When one looks at the history of ideas, two main perspectives on work stand out: some see work as a meaningless curse and others see it as a meaningful vocation. The first view dominated from antiquity to the Reformation, and the second from the Reformation onwards.

There has probably never been anybody who has held work in lower esteem than the classical Greek philosophers. There is no separate word for work in ancient Greek, just as there is no separate word for what we call art. The Greeks used different terms for different productive activities. The Greek word that is often translated as “work”, ponos, primarily refers to strenuous, but not necessarily productive, actions. As with the concept of art, we deal with this lack of a single term for work by projecting our current concept back on to Greek culture, while at the same time trying to avoid too many anachronisms.

Although the standard assumption is that no culture has detested work more than the ancient Greeks, the real picture is a little more complicated. The poet Hesiod regarded work as hard, but also believed that it was through work that one would be blessed by the gods. In Works and Days, written in the seventh century BCE, he writes: