intimately? How much of the knowledge pertaining to a techne was determined by hard-and-fast rules, how much was derived from improvisational learning, how much was instead the product of intuition, how much was just somehow passed on from parent to child? Did someone, in point of fact, need some kind of primary ur-knowledge—a sort of innate shrewdness or acumen—to recognize instinctively how to adapt the acquired knowledge associated with a specific techne to the particulars of the moment and the unpredictability of occasion?
Lastly, there is an underlying sociopolitical dimension to the classical Greek notion of techne. On the one hand, we can detect significant expressions of democratic unease at the claims of sophists to have access to an art of political virtue and rhetoric—an art that could be taught for vast sums of money and therefore challenged the egalitarian claim that the poor majority can have as much civic virtue and knowledge as the wealthy. On the other hand, and in critical terms more important for this present study, people possessing and applying a techne could be viewed in ancient Greece as dangerous to the prevailing aristocratic social order. An alluring yet threatening aspect to the possessor of a techne was that the persons making use of it could potentially challenge persons of higher social position through applied specialized knowledge. In this context, persons putting into practice a techne might be deemed ambitious social climbers seeking to advance themselves through their “careers,” potential Promethean upstarts who could adopt outsized ideas about themselves through their position as experts in a society that had a keen demand for what they dependably offered through their skills.9 Because they possessed a knowledge that serviced real social needs within the polis (and because they exercised skills that at times were much admired and held in prestige within city-states, as in fifth-century Athens), they could potentially exercise that knowledge for self-aggrandizing change. Because they had managed to lift themselves up through education and transform themselves by acquiring authority and legitimacy through their techne, they necessarily undercut, by virtue of that specialized knowledge that allowed them to become acknowledged masters, the aristocratic presumption that nature, rather than nurture, defined who one already always was and that one only had to cultivate a character inescapably ascribed to someone from birth through family line. Therein lay the menace of techne, its edgy rebellious side in ancient Greek thought. A techne held out the possibility of “unregulated mobility” in an aristocratic social world, with the people applying a techne taking advantage of and thriving on change, and it could thus “compensate,” as Serafina Cuomo has succinctly put it, “for the lack of noble birth by producing honor via alternative routes.”10 In this respect, much as the definition of techne ranged widely in ancient Greece, so too did the sociopolitical value of techne, not least when framed within the broader context of the history of work.11 Mastering a techne in the end represented potentially possessing not just a form of productive and practical knowledge but also a threatening form of sociopolitical power. And this shifty and shifting aspect of techne, which reconfigured such knowledge as a sociopolitical strength, could be viewed as a boon or a bane, depending on where you stood within the polis and depending on what sorts of work you were engaged in.
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,
