However, Mr Murdoch has enough to trouble him just now, and so I should make clear that I saw the out-of-context quotation from Herodotus not in the Sun or the Wall Street Journal but on a caption next to a display of Greek pots in the Ashmoleum Museum in Oxford - and it just set me wondering, in sub-Dormer mode, about the status of crafts today more than about Herodotus. It did strike me as a little odd, but maybe if I had not been shouldered aside by polyglot camera-wielding museum visitors (who no doubt would have called up a few thousand words of digression from Herodotus himself) the Ashmoleum caption writer would have enlightened me further. I am grateful to my friend for doing so instead.
Dear Nicholas,
'The Greeks esteemed as noble those who avoided handicrafts.'
Beware of Murdoch editors bearing false quotations! Herodotus is talking about Egypt. (2.166-167). The warrior class engages only in military pursuits and their sons inherit this status directly from their fathers. Herodotus adds in a typical aside that Hellenes, Thracians, Scythians, Persians, Lydians and all other barbarians have a similar attitude to those who learn crafts. (A hint of the real herodotus shows through in the phrase 'the other barbarians'.) Amongst the Greeks, the Spartans despise craft work the most and the commercial Corinthians the least. Clearly he's commenting on the weird ways human esteem works in societies. He's seeing it as weird, as something worth comment. βάναυσοι or artisans are not really part of the city. As Aristotle tells us in the Politics, the βάναυσος is not allowed to attend the ἐλευθέρα ἀγορά, that's to say, to the assembly of free men.
I suspect that the disdain was for those who were tied to their work as contrasted with the superior status of those whose lives were dedicated to war. In practice, Greeks and especially Athenians valued craftsmen greatly. The Greeks had every respect for skilled artisans at every level - skilled potters and painters worked together in Keramicos. Some were free men and some were slaves. Ictinus and Callicrates worked with Pericles and had a higher status than our wretched modern equivalents such as the Gherkin Man. Not for nothing was Athena the goddess of crafts of all kinds and the concept of techne was the most basic source of intellectual metaphor for Greek philosophy. Knowing how to do something was the paradigm of knowledge. Disdain comes in because you had to be a free man and no slave if you wanted to aspire to the status of an Athenian gentleman. The disdain was for economic poverty and not for the skill or knowledge or products of men's hands. After all Ajax committed suicide when he couldn't get his hands on Achilles' armour. Its beauty is part of its high esteem. Same with Nestor's cup, and much else besides.
We still tend to regard military men as archetypes of honour and all the finest qualities, or at least we did when I were a boy. It's only in recent decades that people have finally gone over completely to applauding and crawling before the Murdochs and Berlusconis as though they really were the Lords of Creation. It all depends on what you esteem - it's one of Herodotus' favourite words! He's using comparisons to establish how things are and to point up just how weird they are. He is interested in the truth, but that doesn't mean to say that he thinks that everything's just fine and dandy with the world. What we are seeing in all this is men becoming aware of human values as something inherited and therefore potentially as something that can be shaped. Don't murdoch the man!
