For Ancient Greeks, freedom in death was preferable to a life of subjugation.

Cover photo: Grave Naiskos of an Enthroned Woman with an Attendant, marble (circa 100 BCE). Via Google Arts and Culture.

The Art of Labor

At the height of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, American workers — including children — suffered twelve hour work days and seven day work weeks. Labor Day originated in 1882 as an annual mass rally in New York organized by socialists and leftist organizations to demand shorter hours, higher pay, safer working conditions, and a labor holiday. President Grover Cleveland would declare Labor Day a federal holiday in 1894.

COVID-19 has revealed who are the essential workers and who performs the unnecessary “bullshit jobs”. This once-in-a-century pandemic has also demonstrated the global interdependency of resources, labor, and supply chains — what we commonly refer to as globalization.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and likely their healthcare. This has inspired me to create a new series on the art of labor through the centuries, with a focus on how work has been valued and represented.

This is the third work of a twenty part series.

Ancient Greece and Democracy

Ancient Greece is considered the birthplace of demos kratos, “the people’s rule”, what we today call “democracy”. Of the Athenian Acropolis, UNESCO states, “On this hill were born Democracy, Philosophy, Theatre, Freedom of Expression and Speech, which provide to this day the intellectual and spiritual foundation for the contemporary world and its values.” While this idealistic description suggests an egalitarian society, power was strictly reserved for free adult men who were designated as citizens.

“According to modern standards, “Athenian democracy” came closer to what today would be identified as oligarchy, rule by the few,” argues Professor of Philosophy and Education at Central Missouri State College, H. Clay Jent. In Ancient Athens, just an approximate third of the population was comprised of free peoples and over half of the entire population was in slavery. Nearly every household had a least one slave, with the richest having as many as fifty.

Free women — aided by slaves — took care of the household. Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly write in their 2012 book Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe, “Free male citizens did not need to work and were consequently able to devote their energies to politics.”

“Athenian democracy is not our democracy, but the idea is there”, acknowledges Ioannis Mylonopoulos, a specialist in ancient Greek art and architecture at Columbia University.

According to the Xenophonian-Pseudo Constitution of Athenians, “[A]t Athens the poor and the commons seem justly to have the advantage over the well-born and the wealthy; for it is the commons which mans the fleet and has brought the state her power, and the steersmen and the boatswains and the shipmasters and the lookout-men and the ship-builders these have brought the state her power much rather than the infantry and the well-born and the good citizens. This being so it seems just that all should have a share in offices filled by lot or by election, and that any citizen who wishes should be allowed to speak.”

Slavery

“From [the days of the classical civilization of Greece] until now the labor of the people has been exercised under three conditions; chattel slavery, serfdom, and wage-earning,” documented 19th century British designer and philosopher William Morris in his unpublished essay Art and Labour. Ancient Greece relied heavily on the former. Slaves worked in all kinds of occupations, including agriculture, manufacture of goods, mining, and as household servants.

Michael Lazarus of Monash University writes, “The social relation that forms the basis of Athenian society is the exploitation of unfree labour by a free, slave-owning, minority who exploited the surplus, the means of production and the labourers.”

“The Greeks, like the [American] Southerners, thought of the slaves as inferior to themselves. The Southerners were able on the basis of apparent distinctions to assert the biological inferiority of the enslaved race. The Greeks had too many other Greeks in bondage to assert anything of the sort. For them, there had to be a different cause of interiority, and since under the circumstances it could not be that of race or body, it had to be an inferiority of the spirit,” wrote Victoria Cuffel in her 1966 article The Classical Greek Concept of Slavery.

There were four means by which to acquire slaves in Ancient Greece: slaves born into the household, captured in war, purchased, or enslaved for debt. The latter was especially common in Athens, where sophisticated financial transactions of the commercial class forced citizens into bondage to absolve themselves. The problem was so prolific that the statesman Solon eventually abolished the practice of debt-bondage entirely to avert the potential of civil war.

American political philosopher Harvey Mansfield summarizes the famed Aristotle’s thinking as follows, “No man can be freer than when he is ruling his body, and since he cannot be entirely free of his body even when ruling it, no man and no society can be entirely free. Since perfect freedom cannot be achieved, every society has to decide, in part arbitrarily, who should be free and who slave.” Greeks viewed all people as slaves in some way: to the gods, to fate, to their own desires. Nevertheless, Greeks distinguished between anthropos and doulos, man and slave.

“The intellectual and political elite, furthermore, redefined ‘freedom’ as being free from the need to work and particularly from depending on others to acquire a living as merchants, retailers or wage workers,” explains Koenraad Verboven, Professor of Ancient History at Ghent University.

Greeks maintained an aversion to both drudgery and idleness. Working to the benefit of others was considered degradation, while working for oneself was worthy of respect. “Through work men grow rich […] and by working they become much dearer to immortals,” wrote the poet Hesiod.

This concept of work and freedom serves as a precursor to philosopher Karl Marx’s theory of alienation: “If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must give satisfaction and pleasure. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.”

For example: “The majority [of artists] were profitably employed by the government, and by many public bodies and private individuals, including many poets and philosophers, as well as by patrons in foreign countries. […] The social position of the Grecian artists was thus brilliant in the fullest sense of the world,” as explained in the 19th century art magazine The Crayon.

However, the philosophers “Plato and Aristotle considered makers merely a link or a means of production, as they could not possibly know the ultimate end of the products they generated; […] despite the great admiration their creations merited, they worked on commission and satisfied the needs of users, who determined the ultimate purpose of their work.”

Barbarians

Greeks referred to all non-Greeks as barbaroi, or barbarians. This xenophobic term originates in onomatopoeia, as Greeks derided foreign languages as simply sounding like the noise “bar bar”.

Aristotle argued that “from the hour of their birth, some men are marked out for subjection, others for rule… It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and just.” According to Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, all barbarians were born to be slaves. This was, as Professor of Ancient History at the University of Tel Aviv, Benjamin Isaac describes, “a proto-racist justification of imperial expansion.”

A pair of Roman interpretations copied after Greek sculptures — The Dying Gaul and The Galatian Suicide — offer a glimpse into the Ancient Greek’s perception of both barbarians and slavery. The original sculptures were made to commemorate the recent victory of King Attalus I over the Galatians of Anatolia. The theatrical depictions — both featuring a heroic nude — offer a resolute exaltation of freedom above all, especially slavery.

The Dying Gaul depicts the final moments of a mighty trumpeter, fatally wounded in war, succumbing to his inevitable death. The Galatian steadfastly accepts his fate with valor despite his agony. He lies resolute and unafraid. “An image of a conquered enemy, the sculpture represents courage in defeat, composure in the face of death and dignity,” describes Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art. In exalting the strength and bravery of the vanquished foe, the sculptor implicitly exalts the strength and bravery of his conqueror.

“The coward in war would allow himself to be conquered rather than choose death; he thus merited his slavery. Since slaves are cowards, suo genere [in a class of their own], it must follow that cowards should be slaves,” explains Victoria Cuffel of Temple University.

The Galatian Suicide portrays the murder-suicide of a man and woman. The man, having just taken the life of his lover, prepares to kill himself by aiming his sword at his heart. The lovers choose death over a life of slavery. The man, holding her limp body, has spared his wife an existence of subjugation and sexual exploitation. The sculpture valorizes death over surrender and slavery.

In the 425 BCE play Hecuba by Euripides, the captured Trojan Princess Polyxena — daughter of the titular Hecuba — similarly chooses death over a life of slavery. Polyxena exclaims, “Leave me free, I do beseech; so slay me, that death may find me free; for to be called a slave amongst the dead fills my royal heart with shame.”

Death

Much like the Ancient Egyptians — although to a lesser extent — Greeks had significant respect for the dead. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “elaborate marble stelai and statues were often erected to mark the grave and to ensure that the deceased would not be forgotten. Immortality lay in the continued remembrance of the dead by the living.” Remembrance was both a civic and religious duty, known as the social contract of eusebia or piety.

Take, for example, the Grave Naiskos of an Enthroned Woman with an Attendant, a marble funerary remnant. The detail, size, and decoration of this marble gravestone suggests the deceased woman was from a wealthy family. She is commemorated in a domestic setting, enthroned and attended to by a young girl. The clothes and hairstyle characterize the young attendant as a slave. The woman grasps the lid of a shallow chest, alluding to a continuation of earthly pleasure in the afterlife.

Marble was quarried using bow drills. Slaves toiled in the transportation of the stone under the supervision of skilled quarrymen. As documented by the Met, “[l]ike all ancient marble sculpture, funerary statues and grave stelai were brightly painted, and extensive remains of red, black, blue, and green pigment can still be seen.”

According to Francois Retief and Louise Cilliers of the University of the Free State, “Slaves were entitled to a full burial and were often interred like members of the family. Their graves were simple, however, and no gifts were offered, because the popular conception was that slaves did not have an afterlife.”