Jongman on Atkins and Osborne, eds., _Poverty in the Roman World_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (July 2008)

Margaret Atkins and Robin Osborne, editors, _Poverty in the Roman 
World_. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiii + 226 pp. 
$99 (hardcover), ISBN: 0-521-86211-6.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Willem M. Jongman, Department of History, 
University of Groningen.


How successful was the Roman economy? For the last few decades, and 
in the footsteps of the late Sir Moses Finley, the prevailing opinion 
has been pessimistic: ancient Rome was a world without economic 
growth, and with great social inequality. Thus, only a small elite 
escaped life near subsistence, and even they did not escape the 
horrors of a demographic regime of high mortality. Thus the Roman 
economy never changed much over time: it was just a grim longue durée 
of poverty and underdevelopment. The fall of the later Roman Empire 
thus also became the "transformation of the world of late antiquity," 
since there had been nothing much to decline from. In a sense, the 
medievalists had won the day: the Middle Ages had not been a Dark Age 
after the grandeur that had been Rome.

Perhaps surprisingly, this bleak view of Roman economic performance 
was barely ever validated empirically. Instead, research focused on 
possible explanations, such as elite economic mentality, 
technological stagnation or the scale and status of trade. Empirical 
research on the actual Roman standard of living was -- and is -- 
surprisingly rare. Perhaps this is because scholars thought it was 
self evident that all pre-industrial societies were desperately poor, 
and perhaps it was because the dominant tradition of writing history 
mainly from literary or at least written sources made them despair of 
the possibility of ever writing a real history of the Roman standard 
of living. Until recently the rare exception was the work of Peter 
Garnsey, the honorand of this volume. In two major books he argued 
that in antiquity the worst consequences of temporary food shortages 
were usually successfully avoided, but that poverty and malnutrition 
were endemic.

This is a Festschrift of the modern kind (i.e. an edited volume with 
a smallish number of substantial papers around a real theme, and with 
a real -- and excellent -- introduction) for Peter Garnsey, one of 
the world's leading historians of the economy and society of ancient 
Rome. In one way or another, the authors are all pupils of Garnsey 
and thus the volume is not only a tribute to Garnsey the scholar, but 
also to Garnsey as one of the most successful graduate teachers of 
Roman history.

Real tributes often are irreverent, and the best teachers encourage 
their pupils to go their own way. That is indeed precisely what 
happens in some of these papers, and it happens most prominently in 
Dominic Rathbone's excellent chapter on "Poverty and Population in 
Roman Egypt" (pp. 100-114). Rather than consider how it felt to be 
poor, or how poverty was perceived, he directly addresses the extent 
of poverty in Roman Egypt with a clear choice between three 
possibilities: first, there always was a lot of poverty, second, 
there was prosperity rather than widespread destitution in the early 
Empire, but quite a bit of poverty in the later (Christian) Empire, 
or, third, there never was much poverty, not even in late Antiquity, 
although the Christian church admittedly talked a lot about it. For 
the early Empire, Rathbone really does not see much empirical 
evidence for poverty in Egypt. Nor was there any general system of 
poor relief "because none was needed" (p. 109). Of course, there were 
years of bad harvests, but nothing chronic: "Roman Egypt had a 
prosperous economy, it was highly monetised and urbanised, there were 
numerous opportunities for earning cash in addition to the 
availability of land, and even the small man and woman enjoyed a 
reasonable level of state protection of their rights" (p. 113). The 
situation in late antiquity was probably worse, even if Christian 
writers exaggerated this. Population declined, and social relations 
became harsher.

Two other papers, Neville Morley's on "The Poor in the City of Rome," 
and in particular Walter Scheidel's on "Stratification, Deprivation 
and Quality of Life" elaborate on some of the consequences of this 
argument for social stratification. Morley (I think wrongly) attacks 
Purcell's insistence on the prominence of immigrants of slave 
extraction in the urban population of the city of Rome, and reminds 
us of the importance of the corn dole for free citizens in the 
city.[1] Scheidel argues that if there was indeed some prosperity and 
economic success, Roman society should show more than a mass of 
desperately poor people, overlorded by a small elite of legally 
defined orders of senators, _equites_ (knights) and _decuriones_ 
(town councilors). The legal rigidity of that ranking obscures a far 
more varied stratification with many people of middling prosperity. 
Finally, Anneliese Parkin extensively probes the lack of a pagan 
ideology of almsgiving.

This revisionism stems from a significant paradigm shift that is 
currently unfolding. The new _Cambridge Economic History of the 
Greco-Roman World_ is probably the best example of a new interest in 
economic growth in classical antiquity, and of the new awareness that 
especially Rome may have been rather successful for a pre-industrial 
economy. Part of that argument is, inevitably, that the standard of 
living was not always the same, but changed over time. Tentative 
reconstructions of Roman GDP such as we have are too tentative to 
reveal such change, but a host of direct archaeological indicators 
(shipwrecks, mining activity, building, meat consumption, stature, 
etc.) show quite dramatic growth from mostly the first century BC, 
until the late second century AD -- and dramatic decline 
thereafter.[2]

It is not surprising, therefore, that those papers in this volume 
that deal with poverty in the early Empire (first and second century 
AD) are mostly optimistic, whereas the bulk of the papers on later 
antiquity do indeed take widespread poverty for granted. As Peter 
Garnsey showed many years ago, social relations became increasingly 
grim from the second century AD, and the law turned oppressive.[3] 
Among free Roman citizens, a new distinction emerged, between the 
_honestiores_ -- the honorable (and certainly rich) people -- and the 
humbler people, whose status increasingly came to resemble that of 
slaves. From the early third century AD nearly all free inhabitants 
of the Empire had become citizens, but some now were more equal than 
others. Caroline Humfress shows that this is not refuted by the late 
antique legal discourse on the rights of the poor: these _pauperes_ 
were by no means the really destitute, but only the less well off. As 
such, I think it reflects the contraction of and increasing 
inequality within the upper strata of late Roman society.

The other papers on late antiquity are all concerned with Christian 
attitudes and behavior to the poor. As Greg Woolf observes, the 
prominence of the poor is indeed "due to their peculiar moral valency 
in Christian ... thought" (p. 84). Christianity's growth in, 
particularly, the third century was facilitated by its message of 
consolation to the poor, but from the age of Constantine it 
transformed into the new state religion. As Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, 
Richard Finn, Lucy Grig and Cam Grey all show, defending the morality 
of the poor in a world of great social inequality became a discourse 
full of compromises.

Attitudes to poverty and the poor clearly changed with time. At some 
point in time (and it remains hard to decide when exactly), the poor 
both became more visible, and were looked at more charitably. It also 
seems likely that poverty became both deeper and more widespread in 
later antiquity. What is not yet clear from these fascinating papers 
is the precise chronology and relation between such changes in 
poverty and compassion.

References:

1. N. Purcell, "The City of Rome and the Plebs Urbana in the Late 
Republic," in _The Cambridge Ancient History_ IX, 1994: 644-88; c.f. 
Willem M. Jongman, "Slavery and the Growth of Rome: The 
Transformation of Italy in the First and Second Century BCE," in 
Catharine Edwards and Greg Woolf, editors, _Rome the Cosmopolis_, 
Cambridge, 2003: 100-122; and recently Tracy L. Prowse, Henry R 
Schwarcz, Peter Garnsey, Martin Knyf, Roberto Macchiarelli and Luca 
Bondioli (2007), "Isotopic Evidence for Age-related Immigration to 
Imperial Rome," _American Journal of Physical Anthropology_ 132 (4): 
510-19 for stable isotope analysis of human bone material from Ostia, 
demonstrating that most had not drunk the local water in their youth, 
and thus were immigrants from identifiable areas.

2. Willem M. Jongman, "The Early Roman Empire: Consumption," in 
Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris and Richard P. Saller, editors, _The 
Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World_, Cambridge, 
2007: 592-618; and Willem M. Jongman, "Gibbon Was Right: The Decline 
and Fall of the Roman Economy," in Olivier Hekster, Gerda de Kleijn 
and Daniëlle Slootjes, editors, _Crises and the Roman Empire. 
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop of the International Network 
Impact of Empire (Nijmegen, June 20-24, 2006)_, Leiden, 2007: 183-199.

3. Peter D.A. Garnsey, _Social Status and Legal Privilege in the 
Roman Empire_, Oxford, 1970.


Willem Jongman is the author of "The Early Roman Empire: 
Consumption," in _The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman 
World_ (2007).

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