I would, once again, emphasize that my reading of Marx and that of most of the Marxist folks I've read, has it that Value, in its abstract form, does not exist until the advent of capitalism... where capitalism is defined in terms of wage labor serving as the foundation of ever more interdependent, diversified and widespread forms of commodity production and, therefore social reproduction, since wage labor is estranged/alienated/separated from
1. nature, as land and other means of production;
2. the products of (their) labor and their disposition;
3. the locale, pace and relations of production;
4. their own individual/universal species-being;
5. other people – at work and in public; and
6. their home/community/culture
such that the fetishized exchange of use values veils - in ways never before so opaque - class and power relations.
Any sense of the transhistorical nature of exploitation, then, has to deal with the qualitative difference associated with the hegemony of social labor - the technical term that summarizes the material above - and abstract Value - delinked from the kind of immediate (or money-mediated) exchange of equivalent use values and that of all prior modes of production, kinds of exchange/markets, etc.
It was not the absence of any concept of value that hindered Aristotle, it was the absence of the real power of abstract value... Marx's materialist conception of history argues that the abstraction "Value" did and could not have preceded its being made real in practice... under capitalism. The time of Aristotle had markets but none of those markets were capitalist because the social formation, capitalism, did not exist (even if there were isolated locales where labor was waged.)
Along these lines, manorial lords, mercantilists and guilds pragmatically pursued their interests but the best they could do in terms of understanding the dynamics of the relations they were producing was Smith, Ricardo et al... philosophers of markets but not theorists of capitalist economics. (Though I'm more than willing to say that last bit softly as it may be in serious need of correction... there are clearly folks here who know a great deal more than I do about the history of the field of economics.)