Hesiod on work and welfare
Job, jobs, jobs: no political party can talk of much else. But the concept of the ‘job’ and the ‘wage’ emerges out of the Industrial Revolution. What of worlds where ‘jobs’ did not exist? The Greek didactic poet Hesiod (c. 680 BC) has a most instructive take on the matter. Hesiod was a peasant farmer, i.e. he