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Πόνος means toil or suffering, while πονηρός, derived from it, can mean either that someone toils under oppression or else is knavish, base, or evil. What is the semantic link between toil/suffering and evil? If I had to guess, I could come up with two guesses:

(1) Noblemen are ἀγαθός because that's the natural order of things, and for similar reasons, people who do hard manual labor are knavish, base, or evil for the same reason. OK, the bronze age is before any notion of the nobility of labor, but they certainly had the concept of a reliable servant, or of a character like the swineherd Eumaeus who virtuously cares for the disguised Odysseus, thinking him to be a ξένος.

(2) Maybe evil people cause suffering for the rest of us good people. But this also seems weak, since there is nothing inherently evil (in the ancient world) about causing others to toil or labor. Is the idea that πόνος specifically implies that the toil or labor is unjust, and therefore anyone who imposes πόνος on us must be bad? I suppose then we would have to have had an expansion of the word's meaning, from evil-because-they-inflict-unjust-toil to evil in general.

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    Nietzsche has a lot to say about the origins of "good/evil" terms in Greek in the Genealogy of Morality, and he definitely makes the πόνος/πονηρός connection in I.10. (He accepts a theory quite similar to your first option.) He's an excellent (albeit dated) classicist, though his overall philosophical point is (imo) more problematic.
    – brianpck
    Mar 23, 2021 at 16:22
  • Indeed, Beekes appears to concur with your (1): toilsome, useless, bad, evil. A bridge word is δουλοπόνηρος = bad like a slave. Has undertones of "villain".
    – Cosmas Zachos
    Apr 26, 2021 at 15:37

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The link is not directly between suffering and evil but rather through a shared common root - "twisted" and both suffering and evil.

According to Beekes, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)penh₁- (“to weave, to twist”). From your link

And so the deviation from the righteous is bad, evil and bending under the (too heavy) load is suffering.

Parallel compare English wicked/witch and German wickeln (twist, bend)

It seems that from the same root (through Latin) comes current Spanish pendejo weak, evil, stupid - twisted and thin like a pubic hair. The linked article (in Spanish) describes the logic behind this.

In Slavic languages there exists a root nur "bend" as when preparing to dive and the word понурый ponury "bent down" as if exhausted.

Also compare the root στενός having two meanings:straits/narrow and to groan στόνος and also in parallel cтена - wall and cтон - a groan in Russian.

As antonym to to be contained between walls is the Greek word free ἐλεύθερος derived from to be able to go wherever one wants - ἐλεύσομαι.

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    This seems unlikely to me because (even assuming the *(s)penh₁- etymology, which the dictionaries are doubtful about) none of the Greek words from this root has anything to do with weaving or twisting, and πονηρός is clearly a Greek-internal derivative from πόνος. The earliest sense seems to be "oppressed by toils", from which it's pretty easy to get to "base, knavish" given Greek social ideology.
    – TKR
    May 16 at 2:50
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    στενός 'narrow' and στένω 'to groan' are almost certainly unrelated to each other, and Russian стена and стон definitely are; the latter is cognate to Greek στένω, but the former is a different root altogether, related to στία 'pebble'. ἐλεύθερος isn't from ἐλεύσομαι either, though they did come from the same PIE root meaning 'to come out' (with a complicated semantic history).
    – Cairnarvon
    May 19 at 13:49
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    Pendejo also is not from *(s)penh₁- but from Lat. pecten (at least thus Wiktionary).
    – TKR
    May 19 at 16:12
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    The LSJ is from 1843 and the Bailly from 1895, and neither is more than incidentally concerned with etymology. For modern and rigorous work, the first port of call is Beekes.
    – Cairnarvon
    May 19 at 17:46
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    The linked article also says that pendejo is from pecten "comb", which comes from the same PIE root *peḱ- as Greek πέκω and various other words; it's not related to πόνος.
    – TKR
    May 19 at 18:36

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