Apollo, speaking in Eumenides, the last part of Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia:

The woman you call the mother of the child is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed, the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her. The man is the source of life—the one who mounts. She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps the shoot alive unless the god hurts the roots.

Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism:

That labour constitutes a cost in a unique sense was, of course, an assumption [of the labor theory of value]. But it was an assumption born of a particular view of what was the essence of the economic problem….The crux of the economic problem, as this theory represented it, and as it had been traditionally viewed, lay in the struggle of man with nature to wrest a livelihood for himself under various forms of production at various stages of history. As Petty had said, labour is the father, nature the mother of wealth. To this relationship the contrast between human activity and the processes of nature was fundamental; human activity being endowed with primary significance as the initiator and begetter of change and increase.