Attitudes to Work and Leisure in Ancient Greece

Abstract

The Puritan ethic insists that work is both necessary and virtuous. But if automation makes work unnecessary, is it still virtuous? Indeed, if work is in short supply, may not industry actually be vicious, since it would mean taking more than one's fair share of the work available to the community as a whole, a new sort of πλεονεξία? A letter appeared in the national press recently which said: ‘Work is virtuous only when it is necessary, and much of what was done in the past and for which people were trained, no longer needs to be done. We already have butter mountains, beef mountains, barley mountains, lakes of milk, surfeits of electricity generating capacity, of shipping, of coal and so on.… Twenty thousand miners could be retired tomorrow on £10,000 a year and there would still be a surplus of £50,000,000 from the quarter of a billion pounds we spend on keeping open uneconomic pits. Rather than see these pits close, Mr Scargill wants to condemn his members in perpetuity to that unpleasant job, when they could have the money without doing the work. I see nothing virtuous in a miner doing that sort of work for its own sake.’

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