Poverty, inequality, and “the 1%” are inescapably part of our modern politics. For ancient Romans, this was not always true. The idea that there was such a thing as a class of “poor” Romans only became widespread in Late Antiquity, as Christian bishops invented a role for themselves as carers of the poor to solicit charitable donations from the wealthy.
In this module, we will explore how and why poverty came to occupy this new prominence in the late Roman social imagination and the effects of this development on Roman ideas about wealth. We will pay particularly close attention to radical voices who challenged inequality, such as the anonymous Sicilian who called for the abolition of the rich, and to their more mainstream opponents who justified and legitimised inequality. Students will develop their ability to analyse historical ideas in context, using their new knowledge of late Roman politics, economics, and law to understand how and why our sources wrote about wealth and poverty in the ways that they did. Finally, we will reflect together on how this history of late Roman radicalism (and counterradicalism) might help us theorise and explain wealth inequality in other contexts – like our own.