CUP (2025) h/b 306pp £77.55 (ISBN 9781009496964)
How unequal was Roman society in the first two centuries AD? As the empire reached its peak and wealth poured into Rome from the provinces, did the rich become even richer? And what was the relationship between wealth and high political office?
These are the questions Professor Danon sets out to tackle in this new reconstruction of how wealth was distributed in imperial Rome. He brings epigraphical and archaeological evidence to bear on some innovative economic modelling, casting doubt on the more traditional approach via socio-political grouping. Readers should be warned that the datasets he provides, as tables in the text and in appendices, require a degree of technical knowledge of Gini coefficients, Lorenz curves, Zipf plots and the stochastic method (none of it on the curriculum when I studied ancient history before him at St Andrews).
What D. does do, fairly convincingly, is to use those datasets to build his picture upwards, measuring the number of households in Italy’s biggest 400 towns, estimating the average wealth of each, and then weighing all that against the number of offices available—senatorial, equestrian and curial—and the thresholds required of candidacy for each. This yields an estimate of the actual participation by each class in civic society.
On the big question D. is clear: inequality did increase in the early Empire, though perhaps modestly from an already high base. He believes that, overall, the economy of Italy probably declined gradually over this period. As wealth flowed from the provinces to Italy, and then towards Rome from the rest of the peninsula, the rural economy suffered from price competition from the provinces and an increasing shortage of slave labour. Agriculture became more commercialised with farms consolidating into larger units. But throughout there were significant local variations between civitates. Towns in the north, for example, were generally larger and wealthier than those further south.
Previous scholarship has tended to equate wealth with social rank and political office-holding. D. shows that these elites were not at all as neatly divided. He argues that socio-economic modelling fails to pick up inequalities within groups and may also miss much of the overlap between them. Though very precise data remains scarce and unreliable, D. deploys proxy data from house sizes, alimenta pledges, and even burial plots. Using his bottom-up ‘tessellated’ approach, he suggests that the top-centile share was probably around 40-50 per cent of national wealth, somewhat higher than Scheidel and Friesen have proposed, and more akin to the top-centile shares in early 18th century Britain and France. Again, inequality varied significantly between different towns: it was higher at Ostia than Pompeii, for example, and there was no direct correlation between inequality and the size of the civitas itself.
But did all this wealth entrench the political elite? To stand for the Senate required substantial capital, probably at least 1 million sesterces to meet the qualifying threshold. You also needed a house in Rome and enough loose cash to make substantial payments towards games, monuments and other civic services during your time in office. Were there enough candidates? They were, certainly for the Senate: D’s methodology suggests a potential pool of five or six times the roughly 600 needed. The equites too had sufficient qualifiers for their positions, with perhaps as many as a quarter of them also wealthy enough to stand for the Senate. It is only later on, towards the end of the second century, that it seems to have become harder to fill the curial slots in the civitates but again there were contributory local factors.
Why does this matter? First, it helps us understand the degree of competition for civic office, and therefore the health of the political system. Office was unpaid and involved considerable expense but there was a large surplus of candidates, in Italy itself, for all the senatorial positions. Second, it becomes clear that there were also plenty of wealthy people outside politics—those who could have stood for the senate, for example, but chose not to, as well as others who couldn’t, as former slaves, minors or women. That surplus helped to underpin the stability of the system, providing what D. calls the buffers, ready to replace older, failing households. But it also shows that economic power wasn’t identical with political or social power: wealth, rank and office were not inclusive. As so often, the detail of the Roman empire eludes simplistic classification.
Michael Fallon
Sir Michael led the Parliamentary campaign to save the Ancient History A level in 2007.