This talk, drawn from Usher's new book Following Nature's Lead: Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World (Princeton University Press, 2025), highlights how Ruskin’s “upcycling” of the classical past informs his views on political economy in Unto This Last. His admiration for Xenophon’s Oeconomicus is well known. Here I elucidate several other connections that have gone largely unobserved: Ruskin’s debt to Aristotle’s critique of money in the Politics, Plato’s arguments about just distribution in the Republic, and Hesiod’s notion of productive limits to wealth in the Works and Days. I also unpack Ruskin’s allusion to a story about the Gracchi, champions of artisans and agriculturalists in Republican Rome, and his approval of Horace’s castigation of the pursuit of private luxury at the expense of the public good.
M. D. Usher is the Lyman-Roberts Professor of Classical Languages and Literature and a member of the Department of Geography and Geosciences, the Environmental Program, and the Food Systems Graduate Program at the University of Vermont and a Companion in the Guild of St. George. His latest book, Following Nature's Lead: Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World, has just been published by Princeton University Press. His previous books include Plato’s Pigs & Other Ruminations: Ancient Guides to Living with Nature (Cambridge, 2020) and three books in Princeton’s Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, including How to Care about Animals, How to Say No, and How to Be a Farmer. Usher and his wife own and operate a farm in Shoreham, Vermont.