The Greek concept of techne remained largely identical in ancient Rome, reflecting the same broad range of meanings as it was translated into Latin as ars, even if there were significant differences governing the social structures within which practitioners exercised their skills.12 Like Greek writers thinking about techne, Roman writers, or at least those aligned with what we can call, following Cuomo, an “aristocratic” approach to the issue of techne and ars, were interested in activities associated with arts that developed character and thus activities that made men virtuous as leaders, such as agriculture and military strategy. A general did not win a war, for example, because he had better fighting equipment or technical virtuosity but because he possessed superior moral qualities needed for ruling and leadership, such as courage, temperance, fortitude, loyalty, persistence, reasonableness, moderation, piety, and the like. A techne/ars, by contrast, undercut the aristocratic ethos and made men weak, morally lacking, or uninvested in civic virtue. A techne made men soft, as Xenophon had earlier put it, rendering them lax from laboring indoors, although his denigration of such arts, we should bear in mind, occurs in a highly rhetorical and didactic speech by Socrates arguing with some comic—and characteristically ironic—exaggeration for the superiority of husbandry in an attempt to make the ne’er-do-well son of Crito take more seriously his household duties as a landowner and, consequently, exert himself through toil, with toil here understood as a stylized form of labor that legitimated aristocratic virtue and defined elite status.13 Still, by and large, the aristocratic concept of techne had far more openly negative than positive associations attached to it, not just in Greek but also in Roman thought generally. An ars debased men, Cicero avers, if it is manual, banausic, servile, the product of the workshop or in any way deemed remunerative.14 It was not uniformly taken as a badge of honor, for instance, that Gaius Fabius, who was given the cognomen Pictor for painting the temple of Salus (Health) in about 304 BCE, was in fact a painter: for Cicero, unlike for Pliny, it degraded his dignity within an illustrious line.15 For this reason, arguably, when Cicero and Quintilian talked about whether or not rhetoric was an art, they were quick to moralize it and socially enhance it, thereby ensuring that a rhetor was truly a rhetor if, and only if, he was a “good man” (vir bonus), meaning not just a morally upright man but also a citizen of elevated social standing, an optimate.16
In Greek and Roman antiquity, then, certain arts as forms of specialized knowledge were or could be viewed as edifying and character enhancing in nature, depending on who said what about whom and where and under what circumstances. Architecture, husbandry, rhetoric, and medicine were key in this regard. And they could be elevated to the level of “liberal arts” (artes liberales)—arts pursued by free men to liberate the spirit, without any aim for personal gain and without any concern that the person involved in the art would be engaged in physical, sensuous pleasures or was occupationally dependent on others. Those liberating arts could thus be cast as building virtues and character, the very virtues and character that certain freemen within the aristocratic social order already necessarily possessed from birth and merely needed to enhance and perfect through training.17 Moreover, when it came to the banausic crafts, the user, rather than the producer, of the durable material good was privileged: the aristocratic wearer of the shoe rather than the shoemaker himself was of far greater cultural interest and, naturally enough, enduring social value. Additionally, one typically appreciated the material produced (the art on the Parthenon, the sculpture on a frieze) and not, albeit with the exceptions of such men as Phidias, Apelles, and Lysippus, the producer (the artist who sometimes toiled in the vulgar grime of his sweat), a point synthetically captured by Plutarch when he pithily observed in his Lives that “while we delight in the work, we despise the workman.”18 Finally, for those arts that belonged to or were elevated to the level of being considered one of the liberal arts or placed in a sort of limbo category of semiliberal arts, a general precondition for ensuring that they continued to be viewed in that manner was that they not be practiced for remuneration or pursued strictly for pleasure.
In this way, much as a good deal of ambivalence lay at the heart of the classical concept of work itself as various people articulated the merits and demerits of different forms of labor in a period that “abounded” in a “polyphony” of voices on the subject,19 so, too, a deep ambivalence lay at the heart of the classical concept of the arts themselves. And this is especially true with regard to the productive arts. On the one hand, Greeks and Romans valued the productive arts and took great pride and pleasure in their notable advancements achieved through them. The lasting monuments from antiquity bear witness to this fact and often broadcast it, perhaps most famously in Trajan’s magnificent column, which both represents and enacts the civilizing process and glories of the productive arts as a form of valued, specialized knowledge. Rome can not only build a spectacular pontoon bridge across the Danube to enable the emperor Trajan and his troops to succeed in their military campaign, as is evident in the panels as they unfold from the bottom and spiral upward. Rome can also construct an innovative, freestanding, intricately designed, and hollowed-out column with slender vertical windows and a narrow winding staircase incorporated into it, carving out an entire hillside to accomplish the extraordinary architectural feat, while placing Greek and Latin libraries on either side of the richly adorned column as lasting symbols of the complete appropriation and assimilation of all knowledge (both techne- and non-techne-oriented knowledge) on the part of imperial Rome (fig. 7).20 Some philosophical positions, such as Stoicism and Cynicism, scholars have pointed out, also viewed the productive arts somewhat positively by recognizing the social value of paid banausic occupations, although certainly not, it bears stressing, typically the practitioners of those occupations themselves.21 Or as Harry W. Pleket encapsulated the issue some time ago, “there is a good deal of evidence that some Greeks”—and indeed some Romans, it is safe to say—“were by no means hostile to techne.”22
FIGURE 7. Trajan’s Column, 106–113 CE. Rome. Reproduced by permission of Gianni dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. Detail with reliefs showing victorious Dacian campaigns, including detail of soldiers crossing the impressive pontoon bridge.
On the other hand, as much as ancient Greeks and Romans took seriously the knowledge associated with certain productive arts and valued their sometimes sublime achievements, they also recognized the threat that the possessors of such knowledge theoretically posed to the aristocratic social order and its ethos of entrenched privilege as people involved in those arts potentially asserted themselves, acquired social power, and thrived on, as well as brought about through their activities, change. In the end, as much as they could and did serve the polis, and as much as they tangibly expressed pride in their work and how it sustained themselves and others (perhaps most memorably in Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces’ remarkable, still largely extant, funerary monument dedicated to his profession as a baker), people involved in the productive arts were typically viewed as bound to, or ineluctably associated with, physical matter and/or material gain (fig. 8).23 To paraphrase