do.
Here it is evident that Aristotle condemns the divorce of hand and
brain, both essential to the functioning of the arts, and insists that
they are inseparable. Thus for example in his polemic with
Anaxagoras,who had attributed man's superiority to his possession
of hands, he says (Depart. anim.686 b et seq.) that naturehas endowed
man with this tool, the hand, precisely because man possesses
intelligence. Here, then, Aristotle associatesintelligence with labour
as its guide and director, as he had already done in the Protrepticus
(Arist. dialog.fragm. ed. Walzer, fragm, I3). In the Metaphysics,
however, he goes on to show that the art of manual labour is in itself
a necessary first step towards the gaining of knowledge; that it has
an active intellectual content of its own, which it itself creates and
develops in the very process of being performed, and which in its
turn becomes a stepping-stone to yet higher levels of understanding.
According to Aristotle, man raises himself from the state of
sensation he shares with the animal to the creation of art, using the
data provided by experience in order to form general views. Art or
technical skill is directed towards clearly determined ends, to obtain
which it adapts its means. It must therefore have a clear idea of
ends and means, and of their relationship; it must grasp the concept
of classes of objects or models, and of processes adapted to them;
it must in short reach an understandingof cause, of law, of universals.
" We judge the artist to be wiser than the man of experience,
inasmuch as he understands the reason for things," says Aristotle;

THE GREEK ATTITUDE TO MANUAL LABOUR

and therefore he gives to art the name of science - which is to say

that he recognizes and affirmsthe intellectual value of labour. And
believing that only after man has masteredthe arts or technical skills
can he create pure disinterested science. Aristotle sees in labour a
stage in human development which prepares the way for, and
conditions, the higher stage of pure theory.
Thus, together with its economic and moral value, there is the
acknowledgmentof the intellectual value of labour: an acknowledgment already indicated by the pre-Socratic and Hippocratic writers,
and to some extent by Plato, but made explicit by that same Aristotle
who was responsible for strengtheningthe hostile attitude to labour,
which had become dissociated from the activity of the mind, and
converted into mere brutish toil for slaves. Xenophon and Plato
share this responsibility with Aristotle. By their expressions of
contempt for manual labour and labourers they encouraged the
social changes leading to the increasing use of slaves, and to the
consequent lowering of the conditions of the working classes.
Graduallythe negativeattitudeto labourgains the upper hand. Thus
we have Xenophon's scorn for the worker employed on mechanical
tasks (Oecon. IV 203), Plato's for the engineer (Gorgias 512), and

finally Plutarch's extremist opinion that no young man of good

family would wish to become a Phidias or a Polycletus, because, in
spite of their genius they must, as manual workers, be considered
vile and contemptible. We can see contempt for manuallabour and
technical skills causing the halt and decadence of Greek physical and
medical science, and frustrating Archimedes' attempts to open new
paths in mathematics by introducing mechanics.
None the less, these facts give no authorityfor the traditionalview
that hostility to labour was general throughout the whole period of
Classical Antiquity. Instead, as we have shown, classical antiquity
was also fully aware of the positive attitude which recognised the
threefold value of labour: economic, moral, and intellectual.
Buenos Aires.

Rodolfo Mondolfo.
(trans. D. S. Duncan).