Banausos

βαναυσος is transliterated into English as vanavsos. The βαναυσοι are the peasants and the laboring class. It includes artisans, such as potters, stone masons, carpenters, etc; professional singers; artists; musicians and all persons engaged in trade. It makes no distinction between slave or free. Aristotle writes, "Those who provide necessaries for an individual are slaves, and those who provide them for society are handicraftsmen and day-laborers."

βαναυσος is said to be formed from the word βαυνος (vavnos) meaning furnace and αυω (auo) meaning 'to dry'. It acquired the sense of 'cramped in body' (Politics 1341 a 7) and 'vulgar in taste' (Politics 1337 b 8).

Its strict English connotation is "mechanical" but in Greek it is an epithet of contempt; it is not a complimentary term. "It is used of people who spend money with vulgar ostentation, of accomplishments inconsistent with a perception of the true purpose of life, and it is constantly coupled with the word “aneleutheros”, ‘illiberal’, ‘unworthy of a free man’."

The Greeks are concerned with the "best" state and the best state requires citizens who are the best and in consequence practice arete. This required leisure accompanied with pursuit of arete. Technical education was necessary but did not make good citizens. Leisure was a necessity of good citizenship something the βαναυσοι do not have. βαναυσια deforms the body rendering it useless for military and political duties. Those occupations tire out the body and therefore the mind preventing self education by reading and conversing with others. "It accustoms a man's mind to low ideas, and absorbs him in the pursuit of the mere means of life." (1)

The Doric states of ancient Crete, Sparta, and non-Doric Thebes set up their constitutions to take this into account.

• "Citizens must not live a mechanic or mercantile life (for such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue (arete)), nor yet must those who are to be citizens of the best state be tillers of the soil (for leisure is needed both for the development of virtue (arete) and for active participation in politics)." Politics, Aristotle, Loeb, Book VII, viii., 2; 1328b35f; pg 575.

• "A task and also an art or a science must be deemed vulgar if it renders the body or soul or mind of a free men useless for the employments and actions of arete. Hence, we entitle vulgar all such arts as deteriorate the condition of the body, and also the industries that earn wages; for they make the mind preoccupied and degraded. And even with the liberal sciences, although it is not illiberal to take part in some of them up to a point, to devote oneself to them too assiduously and carefully is liable to have the injurious results specified." Politics, Aristotle Book VIII, ii, 1-2; 1237b 5-10; pg 639.

• "And besides all this, agriculture contributes notably to the making of manly character; because unlike the mechanical arts (βαναυσοι), it does not cripple and weaken the bodies of those engaged in it, but inures them to exposure and toil and invigorates them to face the perils of war". Oeconomica, Aristotle, Loeb, Bk I, ii, 3; 1343b 1-5; pg 331.

• "For such an organization (talking about his {Plato's} planned state that no citizen can sell his land) leaves no great room for the making of fortunes; 'tis a consequence of it that none has either need or license to make them in any sordid calling--as even the sound of the reproach 'base mechanical' repels the man of free soul--and none will stoop to amass wealth by such devices." Laws, Plato, 731d-e.

Miscellanea

• "If a man applies himself to servile or mechanical employments, his industry in those things is a proof of his inattention to nobler studies. No young man of noble birth or liberal sentiments, from seeing the Jupiter at Pisa, would desire to be Phidias, or, from the sight of the Juno at Argos, to be Polycletus; or Anacreon, or Philemon, or Archilochus, though delighted with their poems." Plutarch's Life of Pericles (Langhorne's translation).

Related Topics

• Classical definition of effeminacy

Bibliography

• Sir Livingstone, Greek Ideals, Martin Lecture Series