New volume published in the Penn Leiden Colloquium on Ancient Values (Brill): "Valuing Labour in Greco-Roman Antiquity", edited by Miko Flohr and Kim Bowes

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 Penn Leiden 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.