Potters turn the wheel which moves neither backward nor forward and at the same time imitates the rotation of the universe, and on this same wheel as it whirls they make things of all kinds, no one of them like another, from the same materials with the same tools.
Κεραμέες τροχὸν δινέουσι, καὶ οὔτε ὀπίσω οὔτε πρώσω προχωρέει καὶ ἀμφοτέρωσε ἅμα τοῦ ὅλου μιμητὴς τῆς περιφορῆς· ἐν δὲ τῷ αὐτῷ ἐργάζονται περιφερομένῳ παντοδαπά, οὐδὲν ὅμοιον τὸ ἕτερον τῷ ἑτέρῳ ἐκ τῶν αὐτῶν τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ὀργάνουσιν.
The fascination of a pot shaped on a rapidly turning wheel appealed to the ancients as it does to us; and the parallelism between a pot in the making and man shaped by life is too obvious to have escaped them. Hippokrates’ remark that of the vases produced on the wheel no two are alike is characteristic of the Greek love of variety.
Ecclesiasticus, 38, 32.
So does the potter sitting at his work and turning his wheel round with his feet, who is always painstaking with his task; and all his work is done by number. He moulds the clay with his arm, and his feet. [Literal translation of the Greek text written by a Hebrew and evidently colored by his own idiom.]
Οὕτω κεραμεὺς καθήμενος ἐν ἔργῳ αὐτοῦ, καὶ συστρέφων ἐν ποσὶν αὐτοῦ τροχόν, ὃς ἐν μερίμνῃ κεῖται διὰ παντὸς ἐπὶ τὸ ἔργον αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἐναρίθμιος πᾶσα ἡ ἐργασία αὐτοῦ.
Ἐν βραχίονι αὐτοῦ τυπώσει πηλόν, καὶ πρὸ ποδῶν κάμψει ἰσχὺν αὐτοῦ.
This is the only place in ancient literature in which the action of the foot in wheelwork is referred to. In the second century B.C., therefore, we might assume the knowledge of the kick-wheel, though it may well have been in use long before then, since it is a simple and obvious device. Where labor, however, was cheap and plentiful, as in fifth-century Athens, a slave boy turning the wheel for the potter, whose whole strength and attention could then be expended on his work, would be preferable; and this is the manner in which wheelwork is depicted in Athenian vase paintings (cf. [pp. 64 ff]).
Athenaeus, XI, p. 480 c.