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Poverty in ancient Rome

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Poverty in ancient Rome (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

As of 6 August 2024, 04:12 (UTC), this page is active and open for discussion. An FAC coordinator will be responsible for closing the nomination.
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Nominator(s): Graearms (talk) 20:09, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about Poverty in ancient Rome. It mostly focuses on defining Roman poverty, philanthropic efforts to help the poor, the social stigma regarding poverty, and Christian perspectives on the Roman poor. Although, there is still information on the lives and material conditions of poor people in ancient Rome. I recently had the article reviewed for GA and the reviewer said they hoped to see the article at FA. Perhaps I am overconfident regarding the quality of this article, but I figured I might as well nominate it. Graearms (talk) 20:09, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

  • Don't use fixed px size
  • Suggest adding alt text

UC

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It's good to see this one here. I should say at the outset that many editors, myself included, consider large-scale survey articles like this to be the hardest to bring through FAC, so my admiration for doing so.

Iazyges rightly focused tightly on the GA criteria at GAN, which largely concern sourcing and ensuring that the article jumps through the basic formatting and structural hoops. For FAC, there is a much greater focus on the article's content -- on my read so far, I think it would benefit from some more attention, perhaps at Peer Review, before it is passed as an FA.

I will try to keep these points general, rather than getting bogged down in minutiae, so please understand the examples as representative rather than as a checklist:

  • Probably my biggest concern at the moment is the level of chronological "flattening" -- we present events, categories and people from very different periods as if they are all fundamentally part of the same picture, creating a composite picture of an ancient Rome that never existed. A few examples:
    • the patricians held greater political influence due to their claimed descent from the first 100 senators of ancient Rome while the plebeians were the common citizens with less political significance: this may have been true in the very early Republic, but the distinction was pretty meaningless by the first century BCE, if not earlier: Marius, Cicero and Pompey were all plebeians, for example. It's a fair point that wealthy citizens had more political influence, but whether someone was patrician or plebeian quickly ceased to be a good way of knowing how wealthy they were.
    • The distinction between honestiores and humiliores, on the other hand, is quintessentially late antique: we first see the term used in law in the 2nd century. However, it doesn't quite mean what we say it does, at least in practice for most of the period -- humiliores are simply the poor (which, by the fifth century, can include slaves, waged workers and free peasants), with nothing to do with whether they have held high office. I'd also note that our definition given here isn't quite what the source we've cited says.
    • Sallust, a 1st-century BCE Roman politician and historian ... Tacitus, another 1st-century Roman writer: Tacitus was 1st century CE, not BCE.
    • The "legal status" section is almost entirely late antique, while the "social status" discussion caps out at the end of the 1st century. This might be a reflection of the sources (though I'm not sure it's entirely so), but we need to be much clearer about that situation if it is. The Rome in which Sallust lived and the "Rome" of Constantine and Marcian were very different places.
  • We spend a lot of time in the weeds of exactly how many people were in which social class, or exactly what the Gini coefficient of Roman Egypt was, but I don't think either discussion is really effective without greater contextualisation -- we don't really give any sense, for example, of what it would mean to have a Gini coefficient of 0.42. In a bird's-eye survey article, I'm not sure the weight given to these quite intricate discussions (Bagnall's paper on Egypt gets most of a large paragraph) really fits their importance at the level the article should be pitched.
  • The framing on patronage and euergetism doesn't really chime with current work on the topic, where what we call "philanthropy" is seen much more through a political lens -- one thing that really needs to be emphasised is how almost all of these programmes, particularly the grain dole, are targeted at citizens only, and therefore serve more as badges of honour and community than as handouts for the destitute.
  • There are a few points where a good copyedit and close read would be beneficial: for example:
    • a poor man who is forced to relinquish his ancestral tombs and household gods, indicating that this individual had sufficient wealth to afford such luxuries: our phrasing here has missed the point -- he has inherited these things, and wouldn't have bought them -- he's giving up what was passed down to him for safekeeping.
    • We are inconsistent on the capitalisation of Latin: in general, Latin words are not capitalised, apart from proper nouns (so it's the cura Annoniae).
    • There are minor mistakes of spelling, punctuation, or MoS throughout the article. By themselves, these are easily enough fixed, but I include them here as an illustration that further close attention would be beneficial.
    • Sourcing: the formatting of references is inconsistent -- some have full bibliographic detail, others don't.
      • In the Osborne and Atkins edited volume, we should cite individual contributors directly, rather than lumping them all under the editors' names.
      • However, there is little archaeological evidence that can pinpoint who belonged to these classes: this isn't what Scheidel is saying (in fact, it's almost the direct opposite) -- he writes the apparent lack of non-economic indicators of membership in this 'middle class' tends to obscure its size and significance. His point is that we do have the tools to see a Roman "middle class", but we need to focus on the strictly material (like, as he goes on to say, the demand for luxury goods and specialist crafts in provincial areas, or the wealth profiles of houses), rather than inscriptions and other documents which promote an artificial two-class binary. I haven't spot-checked other sources, but this might be a wider concern.
      • For a huge scholarly field, the bibliography is quite small, and we make heavy use of only a few sources:
        • The prominence of Osborne and Atkins chapters I can understand, though I'm not sure we can really surrender editorial control of so much of the article to only two people.
        • We have a lot of weight on Hands and Duncan-Jones, both from the 1960s.
        • I think you may have used the Oxford bibliography on Roman poverty already, but I see little of the work there looking at poverty through bioarchaeology (particularly diseases of deprivation) -- see Garnsey x2 and Graham listed there, and, for a more positive view, Jongman and Kron. There's a lot of other good material on that list: I'd include Storey 2013 here.
        • Other notable omissions would seem to be The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, De Ste Croix's Class Struggle (despite the name, not just about Greece) and its successors, and the extensive bibliography on the impoverishment (or not) of the Italian countryside. Here the debate starts with Hopkins's Conquerors and Slaves, but again the Oxford biblio is very useful here.

I know there's a lot of different areas in these comments, but I hope I have managed to make them thorough and actionable without making them disheartening. FAC may not be the best place to work on them, but I'm very happy to help here or elsewhere if you do want to discuss any of these areas. Again, thank you for bringing the article and for your good work on it thus far. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:49, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Choliamb

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In addition to the chronological "flattening" pointed out by User:UndercoverClassicist above, which I agree is a problem, I also see here an analogous geographical flattening. Many of the sources cited in the article refer to the Greek cities of the eastern Roman empire, where social and economic conditions differed markedly from those in Italy. The cultural traditions and civic institutions of these cities remained strongly Greek even after they fell under Roman political control, and it is dangerous to characterize them as "Roman" without much more careful contextualization than is offered here.

UndercoverClassicist also mentions that the number of works cited is quite small considering the size of the topic, and this seems to me to be one of biggest weaknesses of the article. The general bibliography on Roman social and economic history is enormous, and in the past half century or so there has been a growing interest in the lower strata of Roman society in particular. Relatively little of this work is mentioned in the article, which gives disproportionate weight to the essays collected in Osborne and Atkins 2006. Most of those are good, useful essays, but they are the very small tip of a very large iceberg. In this respect the article is undermined by its own ambition: an article that cast its net more narrowly and focused specifically on, say, tenant farmers in late Republican Rome, or the urban poor of the city of Rome at the height of the Empire, would have been more manageable in terms of bibliography, and might also have avoided some of the problems of chronological and geographical compression mentioned above.

The rest of my comments focus on problems with the presentation, translation, and general appropriateness of the ancient literary and epigraphical sources cited in the article. It is a credit to the editors that they usually provide references and links to the specific passages of the ancient authors cited, side by side with the references to the modern secondary sources where they found the quotations. This is an excellent practice and one that should be encouraged, even if some of the citations given here are incorrect. It is pretty clear, however, that most of the contributors to the article are not very familiar with the ancient authors and works that they cite, and this has led to confusion and misrepresentation in a number of instances. Here are a couple of examples:

Example 1: The first paragraph of the section entitled "Social status and stigma" refers to the author Seneca, without any recognition that there are two different Roman authors by that name. The wikilink in the first sentence of the paragraph links to the article about Seneca the younger, but the quotations in the following three sentences come from the Controversiae, which were written by his father, Seneca the elder. The sentence after that contains a quotation from a different work, the essay De vita beata, which was written by Seneca the younger. The structure of the paragraph is set up to suggest that there is a contrast or conflict between the views expressed by Seneca in different works ("Seneca argued X ... However, Seneca also believed Y"), but in fact there is no such contrast, because the quotations are drawn from the works of two different people, not one.
This paragraph also reveals a serious misunderstanding about the kind of work the elder Seneca was writing when he composed the Controversiae. In his Controversiae, Seneca asks "What is there that riches have not corrupted?" Seneca argued that unmitigated greed caused damage to the world, writing that "to meet the whims of crazy luxury every stone is quarried, forests are felled throughout the world." He continues, exclaiming "Poverty, how little known a good are you!" These sentences imply that the views expressed here are Seneca's own views, but that is not the case. The ten books of Controversiae are school books; they consist of a series of debate topics designed to teach students the rhetorical and declamatory skills necessary for a Roman legal and political career. Each chapter states a proposition based on some aspect of Roman law, and is followed by examples of arguments both pro and con, the purpose of which is to show students how to be effective advocates for their clients. Many of the propositions are rather silly ("A woman is tortured by a tyrant who thinks that her husband is plotting to assassinate him. Later the husband divorces the women. Can she sue him for ingratitude?" or "A Vestal Virgin writes a poem in praise of marriage. Should she be prosecuted for breaking her vow of chastity?"), and quite a few involve pirates and kidnappings, the better to engage the interests of Roman teenagers. But the main point here is that these propositions, and the arguments advanced both for and against them, are rhetorical exercises for students; they do not necessarily represent the views of the elder Seneca on any of the underlying legal issues. To say that "Seneca argued that unmitigated greed caused damage to the world" is therefore seriously misleading.
Example 2: The final paragraph in the section entitled "Private philanthropy" contains this sentence: Plutarch believed that charity could prolong the suffering of the poor by encouraging laziness, describing a Spartan telling a beggar "But if I gave to you, you would proceed to beg all the more; it was the man who gave to you in the first place who made you idle and so is responsible for your disgraceful state." The problem here is similar. In fact, we have no idea whether Plutarch himself believed that charity prolonged the suffering of the poor. The original source of this quotation is not cited in the article, but if you turn to the secondary source (Hands 1968, p. 65), it will lead you to p. 159, note 67, where you will find a reference to Plutarch's Moralia 235A. That citation is incorrect (it should be 235E), but persevering readers who turn to section 235A and keep going will eventually discover the correct passage. It comes from a work entitled Ἀποφθέγματα Λακωνικά (Sayings of the Spartans), a collection of quotations attributed to various ancient Spartans, from the legendary kings of the 8th and 7th centuries to genuine historical figures of the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Most of the quotations exemplify the famous Spartan qualities of severity and austerity, and this one is no exception. Plutarch's interest in collecting them was to illustrate the character of the Spartans, not to express his own views on beggars and charity, and to say that he himself believed that "charity could prolong the suffering of the poor" is to serious misrepresent the nature of the work. Imagine if this same collection of Spartan quotations had been compiled by St. Augustine, or by Winston Churchill. Would we then claim, in wikivoice, that Augustine or Churchill believed that by helping beggars you only make them lazy? And leaving Plutarch aside, what do the words of an anonymous Spartan who was already ancient in Plutarch's time have to do with the subject of poverty in ancient Rome?

These are just two examples, but there are many other passages in the article that reveal a similar lack of familiarity with the ancient sources. To be fair, most Wikipedia articles on Greek and Roman topics suffer from similar problems, to a greater or lesser extent; this one is no worse than most, and better than many. To avoid them, such articles really need the participation of editors who can read Latin and Greek, are broadly familiar with ancient Greek and Roman authors and their works, and have at least a little academic training in ancient history. There aren't a whole lot of people like that who are active on Wikipedia, but there are some. It is probably inadvisable to nominate an article on classical topic for FA without the active participation of at least one such editor, since problems that are obvious to people with experience in the field are liable to pass unrecognized by those whose interest is more casual.

Here are a few more passages in which the treatment of the ancient sources seems problematic to me, in one way or another. They are grouped by the sections in which they appear:

Private philanthropy

  • First paragraph. The 1st-century BCE Greek geographer Strabo described supplies to the poor in Rhodes being funded by wealthy philanthropists. Rhodes =/= Rome. Although the island was firmly within the Roman orbit in Strabo's time, under Roman rule the cities of the Greek east were generally allowed to govern their internal affairs as they saw fit, and it is difficult to extrapolate from Greek cultural institutions to Roman ones. (See the remarks about geographical flattening above.)
  • Same paragraph. An ancient inscription from Acmonia recounts a legislative proposal by an individual named Titus Flavius Praxias to, in 85 CE, to allocate the funds earned from select pieces of property for an annual banquet. This is true, but it is not a very convincing example of "private philanthropy", at least if that phrase is understood to mean assistance for the poor. Hands 1968 is cited here, but he is principally interested in the inscription for the light it casts on the legal mechanisms by which private wealth could be transferred to the state, and he does not imply that it describes any kind of charity in the modern sense of the word. From the inscription it is clear that the funds were to be used for a banquet celebrating Praxias's memory and a ceremony (an imitation of the Roman rosalia) in which roses were purchased to decorate his tomb, as well as for the ongoing protection of his tomb against vandalism and other damage. Praxias, although a Greek living in Asia Minor, had become a Roman citizen, and Simon Price (Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor, p. 89) sees his bequest as an example of the imitation of Roman practices by upper-class Greeks in order to enhance their standing among the local elites. Aristocratic jockeying for status doesn't rule out the possibility of also helping the poor, of course, but there is nothing in the text to suggest that helping the poor was any part of Praxias's purpose. The SEG reference given for this inscription in the footnote (Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 15, 330) is incorrect; the correct reference is IGRR (= Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas pertinentes) IV 661 (with corrections in SEG 13, 542). The Greek text is here; an English translation can be found in Barbara Levick, The High Tide of Empire: Emperors and Empire AD 14–117 pp. 83-84, no. 161.
  • Same paragraph. The same reference to SEG 15, 330 is also given for the inscription from Ephesos concerning the bequest of C. Vibius Salutaris, mentioned a few sentences later. It is incorrect there too. This long text (actually several related documents) is inscribed on the wall of the theater at Ephesos; it has generated a much discussion and a large bibliography, none of which is mentioned here. It was published as no. 27 in Die Inschriften von Ephesos, but the Greek text and an English translation can be more conveniently consulted in J. H. Oliver, The Sacred Gerusia (Hesperia suppl. 6, 1961), pp. 55-85 (JSTOR 1353868).

Legal status

  • Tryphoninus, a jurist recorded in the Digests, recounts the story of a supposedly poor man who authored his will without the knowledge of the mass of wealth through his slaves. The odd phrase "mass of wealth through his slaves" presumably means "wealth [amassed] through [the work of] his slaves". But Tryphoninus doesn't actually recount the story of anyone in this passage. The "supposedly poor man" is not a real person but an imaginary, hypothetical example invoked to illustrate a legal point about the laws governing Roman inheritance. Look again at Humfress's more careful wording ("envisions a situation" =/= "recounts the story of") in the essay cited in the next sentence. The name Tryphoninus should not be italicized (but good for you for not following Humfress into error and misspelling it Tryphonius, as she does).

Living conditions

  • First paragraph. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman historian, the Roman poor lived in tabernae, or the awnings of theaters. The phrase sub velabris umbraculorum theatralium is here translated as "awnings of theaters", following Rolfe's translation in the Loeb edition, which is what the link in the footnote points to. But if you look again at Osborne's essay in Osborne and Atkins, p. 9, which is the other source cited in this sentence of the article, you will see that Osborne favors a different interpretation: he quotes Nicholas Purcell, who understands the words as a reference to the vaulted stone substructures that supported the seating of theaters and amphitheaters and formed the conspicuous rows of arched openings still visible today on buildings like the Colosseum and the Theater of Marcellus. These dark archways were notorious in antiquity as the haunts of thieves, prostitutes, and other persons of dubious character. There's no certainty here, but I would encourage you to follow Purcell and Osborne rather than Rolfe.
  • Second paragraph. Galen claimed the rural impoverished townsfolk consumed flat-cakes as part of their diets. The phrase "rural impoverished townsfolk" is an oxymoron: rural people do not live in town, and townsfolk are not rural. Galen's text actually mentions two different groups here: οἵ τε κατ' ἀγρὸν ἄνθρωποι καὶ τῶν κατὰ πόλιν οἱ πενέστατοι (literally "the people in the country and the poorest of those in the city"). The links to both Galen citations in the footnotes are broken, but it looks as if they were intended to point to Powell's translation, published by Cambridge Univ Press (and behind the Cambridge paywall). Powell translates the phrase in question here as "country folk and very poor town-dwellers".
  • Fourth paragraph. Poor Romans were especially vulnerable during crises, being susceptible to food shortages or being the victims of crime. According to the 2nd-3rd century Roman historian Herodian, during a time of plague in the city of Rome in which many common people suffered greatly, the Emperor Commodus (r. 177–192) left Rome for Laurentum. I don't understand the sequence of thought here. What does Herodian's comment about Commodus's decision to leave the city have to do with the susceptibility of poor Romans to health problems and crime? As an analogy, earlier this year the governor of Texas was traveling abroad and chose not to return home when the city of Houston was devasted by hurricane Beryl. This may tell us something about the governor of Texas, but it does nothing to help us understand why the people of Houston are especially vulnerable to hurricanes.

Christianity

  • First paragraph. The epistulae of Paulinus, a 4th-century Christian Bishop describes possibly fictitious Christians organizing mass events designed to provide alms and gifts for the poor. This is a puzzling statement. What is meant by "possibly fictitious Christians"? On its face the sentence seems to say that certain charitable activities were organized (where? when?) by people who claimed to be Christians but who in reality were not, but is that really what Paulinus wrote? I couldn't check because no citation (ancient or modern) is provided here.
  • I should have fixed this issue; Paulinus was describing a banquet for the poor and it was possibly fictious as it may have been exaggerated. Also, he wasn't present for the event he is describing. Graearms (talk) 16:51, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Second paragraph. Ambrosiaster, an unidentified author of a 4th-century commentary on St Jerome. The commentary attributed to the so-called Ambrosiaster deals with the epistles of Saint Paul, not with Jerome, most of whose works are later than the period when the Ambrosiaster is thought to have been writing. (Incidentally, it's a little surprising to see Jerome, who along with Augustine was the most formidable scholar and theologian of his age, and whose Latin translation of the bible remained the standard text for European Christians for over a thousand years, identified simply as "a 4th and 5th century priest".)

And few other miscellaneous quibbles:

  • the Cataline conspiracy: The name is Catiline (Catilina in Latin), not Cataline. The event is referred to as the "Catilinarian conspiracy" in most English-language sources, and that is the name of the WP article. Why anyone would take a perfectly good wikilink to Catilinarian conspiracy and pipe it so that it reads "Cataline conspiracy" instead (not once but twice!) baffles me.
    I have heard people use the term Catiline conspiracy before which is why I wrote it that way. After doing a quick google-search to see if others had used this term before, I found a few sources which did indeed write it this way: National geographic, History skills, History collection, and the Ancient History Encyclopedia. Graearms (talk) 03:01, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Latin terms such as obligatus, nexus, and damnatus all were used to describe debtors. Not quite true. Obligatus and damnatus are adjectives that describe debtors, but nexus is a noun that describes the debt itself. Hands (cited in the footnote) writes that these words "came to be used in the context of penalties for debt"; note the careful wording, which does not say that they were all used "to describe debtors". The paraphrase in the WP article has transformed the accurate statement in Hands into an inaccurate one.
    I have edited the statement to better reflect what Hands has said. Graearms (talk) 02:52, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Gytheio. Gytheio is the modern Greek name. When referring to the ancient city, better to use the ancient name Gytheion (or the latinized form Gytheum). And although the link to the Greek text is helpful for those who read Greek, most WP readers will benefit more from an English translation. Since Hands is already cited in this sentence, why not also cite his translation of the inscription (p. 189, no. D31)?
    I Latinized Gytheio to Gytheum and have added the citation to p.189 of Hands. Graearms (talk) 02:50, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It cannot be a pleasant experience to have your hard work picked apart in this way, and because many of these comments essentially boil down to "the person who wrote this does not appear to have an adequate knowledge of the subject", it is probably hard not to take them personally. But in spite of the problems I have noted (and those noted by UC above), there is still a lot of value in this article, which brings together much interesting information that is not otherwise easily available in one place. It may not be among "the best articles Wikipedia has to offer", but FA status matters much more to Wikipedia editors than it does to ordinary readers.

Best wishes, Choliamb (talk) 15:04, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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