Valuing Labour in Greco Roman Antiquity: 481

A reevaluation of ancient people's attitudes to labor. From Plato's ideas about the meaning of work to Roman scupltors' commemoration of their labors, this volume addresses both philosophical and working people's own understanding of what it meant to work in the ancient world. 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.