Description: How did ancient Greeks and Romans regard work? It has long been assumed that elite thinkers disparaged physical work, and that working people rarely commented on their own labors. The papers in this volume challenge these notions by investigating philosophical, literary and working people's own ideas about what it meant to work. From Plato's terminology of labor to Roman prostitutes' self-proclaimed pride in their work, these chapters find ancient people assigning value to multiple different kinds of work, and many different concepts of labor.
Review Quotes: "Valuing Labour represents an important step in the reevaluation of ancient labor. It will be interesting to a variety of readers because of its temporal, geographic, and methodological extent, and presents some novel interpretations of both familiar and more unusual sources."
Jane Sancinito in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2024.12.12