Book

Valuing Labour in Greco-Roman Antiquity

How did ancient Greeks and Romans regard work?

Author

Miko Flohr and Kim Bowes (eds.)

Date

09 April 2024

Links

Brill

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.

(Text from publisher's website)