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.
Table of contents
- Introduction: Value at Work (Miko Flohr and Kim Bowes)
- Plato’s Exemplary Craftsman (Ineke Sluiter)
- Πόνος and πονέω in Aristotle (J.J. Mulhern)
- Galen on Hands and the Teleology of Work (Ralph M. Rosen)
- On Valuing Roman Art and the Labour of Art Making (Lauren Hackworth Petersen)
- Emotional Labour in Antiquity: The Case of Roman Prostitution (Sarah Levin-Richardson)
- Meaning in the Making: Representing Glass Production in Imperial Rome (Bettina Reitz-Joosse)
- Who’s Afraid of Wage Labour? Analysing Some Texts of the Second Sophistic (Christel Freu)
- The Value of Work: Work and Labour within the Roman Upper-class Household (Miriam J. Groen-Vallinga)
- The Labour of Listening: Internal Audiences in Theocritus (Amelia Bensch-Schaus)
- Labor in the locus amoenus: Agricultural Industry as Premise of Pastoral Leisure (Riemer A. Faber)
- Work Underfoot: The Rustic ‘Calendar’ Mosaic of Saint-Romain-en-Gal (Nicole G. Brown)
- Rural Labour and Identity at Vagnari in Southern Italy (Liana Brent and Tracy Prowse)
- Foreign Labour, Common Ground: The Value of Craftspeople in Early Democratic Athens (Helle Hochscheid)
- The Craftsman’s View: Labour and (Self-)Appreciation as Reflected in Signatures (Natacha Massar)
- Professionals as paradeigmata of aretê in Hellenistic Honorific Decrees (Antiopi Argyriou-Casmeridis)
- Images of Craft: Activity and Presentation of Work on Gallo-Roman Tombstones (Fanny Opdenhoff)
Bibliographical details
Type
Edited volume resulting from the June 2021 Penn-Leiden colloquium on ancient values, co-organized by Kim Bowes and myself, which focused on Valuing Labour.
Reference
Flohr, M. and K. Bowes (2024). Valuing Labour in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Mnemosyne Supplements 481. Leiden: Brill.
Open Access
This volume is not available in open access, but it is available digitally through the website of Brill.
Miko Flohr, 09/03/2024