I assume you mean 2000 years ago. No surprises here. Classical civilization was primarily an agricultural society, and slave labor was cheap and easy to acquire if you had the capital. Furthermore, even large-scale projects were designed by leaders to employ as many people as possible, so the demand for labor-saving industrial devices was pretty much non-existent.
Inventions, then, were designed to solve a particular problem that could not be solved by brute force alone, rather than as a means to reduce the overall effort. Windlass cranes used in building, say, a temple column were mandatory since you cannot physically get enough slaves around a marble disc to lift it more than a few feet off the ground. The Romans used water wheels mainly to pump water out of mines where it’s too cramped for a large labor force. These inventions were sometimes employed as labor-saving devices (e.g. water wheels for flour grinding), but not nearly as often as in, say, the Middle Ages, where labor was scarce.
I wish I had a cite for this, but I recall reading that Vespasian was offered a plan for the development of a super-sized crane which could reduce the time and effort needed to construct the Coliseum. He refused, stating it was the duty of the emperor to employ as many builders as possible.
Actually, they probably would have called it a σταδιον 