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wealth, Roman attitudes towards  

Gloria Vivenza and Neville Morley

Roman attitudes to wealth were complex and sometimes ambivalent. Wealth was an essential basis for political and social life, but also a topic of extensive debate, which focused on the proper uses of wealth and the proper ways of attaining it. These moral, philosophical, and literary debates had practical implications for how the Romans spent their wealth and how they acquired it.Wealth was a central theme in Roman politics and society. The citizen body was divided between different census classes on the basis of property holding, and access to political office and status depended on a formal assessment of personal wealth.1 Furthermore, winning election to office required considerable resources. Neither a long family tradition of public service nor individual political genius was enough, and Julius Caesar’s debt problems, partly due to his political campaigns, are well known. Conversely, a homo novus like Cicero, with no political tradition in his family, could engage in politics if he had .

Article

poverty  

Neville Morley

Discussions of poverty in past societies almost always begin with the question of definition, and the problem of cross-cultural comparison. By most modern standards—in terms of education or health, for example, or the level of infant mortality—everyone in antiquity was poor, even compared with the present-day populations of India or sub-Saharan Africa, let alone the modern West. This is inevitable, given the limitations of premodern technology and hence of agricultural productivity; even the most optimistic views of ancient economic development would not deny that most people must have lived close to subsistence level.1 Considered in absolute terms, “mass structural poverty” has characterised all premodern societies, but that tells us little about the specific nature of ancient social structure, or about the significance of poverty in classical antiquity.The focus of economic historians in recent decades has therefore been on “relative” poverty within the premodern era. One line of research considers the societal level, that is, the level of development of classical Mediterranean societies compared with others. Was it true, as the Spartan Demaratus claimed to the Persian king Xerxes (according to Herodotus 7.102.1), that poverty (penia) was always Greece’s foster sister, but kept at bay by virtue? A similar ideological claim, grounding political and moral superiority in a taken-for-granted condition of limited means, is offered by Thucydides (1.

Article

inequality  

John Weisweiler

The just distribution of social goods was fiercely debated in the ancient Mediterranean and the ideologies of egalitarianism and inegalitarianism developed in Rome and Athens shaped Euro-American political thought from the Enlightenment onward. By contrast, the study of actual income and wealth distributions in ancient societies is a more recent development. Only in the early 21st century have scholars begun to make systematic attempts to quantify levels of inequality in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Since we lack the documentary sources on which the study of inequality in contemporary economies is based, most of these reconstructions rely on a combination of modelling and the interpretation of isolated figures found in literary texts. This fragmentary evidence suggests that in the best-attested regions of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East inequality was considerable. In particular, the formation of large territorial states—most notably the empires of Babylon, Persia, and Rome—facilitated the concentration of wealth into fewer hands. But it is unclear whether inequality increased over time. At least, there is no unambiguous evidence that wealth and income were more unequally distributed in late antiquity than in earlier periods of Roman history.