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Rich and Poor: the Great Divide in Ancient Rome and Victorian England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

S. J. Bastomsky
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Extract

In his book, The Roman Empire (Fontana History of the Ancient World Series), Colin Wells mentions incomes and the cost of living in first-century Italy. He concludes that a wage of 4 sesterces a day was an ‘absolute maximum’ and goes on to comment that ‘it is hard to tell whether the discrepancy between the really rich and the labouring poor was greater in some third-world countries today, or in Victorian England… To prove his point Wells gives £300,000 per annum for the Marquess of Bute as an example of an enormous income in the nineteenth century, though he does not tell us what the poor would have earned then.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , April 1990 , pp. 37 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1990

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References

Notes

1. Wells, C. M., The Roman Empire (1984), p. 204Google Scholar.

2. ibid., p. 204.

3. Ruth First, the South African revolutionary, put it well when in a careful analysis of the consequences of imperialism in The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d'etat (London, 1970), p. 9Google Scholar she wrote: ‘Africa is a continent of mass poverty, but the obsession of the ruling group is with luxuries. The same could be said in indictment of countless societies. But those who came to power mouthing the rhetoric of change faced the critical poverty of their: ountries with frivolity and fecklessness.’

4. Wells, , op. cit., p. 203Google Scholar.

5. The passage referred to, but not precisely cited by Wells, , is presumably Talmud Babli, Yoma35bGoogle Scholar.

6. Talmud Babli, Aboda Zara 62a.

7. Wells, , op. cit., p. 204Google Scholar.

8. ibid., p. 204.

9. Cicero, , Pro Roscio Comoedo, 28Google Scholar.

10. Cato, , De Agricultura, 22.3Google Scholar.

11. Wells, , op. cit., p. 203Google Scholar. See also Duncan-Jones, R.: The Economy of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 1974), Appendix 7, pp. 343–4Google Scholar.

12. Duncan-Jones, , op. cit., p. 33, p. 133Google Scholar.

13. Frier, B. W., Landlords and Tenants in Imperial Rome (Princeton, 1980), p. 21Google Scholar.

14. Duncan-Jones, , op. cit., p. 17Google Scholar.

15. ibid., p. 21.

16. Sherwin-White, A. N., The Letters of Pliny (Oxford, 1966), pp. 149–50Google Scholar.

17. For the complete list see How, W. W., Cicero: Select Letters (London, 1925), Vol. II, Appendix III, pp. 140–3Google Scholar.

18. Plutarch, , Cicero 7Google Scholar.

19. Cicero, , Ad Att. 2.1.11Google Scholar.

20. Ad Att. 4.1.7; 4.2.5; 4.3.6.

21. Ad Att. 11.2.2.

22. Ad Att. 11.24.1; Plutarch, , Ciceroil. 41Google Scholar.

23. Phil.2.40.

24. Paradoxa Stoicorum 49.

25. Frier, B. W., CJ 74 (1978), 1–6Google Scholar.

26. Frank, Tenney in his Rome and Italy of the Republic, Vol. I of An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (New Jersey, 1959), p. 393Google Scholar, gives Cicero's income as about 600,000 sesterces a year, basing this on the passage in the Paradoxa Stoicorum, but he seems to have misunderstood the text, as the sescenta sestertia mentioned are derived by ille that man — ex suis praediis; for ex meisCicero gives a figure of centena.

27. Historia Naturalis 33.134.

28. Plutarch, , Pompey 55Google Scholar.

29. Plutarch, , Pompey 52Google Scholar states that Pompey was granted the whole of Africa, both Spains and four legions. This refers to 55 B.C. In 52 B.C. (Appian, , Civil Wars 2.24Google Scholar) the Senate voted him two more legions.

30. Kraay, C., Archaic and Classical Greek Coins (London, 1976), p. 67Google Scholar.

31. Watson, G. R., The Roman Soldier (London, 1969), p. 89Google Scholar; p. 187 nn. 219, 220.

32. Plutarch, , Crassus 2.2Google Scholar.

33. When he considers Crassus' fortune, Frank, Tenney maintains that ‘Pompey seems to have surpassed this figure’ (op. cit., p. 393)Google Scholar, but he seems to have misread the passage in Dio on which he rests his argument. Dio 48.36, states that Antony and Octavian offered Sextus Pompeius 1,750 x 10,000 drachmae from his father's estate; i.e. 17,500,000 denarii or 70 million sesterces. Frank miscalculates this as 70 million denarii.

34. O'Brien, P. K. and Engerman, S. L., ‘Changes in income and its distribution during the industrial revolution’ in Floud, R. and McCloskey, D. (eds.), The Economic History of Britain since 1700 (Cambridge, 1981), p. 172Google Scholar.

35. Lynd, H. M., England in the Eighteen-Eighties (London, 1945), p. 52Google Scholar.

36. Booth, C., Labour and Life of the People (London, 1891), Vol. I — East London, p. 33Google Scholar.

37. This figure, it should be remembered, refers to urban workers. Agricultural labourers earned less.

38. Whitaker, J., An Almanac for 1882 (London, 1882), p. 139, p. 144Google Scholar.

39. ibid., p. 157.

40. Quoted in Beckett, J. V., The Aristocracy in England 1660–1914 (Oxford, 1986), p. 291Google Scholar.

41. ibid., p. 292.

42. Clapham, J. H., An Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1939), Vol. I, graphs p. 128, p. 561Google Scholar.

43. Court, W. H. B., A Concise Economic History of Britain (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 159–60Google Scholar.

44. Clapham, J. H., op. cit., ii. 452Google Scholar.

45. See, for example, Scobie, A, Klio 68 (1986), 399–433, esp. 433CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. This, of course, applies even more to modern times, and it may be interesting to compare Roman incomes with those when Wells's book was published. In June of that year in Australia – the home of the present writer – an unemployed couple with three children would have received $208.70 per week if they had claimed the maximum amount of Federal benefits. If we start our calculations from this base of $10,582 and apply the ratios of early Roman Imperial times, an upper-middle class Australian should have earned 87,748,328 p.a., and the extremely rich should have enjoyed an annual income of $186,024,984. If we calculate in the reverse direction and take a professor's salary of $52,026 in June, 1984, as an upper-middle class income, then on Roman ratios, the Australian dole for a family man ought to have been 873 per year!