How and how far were the arts valued in the ancient world? The question is considered with special reference to literature and on a comparative basis: how were literature and the other arts valued then, in comparison with other periods of Western civilization? Among the topics discussed are: value implied by institutional status; the status of “literature” and “art” as permanent categories; assessments of epochs of art; and the complex relation between estimations of literature and critical evaluation of particular works. Overall, clear contrasts are shown to exist between the estimations of literature in early Greece (in institutional terms, uniquely high; in explicit theoretical terms, elusive), in the Greco-Roman age and the centuries following, from Aristotle to Samuel Johnson (modest), and in the modern period (from the later eighteenth century to the present day: pragmatically, the highest).