This article is the first one of a series of documents that attempt to identify the anthropologic paradigm on which the management thought has been constructed, and its impact in the management contemporary practices. To do that, it adopts an historical perspective, examining the different conceptions that have been formulated about human being and work, and how they have influenced the speech and the practice of management. The research tries to verify if it is true the hypothesis according to which during the last centuries would have taken place a process of instrumentation of the reason that has conceived the human being as a mean for the fulfillment of purposes, principally economic, and the emergence of management would be a manifestation of this process. This first article centers in the study of the Greek conceptions about human being.