In the summer of 2020, amid COVID 19 lockdowns, the eleventh Penn-Leiden Colloquium took up the challenging theme of labor. As the editors of this resulting volume state in their introduction, “essential labor” was a timely issue, and the papers offered reflect how scholars were reacting to their own work in that moment.[1] The sixteen body chapters of Valuing Labour in Greco-Roman Antiquity approach the idea of work from a range of disciplinary and methodological angles and consider what kinds of labor have value and under what circumstances. The result is an intensely thought-provoking collection, though there is occasionally more value to be had in reading across, rather than within, the book’s divisions.
To their credit, Kim Bowes and Miko Flohr seem to have been thoroughly aware of this. Following sections on definitions (what is labor and how is it distinct from, or coterminous with, work?) and historiography, their introduction highlights key themes that appear throughout the chapters. These are interesting, raising issues of positionality, gender, and bias, but do not, in themselves, suggest an organizational principle. Instead, the volume is structured into four, four-chapter sections, grouped around shared methodologies or types of labor. This approach is mostly successful, though some papers fit their categorization more naturally than others. In what follows, I will provide summaries of these sections, noting some interesting chapters from each, and I will conclude by addressing some unexpected themes that appear when reading the chapters in different groupings.
The first section, “Revisiting the Canon,” analyzes the attitudes of philosophers (Ineke Sluiter and J.J. Mulhern) and technical writers (Ralph Rosen) toward labor in antiquity and looks at ancient and modern attitudes toward artistic labor (Lauren Hackworth Petersen). The marriage of these chapters highlights a simultaneous strength and challenge of the volume: its complete rejection of traditional disciplinary boundaries. Hackworth Petersen’s chapter, a highlight that would be useful for teaching as well as for scholarly consideration of the field’s direction, is rightly recognized as a consideration of canon and placed with its counterparts, but it is consequently cut off from Natacha Massar’s chapter on signatures and Antiopi Argyriou-Casmeridis’ work on honorifics, which touch on worker identity in different ways. In its current placement, the reader encounters the chapter immediately following Rosen’s work on Galen, which emphasizes the physicality of both the human body and the creation of art.
The next section, “Pushing the Boundaries of Labour,” presents new theoretical and methodological approaches and utilizes an impressive array of evidence. Each chapter here advances debates in their respective fields, and do, indeed, “push” at preexisting boundaries, partly through their juxtaposition. Thus, Reitz-Joosse’s concept of “madeness” as a valuable feature of an object, for example, is enhanced and made more thought-provoking by the contrast to the pragmatic attitude toward labor that Christel Freu identifies in Dio and the authors of the Second Sophistic. The graffiti of sex workers discussed in Sarah Levin-Richardson is all the more obviously outward-facing when considered alongside the dialogue within the columbaria analyzed by Miriam Groen-Vallinga.
“Labour and the Countryside,” section three, presents chapters with a common subject, but differing approaches. Literary, artistic, and archaeological analyses are variously applied to scrutinize rural labor in fiction and reality. Both Amelia Bensch-Schaus and Riemer Faber complicate the construction of leisurely country life, arguing, in different ways, that poets could not present their bucolic worlds without seriously engaging with the strenuous realities of rural labor. Readers will be grateful for the high-quality, color images throughout the volume when engaging with Nicole Brown’s mosaics and Liana Brent and Tracy Prowse’s finds from Vagnari, as they present fascinating interpretations of their respective materials.
The final section, “Labour and Civic Values,” covers a broad span of time and considers labor primarily as it appeared in public life. Helle Hochscheid’s argument for the long residency of, and the growth of official standing for, metics in Athens is particularly interesting here. It not only presents its own material convincingly, but it also touches on the issues of identity and honor that appear in the section’s other chapters.
The order of the volume represents a thorough shuffling of the original colloquium presentations and reveals several commendable goals: breaking down the urban-rural divide, avoiding the segregation of material culture, and mingling theoretical chapters with case studies. The current configuration is sensible, but a variety of important and unexpected themes emerge when it is abandoned. One leitmotif is that labor in antiquity was treated, in a variety of contexts and often by the workers themselves, as secondary to their social and familial ties. Groen-Vallinga, Massar, and Brent and Prowse all touch on this by noting the prominence of family and master-apprentice connections in signatures and funerary contexts. That there is such strong evidence for “life” winning out in the tension of “work-life balance” is interesting and emphasizes the complicated and multifaceted identities of workers. It also supports the social “embeddedness” (p. 11) of labor that Bowes and Flohr discuss in their introduction.
Another important point that emerges is that some knowledge of and about technical work was evidently part of the wider consciousness. Sluiter’s reading of teknê as “proto-typical knowledge,” Bettina Reitz-Joosse’s “madeness,” the audiences of Brown’s mosaics, and Argyriou-Casmeridis’ honorific decrees, among others, all share the idea that non-workers were expected to recognize, appreciate, and even understand some of the complexities of skilled labor. That labor was not only a kind of “common knowledge,” but also, under the right circumstances, beautiful and honorable means that we must put elite distaste for banausic and commercial labor into context, with the understanding that that context can change over time (as in Freu’s chapter on wage labor).
Finally, it is clear that many of these authors felt it was time to push back against the traditional, negative valuation of labor attributed to ancient thinkers. Multiple chapters work to shift scholarly attention away from famous critiques of labor toward a more balanced, and even positive, point of view. Their efforts and achievements are commendable, but it is worth noting that the intentional, capacious conception of labor does occasionally obscure ancient distinctions. Thus, while the labor of thinking or striving for justice (as in Mulhern’s πόνος) is certainly labor, it would be oversimplifying to assume that the respect present in those discussions would have been extended to Levin-Richardson’s sex-workers. Argyriou-Casmeridis’ chapter is interesting on this front, as her collection of honorary inscriptions includes performers and sculptors among other, more “learned” professions. She adopts a generous interpretation of the decrees and provides strong evidence that communities recognized, at a minimum, that labor (usually) was not free.
While the collection cannot be called the final word on this topic, 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. It is to be hoped that its reconsiderations of labor’s social and cultural value will continue to inform both social and economic studies of the ancient world, as it is clear that attitudes were more nuanced than has long been understood.
Authors and Titles
- Introduction: Value at Work, Miko Flohr and Kim Bowes
Section 1 Revisiting the Canon
- 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
Section 2 Pushing the Boundaries of Labour
- 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
Section 3 Labour and the Countryside
- 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
Section 4 Labour and Civic Values
- 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
Notes
[1] By way of disclaimer, I audited a class with Kim Bowes at the University of Pennsylvania. I am also acquainted with contributors Ralph Rosen, Bettina Reitz-Joosse and Amelia Bensch-Schauss, though I never studied with them.