Popular Culture in Ancient Rome E-Book

J. P. Toner

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 546

Beschreibung

The mass of the Roman people constituted well over 90% of the population. Much ancient history, however, has focused on the lives, politics and culture of the minority elite. This book helps redress the balance by focusing on the non-elite in the Roman world. It builds a vivid account of the everyday lives of the masses, including their social and family life, health, leisure and religious beliefs, and the ways in which their popular culture resisted the domination of the ruling elite. The book highlights previously under-considered aspects of popular culture of the period to give a fuller picture. It is the first book to take fully into account the level of mental health: given the physical and social environment that most people faced, their overall mental health mirrored their poor physical health. It also reveals fascinating details about the ways in which people solved problems, turning frequently to oracles for advice and guidance when confronted by difficulties. Our understanding of the non-elite world is further enriched through the depiction of sensory dimensions: Toner illustrates how attitudes to smell, touch, and noise all varied with social status and created conflict, and how the emperors tried to resolve these disputes as part of their regeneration of urban life. Popular Culture in Ancient Rome offers a rich and accessible introduction to the usefulness of the notion of popular culture in studying the ancient world and will be enjoyed by students and general readers alike.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Elite and Popular Cultures

1 Problem-solving

Problems and risk

Family management

Making money

Subprime loans

Social relations

Power, politics and the moral economy

Popular resources for problem-solving

Conclusion

2 Mental Health

What is mental illness?

Stressors in Roman society

Mental discourse in Roman society

3 The World Turned Bottom Up

4 Common Scents, Common Senses

5 Popular Resistance

Conclusion: Towards a Christian Popular Culture

Select Bibliography

Index

Copyright © Jerry Toner 2009

The right of Jerry Toner to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4309-0

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4310-6 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5490-4 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5491-1 (Single-user ebook)

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Illustrations

1. Relief showing the inside of a butcher’s shop

2. Relief of a farmer driving to market

3. A wall painting from Pompeii showing bread being doled out to the poor

4. Votive offering of a blind girl

5. A detail of the Arch of Marcus Aurelius

6. Tintinnabulum in the form of a gladiator fighting his own phallus, used to ward off evil spirits

7. A folded lead curse tablet

8. Happiness lives here, not in a brothel, but a bakery

9. A shop sign in Pompeii

10. That most popular hero, the charioteer

11. A wall painting of a fight in the crowd at the amphitheatre in Pompeii

12. Mosaic showing itinerant musicians in the street

13. Mosaic of a personification of winter

14. A classy cookshop in Pompeii

15. A scene depicting a ritual of the cult of Isis

16. Mosaic showing the wide-eyed excitement of the crowd at the circus

Acknowledgements

I want to thank a number of people, without whom this book would never have been written: Justin Meggitt and Peter Garnsey for all their help, support and intellectual input over many years; Melanie Wright and Chris Kelly for all their advice and encouragement; and Emma Widdis and Anne Henry, who introduced me to, and taught me much about, the area of sensory history. I also want to thank Jon Gifford, Jason Goddard, Chris Hartley, Peter Harvey and Miranda Perry, who all helped keep me sane while I was carrying out my research. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the President and Fellows of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, for their generous award of a Research Fellowship, which allowed me to carry out my work in such a pleasant and stimulating environment. I also want to thank the staff of the Cambridge University Library and Classics Faculty, who have always been exceptionally helpful. The team at Polity did their usual excellent job in producing the book and my thanks go to Andrea Drugan in particular. The anonymous readers for Polity provided many astute comments and helpful criticisms, for which I am very grateful.

My mother worked for many years in Cambridge as a college servant, as they were known in those days, to support her three children and disabled husband. Watching her showed me how hard it can be for ordinary people to make ends meet and deal with a socially distant and sometimes difficult elite (thankfully the Governing Body of her college did not possess the powers of the Roman judiciary). Thankfully also she believed in education, which allowed me to ‘move upstairs’ and indulge in the luxury of Roman history. This book is dedicated to her in gratitude for that.

Introduction: Elite and Popular Cultures

This is a book about popular culture in the Roman world. Popular culture is probably best defined in a negative way as the culture of the non-elite.1 The non-elite (I shall also call them simply ‘the people’) comprised a whole host of different social groups – peasants, craftsmen and artisans, labourers, healers, fortune-tellers, storytellers and entertainers, shopkeepers and traders – but also consisted of their women, their children, and the have-nots of Roman society: slaves and those who had fallen into destitution and beggary. The culture these groups shared was very much the unofficial and subordinate culture of Roman society.

In total, we are talking about tens of millions of people inhabiting a region stretching from the damp lowlands of Scotland to the baking-hot banks of the river Nile. Dozens of local languages, most of which we have little or no trace of, jostled alongside the official Latin and Greek. It will never be possible to re-create the richness of each of these local cultures. We are also looking at a period spanning hundreds of years, from roughly 100 BCE to 500 CE. The evidence is so scanty that we cannot examine the popular culture of any one point in time. Regrettable though this is, it need not present an insurmountable obstacle. The argument of this book is that the popular culture can best be understood as a whole. Popular culture represented a set of attitudes, which in many ways can be seen as responses to the broadly similar social, economic and environmental conditions that the majority of the population of the Roman Empire faced throughout its history. I will be trying to look at the themes that characterized and dominated the lives of these largely voiceless people.

The non-elite were too great a hotchpotch of differing groups to be united by a single, monolithic culture. They inhabited a complex world of different geographies, wealth and status levels that meant that no uniform way of life could ever exist. One of the main internal divisions was between slaves and the free. Most Roman citizens saw themselves as anything but servile. But the poorest of the free could easily find themselves in a far worse material condition than most of the slave population. An increasing number of them drew their ancestry from the slave body. That might explain their vigorous protests against the execution in 61 CE of Pedanius Secundus’s entire household of 400 slaves, after his murder by one of them.2 The fervent desire for freedom that we encounter among many slaves argues for a shared outlook with the free. Both free and slave valued the same privileges. They took their pleasures in the same boisterous way. They faced the same social pressures, albeit in varying degrees. Both had to cope with a system of hierarchy that placed them at the whim of the powerful, even more so as the value of citizenship declined under the empire. The people had their own marginals too: beggars, bandits, the mad. There was never just a simple division between free and slave.

The non-elite were not unified by class interests: few if any elements of class consciousness can be sensed in the surviving record. Most of them saw their neighbours as competitors not comrades in the harsh struggle for scarce resources. To have nothing was to be nothing in the Roman world. Theirs was a culture where people strove to look down on their neighbours with something of the same disdain that the elite looked down on them. For the most part, these were people who were far too busy getting on in the world, or just striving to maintain what little they had, than to worry about whether anything fundamental was wrong with the system itself.

Not a class but a culture none the less. A mosaic of popular subcultures united by broadly similar interests, facing the same day-to-day problems of making a living, and equipped with the same tried-and-tested ways of trying to get things done in a tough, hierarchical world run by the elite for the elite. Popular culture was far more than a collection of circus entertainers and half-remembered songs from the theatre.3 Popular culture was how people survived.

The non-elite comprised about 99 per cent of the empire’s population of about 50 or 60 million. The elite consisted of the senators, the equestrian class and the local governing class. The elite numbered perhaps 200,000. The army numbered another half a million or so. The status of the army is a moot point given that they represented a group with a strong subculture of its own and, for reasons of space, I have largely omitted them from the discussion.4 Of the non-elite about 80–85 per cent lived in the country, mostly eking a living from the land either as small-holders, tenants or labourers, or indirectly as slaves. Of the 15 per cent of the total population who comprised the urban non-elite, about 30–40 per cent represented Hoggart’s ‘respectable’ sorts – tradesmen, craftsmen and the like. And 50–60 per cent worked as labourers.5 Rome was one of history’s great slave-owning societies and slaves accounted for about 10–15 per cent of the total non-elite population, but perhaps 15–25 per cent in Italy, and are double-counted since they worked mostly as labourers or for craftsmen. A substantial portion of the population, which will have varied hugely depending on local factors, lived at little more than subsistence levels of income. About a tenth of the population were destitute, scraping by on begging and thieving, but this represented only a base figure, which could balloon in periods of economic crisis to as much as two-thirds of the population.6

The elite for the most part set themselves sharply apart from this mass of Roman society. A huge wealth gap served to distance them from the majority. The richest of the rich possessed fortunes exceeding 100 million sesterces, which can be expressed as about 25,000 times an annual subsistence income (though this is actually a lower ratio than exists today). More importantly, the elite felt themselves bound together by a common upper-class culture of learning (paideia).7 This educated, literary outlook represented the shared world-view of the ruling class. Recondite, academic and stylistic, paideia served as a hard-won badge of class membership. It excluded the majority by relying on what it saw as taste and discernment, but also on what can be seen as deliberate obfuscation. So, in the court of the later emperors in Constantinople, a mode of handwriting was developed known as litterae caelestes, ‘heavenly writing’, which was the preserve of palace administrators.8 Similarly, the legal profession developed a sophisticated jargon. All of this must have been complete gobbledygook to the non-elite. They were expected to look on in awe at elite culture: ‘whatever is highly placed must be prevented from becoming low and common in order to preserve due reverence’.9

It is this element of social conflict that makes it dangerous to think about the non-elite in terms of having a folk culture. ‘Folk’ suggests a common culture that all members of Roman society shared equally, regardless of social position. It tends to ignore issues of politics, ideology and conflict so as to emphasize the communal. There is no doubt that there was much culture that the elite and the non-elite did hold in common. The risk is that ‘the folk’ become the harmless characters from an H. E. Bates novel, sitting in their farmyards drinking mead and discussing olive oil; and folklore comes to represent a romanticized, rosy view of Roman life, with the non-elite content to be under the wise rule of their betters. Roman society cannot simply be seen as a culture characterized by social consensus. This is to deny its conflictual elements. The vast and widening gaps in wealth that the acquisition of empire had created meant that social contrasts were stark. There was little direct, personal contact between the elite and most of the populace, particularly in the city of Rome where its colossal size meant that traditional face-to-face social mechanics had broken down. Most of the non-elite, as a simple matter of arithmetic, were not hooked into the network of patrons and clients. The city’s population was full of slaves, perhaps as many as a third, who cannot safely be assumed to have been happy with their lot.10 Herodian blames the melting-pot of Rome, which had resulted from mass immigration, for the intensity of urban violence.11 Outside Rome, we know that some at least of the oppressed passionately resented their imperial oppressors. Everywhere, the people lived in a power structure that dealt out a steady stream of degrading treatment. Such humiliation was never humdrum. It hurt.

All of these people confronted a daily reality of a steeply stratified society in which power was concentrated firmly at the top. Discussions about the exact meanings of Latin terms such as populus, plebs, turba, multitudo or vulgus are in danger of missing the point. It is hardly surprising that the elite failed to express themselves more clearly when talking about the the non-elite because, to put it crudely, they didn’t give a damn about them. So, to be clear, this is not a book about the narrow role or otherwise of the Roman plebs in the world of largely elite Roman politics, an approach which risks implying that the people only mattered to the extent that they existed as an adjunct to power. Rome was a complex society and as such requires a more complex model of social relations. That is why the modern term ‘popular culture’ is so useful: the term recognizes the plurality of Roman culture and the difference, division and contestation between the non-elite and the elite. Real differences existed between many of their values, beliefs and behaviours. The non-elite represented a variety of social groups distinguished from society’s economically, politically and culturally powerful groups. Potentially, these groups could be united and so represented a potent threat to the elite, one that needed to be carefully observed, policed and, where possible, reformed.

We must not fall into the trap of being melodramatic here. The flip side of seeing the people as members of a folk culture is to reduce them to the status of mere victims, romanticizing their suffering in the process. It is easy to exaggerate the overall level of poverty when judged against the standards of the time (the people were un-doubtedly all poor in comparison to modern, Western standards of living). Nor was this a crude class struggle between elite and subordinate. The popular culture definitely did include elements of resistance against the dominant groups in society, but even then much of this took the form of minor skirmishes along the borders of class relations; more friction than warfare. There were also obviously significant ‘grey areas’ along the division between the popular and elite cultures. Social mobility did allow some lucky few to break through the glass ceiling of servile, plebeian or provincial status into the upper echelons of Roman society, even though the elite do ‘have a way of looking the same over the centuries’.12 This book does not, though, concentrate on these areas of overlap. Obviously there are many points where I will discuss the differences or otherwise between the popular and elite cultures, but to make that the primary focus of the book would be to make the mistake of seeing the non-elite as of interest only in terms of the way that they related to the elite. This is an attempt to describe and analyse the popular culture on its own terms, on a stand-alone basis. This is, after all, how elite culture has traditionally been viewed: as something as worthy of study in its own right and not simply as an adjunct to the popular culture.

Great and little traditions coexisted. The great tradition – classical learning, knowledge of Greek, philosophy, rhetoric – contrasted sharply with the little tradition: folk tales, proverbs, festivals, songs and oracles. The great tradition sometimes participated in the little, in for example sermons or speeches given at meetings before the plebs in Rome. The elite sometimes joined in the fun at festivals, and they gambled, and quoted well-known proverbs. But the great tradition was harder for the people to penetrate, requiring as it did years of rigorous learning and large amounts of cash. Harder but not impossible. One of the themes of this book is that the two traditions were interdependent and frequently affected each other. Cultural influence flowed both ways and served to create new traditions. It did not just trickle down from above to a people below who were grateful for the opportunity to have something to imitate.

Nor were the people simply passive consumers of Roman culture, in the ‘bread and circuses’ style. It suited the elite to think of the people as apathetically apolitical because it helped justify their own tight grip on the exercise of power. Instead, the people actively interpreted the cultural images that the ruling elite put before them. In some cases they took them at face value. In some cases they sought to reinterpret these symbols in a way that clearly aped the elite way of doing things but for a non-elite purpose, as in the organization of their associations. In others, such as apocalyptic literature, they actively subverted them to create a message that entirely contradicted the original meaning and purpose. The non-elite cannot simply be seen as receptacles for the values that their social betters deigned to send their way. Popular culture was more creative than that. People were always able to adopt, adapt and reject as they saw fit.

The non-elite frequently bore the charge of being indiscriminate and gullible. Popular religious ideas in particular earned the pejorative label of being mere superstitions, foisted on a credulous public by a mercenary and cynical class of diviners, oracle interpreters and magicians. This does too little justice to the active use to which people put these religious ideas so as to understand, influence and control their social environment. Similarly, elite condemnation of the crowd in the games focused on their seemingly mindless and wanton obsession with trivial horse races and gladiatorial combats. In fact, the games were a place where the non-elite took an active role in consuming the images that elite benefactors placed before them. The detailed expertise that many of the crowd exhibited acted both to establish social identities and as a training in the key life skills that a member of the non-elite needed to survive and thrive in Roman society.

In an article on using less conventional sources for gleaning evidence concerning daily life in the Roman world, Millar rightly notes that ‘in a perfectly literal sense’, ancient historians ‘do not know what we are talking about’.13 The problems of discovering lay attitudes from elite sources can seem to be insurmountable. No ready made body of source material exists. Evidence is fragmentary, with the sources sometimes obscure and usually far from comprehensive. I make use of elite literary texts, popular texts such as oracles and joke books, papyri, graffiti, magical spells and curses, as well as inscriptions, law codes and archaeological artefacts.14 Precision is impossible in this situation and may in any case be inappropriate for a subject area that requires a high level of generalization. Most of these generalizations will be subject to major exceptions given that we are dealing with evidence drawn from very different times and places. It definitely involves some speculation if only to put forward the most likely and plausible solutions. Overall the argument proceeds by piling up fragments that give a reasonable impression of what it was like to be one of the people in Rome. Nor can a book of this size hope to be comprehensive – I have, as already mentioned, omitted the army, but also do not cover the status of lower class women’s culture adequately, nor do I enter into the dense debate concerning the degree of non-elite literacy, which in any case risks seeing the people as mattering only to the extent that they could participate in elite culture. I have focused on specific areas of religious practice, such as oracles, festivals and exorcism, where I believe these to be critical to understanding the popular culture, but there were many other rites, such as household worship, mystery cults and disposal of the dead, which do not receive the coverage they deserve. The regions are under-represented, with Rome, as usual, hogging the limelight. I am also guilty of using the term ‘elite’ somewhat indiscriminately to cover all the wealthy and powerful in Roman society. In reality, of course, elite culture was every bit as diverse as I am arguing the non-elite culture to have been. Elite literature cannot therefore be read simply as an unmediated presentation of elite attitudes. But in the context of a book about the people, the term ‘elite’ will have to do as a historical generalization to stop the argument from grinding to a halt in a quagmire of qualifications.

Roman popular culture changed. Rome was a society in constant, albeit steady, transition and non-elite culture changed with it. It is very easy to slip into a view that sees popular life as an unchanging cycle of recurrent life events, a permanent now of seasons and festivals. This is an exaggeration. The creation of a large empire, the growth of a huge capital city to match, and the changes in the leadership structure of Roman society all gave great impetus to the popular culture to adapt itself to these unsettling new realities. In the later empire, new popular heroes and religious movements testified to the continued dynamism and ingenuity that characterized the non-elite’s attempts to protect their interests and get something out of the system. Maintaining access to some form of power through patronage, whether secular or spiritual, and having to adapt when social realities changed: the people were no different to the elite in that respect.

The first chapter concentrates on the ways in which the non-elite dealt with the significant array of problems that beset their lives. If the elite had their paideia, the people had communal experience found in such things as fables and proverbs: a knowledge and practical wisdom won from the daily battles they engaged in to survive. In the eyes of the elite this was knowledge that was simply not worth having; the people were ignorant of everything that really mattered. But this archive of collective wit and repertoire of communal action mattered in the popular world. The people shared a range of tactics that enabled them better to cope with living with Roman inequality. One element of this was the active management of social superiors, not so much wealth-management but management of the wealthy. Another was that the non-elite had a strong sense of social justice that operated as, in Thompson’s famous phrase, a ‘moral economy’ to ensure that the elite fulfilled their social obligations to the people. The popular world was one full of physical insecurity, with both physiological and psychological distress. Fear was pervasive, both real (wild animals, illness, thieves, bandits, authorities) and imagined (demons, premonitory dreams, portents). The people acquired by themselves a set of creative, if sometimes contradictory, means to stay alive in this threatening, risky environment. Mutually exclusive practices coexisted within the non-elite view, but such occasional contradictions served to help the people adapt to changing circumstances. They supplied a range of options on which to draw according to the requirements of the particular situation.

In case the popular culture should appear as calmly rational, I move on to examine the mental health of the non-elite. A huge amount of profitable work, pioneered by Garnsey, has been done on the level of physical health that the Romans had.15 Here I look at what degree of mental health we can reasonably expect to have existed given what we know about the various kinds of social stressors that most people faced. Hierarchy and violence cause human beings high levels of stress and stress-related disorders, and both factors were in plentiful supply in Roman society. Mental health should not be confused with madness. Rather mental health represents a spectrum, ranging from severely debilitating illnesses such as schizophrenia to a range of less serious problems such as depression and personality disorders. Modern comparative evidence would lead us to expect as poor a level of mental health among the overall Roman population as was the case with their physical health. The evidence would also strongly suggest that incidence of mental disorders will have correlated negatively with social status. The world of aberrant mental phenomena was therefore a core issue for the popular culture to deal with.

If one thing characterizes popular culture for most people, though, it is its informality, fun and irreverence. The third chapter looks at the festivals that the people enjoyed to alleviate the stresses of their everyday lives by turning their hierarchical world bottom up. Using Bakhtin’s notion of carnival, I look at the themes of the inversion of the normal hierarchy, the popular focus on the body and its functions to bring everyone down to the same level, and the use of humour to mock and ridicule all forms of authority. This spirit of carnival, however, spilled over into all forms of non-elite fun. It was not just contained in an annual jamboree. The elite found this unsettling in that many of their members chose to participate in these popular pleasures. In the collapse of the republic and the crisis of leadership it engendered, it became clear that a new way of integrating the government and the people had to be found. I argue that the imperial games can be seen as a way of incorporating some of the carnival spirit so as to entice the people into a new social contract. Popular culture fed upwards into new forms of elite behaviour.

The elite and the people inhabited different sensory worlds. Whether it was in their use of delicate perfumes, fine art, or writing itself, the elite strove to define itself in terms of sensory refinement and taste. The non-elite, by contrast, lived in narrow, noisy, stinking places of overweening proximity. The elite adopted certain practices precisely because they were in contradiction with popular behaviour, but they then used this invented sense of their own good taste to condemn the non-elite as immoral and worthless: the city’s filth and scum. The city was seen as particularly threatening because the senses were thought to affect the individual’s physical and moral self directly. You were what you smelled. The new imperial settlement sought to re-order the sensory universe by giving the non-elite access to taste, thereby bringing it under the calming and morally improving influence of the refinements that the elite had previously sought to keep for themselves. The splendour of imperial largesse overwhelmed the senses. Luxury became a point of communal consensus, even if this did create tensions with the traditional elite.16 Most analysis has focused on the architecture, art and the use of urban space to convey powerful imperial images and ideological messages. Here I look at how the emperors used the whole world of the senses to create and manage a new context for the coming together of ruler and ruled. The literary texts which form the basis for this chapter are themselves expressive of a new sensuousness in Roman literature, which reflected a wider cultural shift in that direction. The overblown tales of imperial largesse, while not fully believable as records of historical fact, show that luxury became the normal context for the meeting between the emperor and his people, whatever misgivings the literary elite might still have had about that fact.

Many slaves hated their masters. Many free men loathed their patrons. Many provincials despised Rome. Any analysis of the popular which did not look at how these people expressed the resentments born of their subordination would be seeing Roman culture too much from the elite point of view. Resistance, however, is a broad term that can cover a whole array of acts, ranging from the dramatic revolts of Spartacus to the daily acts of dissent and deceit that a slave might save for his master. I suggest that popular culture, as the culture of the subordinate classes, will always try and carve out for itself a free space in which it has greater room for self-expression and manoeuvre. In Rome, this was achieved primarily though the use of new, imported religions. The dominant culture will largely be indifferent to such spaces so long as they do not publicly threaten the status quo, at which point they will come down with full state coercive power. But the powerful will also try and incorporate elements of the oppositional subculture into a new mode of government, as the Romans did with Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.

Rome did not possess a monolithic, homogeneous culture. The concept of popular culture brings in difference, diversity and resistance to how we see the Roman world. This in itself raises questions about the degree to which people actually believed the emperors’ ideological claims to good governance. Focusing on the production of images in imperial art and architecture runs the risk of ignoring their reception. Once we recognize that the people could actively reinterpret and undermine any image that was put before them, it becomes impossible to be so confident about how those images were perceived. Popular culture in ancient Rome was not just about folklore; it was about how people sometimes mocked, subverted and insulted their superiors; how they manipulated the elite to get something of their own way; and how they saw through the ideologies by which the powerful sought to dominate them.

Notes

In the interests of accessibility I have used the most easily available translation where possible. If a text can be found with other similar documents of interest in one of the number of useful sourcebooks that are now available, I have quoted it from that source. I have included some of the key Latin terms and phrases in the notes for the more specialist reader. Teubner editions have been used unless otherwise stated.

1 See Burke, P., Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Temple Smith, 1978, prologue. This remains the model study of historical popular culture. For a discussion of the theory of popular culture as it relates to the ancient world, see Toner, J. P., Leisure and Ancient Rome, Cambridge: Polity, 1995, pp. 65–7, and Meggitt, J. J., Paul, Poverty and Survival, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998, pp. 12–18.

2 Tac. Ann. 14.42–5.

3 Horsfall argues that a ‘nexus between theatre, song and memory was at the heart of popular culture’, in The Culture of the Roman Plebs, Duckworth, 2003, p. 17. I would agree with the review of Goldberg, S. M., in JRS 94 (2004): 202–3, that H.’s work is ‘under-theorized’, but it is also a pleasure to read and is a mine of interesting and useful information. I suspect, if I may, that H. would be only too happy to be called ‘under-theorized’.

4 Horsfall, ibid., has a useful appendix on the culture of the soldier, ‘The Legionary as his own Historian’, pp. 103–15.

5 Hoggart, R., The Uses of Literacy: aspects of working class life, Chatto and Windus, 1957.

6 All of these figures are no more than approximate estimates; see Scheidel, W., ‘Demography’, in W. Scheidel, I. Morris and R. Saller (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 38–86; and Parkin, A. R., ‘Poverty in the Early Roman Empire: ancient and modern conceptions and constructs’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2001, summarized in Parkin, A. R., ‘ “You do him no service”: an exploration of pagan almsgiving’, in M. Atkins and R. Osborne, Poverty in the Roman World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 60–82. In her thesis, P. notes, pp. 26–7, that there three types of poverty: structural or endemic, which includes most of the disabled, sick, maimed, widows and the elderly, who comprise 5–10 per cent of the population; conjectural or epidemic poverty includes those who are at subsistence level and so are highly vulnerable to any changes in income, and covers another 20 per cent; occasional episodic poverty covers those who are hit by events such as famine and accounts for another 40 per cent of the total population. The grand total of 70 per cent poor is obviously a maximum. As P. also discusses, poverty can be seen as both a relative and an absolute concept.

7 See Brown, P., Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: towards a Christian empire, Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

8 See Kelly, C., Ruling the Later Roman Empire, Belknap, 2004, p. 31.

9 Val. Max. 2.6.17, quidquid enim in excelso fastigio positum est, humili et trita consuetudine, quo sit venerabilius, vacuum esse convenit.

10 Hopkins, K., Conquerors and Slaves, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 68, implies a figure of 42 per cent of the urban population being comprised of slaves in 28 BCE, which seems too high.

11 Herodian 7.6.4.

12 Wallace-Hadrill, A., Rome’s Cultural Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 454.

13 Millar, F., ‘The World of the Golden Ass’, JRS 71 (1981): 63–75, p. 63.

14 For an overview of the available sources and how they relate to the ancient non-elite, see Meggitt, Paul, Poverty and Survival, pp. 18–39.

15 See, for example, Garnsey, P., Food and Society in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

16 See Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, pp. 315–55.