The Form of Otium: Labor and Leisure in Greek and Roman Domestic Space

Beyond the many things that made Greek and Roman culture fundamentally different from each other-opposite, even-they both shared a contempt for work.01 This might come as no surprise, as both the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans based their material existence on the exploitation of slaves, and yet, no other slave society since has developed such a deeply ingrained hatred for work at large.Even what our modern ethos sees as fulfilling, free work, was seen in the ancient Mediterranean as the unworthy burden of material life, as opposed to the meaningful and noble (non)occupation of "scholé" or "otium": doing nothing.02 Of course, this doing nothing could only exist as the flip side of war, slavery, and the subordination of women; and yet in its starkness, this dialectic of work and leisure, labor and otium, presents an interesting contrast to contemporary experience.Mature capitalism has taught us to love work as we would leisure, and to invest in leisure the energy and planning that we would devote to work.Both our vocabulary and our spaces have registered this shift: while we talk about "fun" and "passion" at work, we increasingly bring our laptops into our beds.If such a blurring of domains can be seen as a form of exploitation, as our whole being is essentially put to work, there is also a positive aspect to this dynamic: our houses don't work anymore the way they are supposed to-and that, we would argue, is a good thing.03 In fact, today's houses are the outcome of a long historical process that has defined, in increasingly so-01 Hannah Arendt articulated this peculiarity of ancient Mediterranean cultures by distinguishing labour -that which supports survival -from work, which, supposedly, leaves a permanent trace and has a higher ambition, such as, for instance, the work of a craftsman or artist.Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013 [1958]).02 For the Greek scholé see William K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy: Volume 5, The Later Plato and the Academy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 89.An in-depth discussion of the topic can be found in Kostas Kalimtzis, An Inquiry in the Philosophical Concept of Schole (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017).For the Latin otium, see J. P.

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