Poverty in the Roman World

by Edited by Margaret Atkins , Robin Osborne

• ISBN13: 9780521862110
• ISBN10: 0521862116
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-10-09
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

If poor individuals have always been with us, societies have not always seen the poor as a distinct social group. But within the Roman world, from at least the Late Republic onwards, the poor were an important force in social and political life and how to treat the poor was a topic of philosophical as well as political discussion. This book explains what poverty meant in antiquity, and why the poor came to be an important group in the Roman world, and it explores the issues which poverty and the poor raised for Roman society and for Roman writers. In essays which range widely in space and time across the whole Roman Empire, the contributors address both the reality and the representation of poverty, and examine the impact which Christianity had upon attitudes towards and treatment of the poor.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	ix
Preface	xi
List of abbreviations	xiii
Introduction: Roman poverty in context	1	(20)
Robin Osborne
The poor in the city of Rome	21	(19)
Neville Morley
Stratification, deprivation and quality of life	40	(20)
Walter Scheidel
'You do him no service': an exploration of pagan almsgiving	60	(23)
Anneliese Parkin
Writing poverty in Rome	83	(17)
Greg Woolf
Poverty and population in Roman Egypt	100	(15)
Dominic Rathbone
A pragmatic approach to poverty and riches: Ambrosiaster's quaestio 124	115	(15)
Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe
Portraying the poor: descriptions of poverty in Christian texts from the late Roman empire	130	(15)
Richard Finn
Thowing parties for the poor: poverty and splendour in the late antique church	145	(17)
Lucy Grig
Salvian, the ideal Christian community and the fate of the poor in fifth-century Gaul	162	(21)
Cam Grey
Poverty and Roman law	183	(21)
Caroline Humfress
Bibliography	204	(16)
Index	220