T.’s book brings new energy to the study of poverty (penia) in Athens. From the outset she makes clear that ‘[p]overty is best understood not simply as a lack of wealth, but as a condition shaped by, contingent on, and a product of social relations’ (pp. 21–2), that is, there is more to poverty and to the experience of it than material wealth. She succeeds in demonstrating this in the course of her book as she sifts through the voluminous evidence available, intent on interrogating every discourse and institution and filtering every bit of data. The result is a densely argued yet swiftly paced study.
We are indebted to T.’s devotion to the work of Amartya Sen (perhaps best known to many of us for his Development as Freedom [1999]) on twentieth-century (mostly southern-hemisphere) poverty and his encouragement of individual and community capabilities. T. promises to get around the materiality of past approaches and right to the experiences of the individual penes. In early chapters, leaning on emic literary discourses and etic statistical analyses, T. offers a complex portrait of the Athenian poverty landscape that differentiates among citizen and non-citizen men; she explores strategies undertaken by both citizen and non-citizen women to cope with poverty, and leaves this reader with a far better understanding and appreciation for the Athenian experience of poverty than can be gained from monolithic approaches. Her opening chapters depend necessarily on the material in tragedy and comedy, in the orators and philosophers, and this gives way in Chapter 3 to a rich discussion of wealth and poverty: who has how much, what does poverty mean, is it above or below subsistence? There is a lot of information to work with here, and T. is inclined to take the lead of J. Ober, an acolyte of New Institutionalism, whose influence has been growing of late. T. compares the recent attempts by leading mainstream historians (Ober, G. Kron, H. van Wees, I. Morris, L. Foxhall, R. Osborne) to extract Gini coefficient numbers for Athens. This is complicated stuff (the Gini scale runs from 0 to 1, and the lower the number the greater the inequality), and T. walks the reader through some of the ambiguities that Gini numbers for historical societies invariably offer. Her mid-book conclusion includes an admission that her measurements ‘do not reveal how poverty was experienced’, but there is also a promise that subsequent chapters will ‘look more closely at a diversity of poverty experiences’ (p. 96). She comes through on this promise.
In Chapter 4 T. interrogates discourses that for the most part are focused on the temporary penia of otherwise well-off persons (plousioi). During the stasis of 404 bc, Aristarchus had to look after his female relatives, whose arrival drove the population of his house to fourteen (plus at least two slaves); he was hardly able to feed them; the overcrowding was nearly unbearable; he found no takers for the household furniture he was selling. His was a sorry plight. There was a happy ending as Aristarchus put the women to work making textiles, and soon things were all right again (Xen. Mem. 2.7.2). When we are told by our elite sources that families were forced to sell property, I wonder what in fact we are being asked to look at. How many chronically poor people had property to sell? Are we supposed to find sympathy for the ‘temporarily poor’? The inheritance disputes at the heart of the fourth-century oratorical corpus tell us much about how people were accused or self-characterised as poor, but little about what it was like to be poor, poor all the time. If chronic poverty is indeed ‘something citizens do not ordinarily suffer from’ (p. 148), that makes poverty remarkable, but it does not help us understand chronic poverty in Athens.
The later chapters do bring us face to face with the poor, citizen and non-citizen alike. In Chapter 5, T. looks at the strategies that were available to mitigate the effects of poverty, among them accessibility to credit and the role of the deme in the support of the poor. She refers to these opportunities as ‘non-materialistic aspects of life’ – these are the affiliations within social groups that created strong ties that could bring support to those in need. Religious associations tended to cut across class or status lines and provide weak ties that often prove as effective as strong ones.
T. allows that nearly all the words that we have on the subject of poverty come from the elite stratum, whose spokespeople emphasise the fecklessness of the poor, who lacked ‘eutaxia (good order, discipline) [and] suffered from adoxia, atimia, and were apragmosyne’ (p. 45). (Yes, this last noun is construed as an adjective, an unfortunate slip that has little company in this well-wrought volume.) This is the sort of thing the Old Oligarch regularly offered up, as T. points out (p. 45). Let me add that Xenophon praised orderliness (taxis) at great length in the Oeconomicus (8.3–20): orderliness means everything is in its proper place. In the Cyropaedia (8.5.7), he called this orderliness euthemosyne, a term he inherited (unexpectedly) from Hesiod (Op. 371). It is an old (and tired) notion in the Greek world already in the fourth century, and of course remains with us still today. Thus T.’s book is timely and a good example of the sort of research we should be doing in our field that can connect with the present day and invigorate both our research on antiquity and our contribution to the problems we are dealing with right now.
Finally, I must confess that the people I was hoping to meet in this book do not appear. Where are the working poor who can be (partially) recovered in the archaeological material left to us? T. uses archaeological material to good effect as she sorts through the increase in the dimensions of workshops (ergasteria) and in the quality of their construction at Thorikos and other locations in the fourth and third centuries (pp. 185–93). But what of work conditions in these ergasteria? What of the men who toiled in the workshops at the edge of the agora? Do not their tools tell a story, do not their working conditions help us understand the experience of the working poor? Of course they do. T.’s use of elite texts is necessary, and her use of inscriptions and of dedicatory reliefs is expert and illuminating, but all this evidence is made murky either by its elite viewpoint or by an uncertainty of circumstances. Nevertheless, T.’s emphasis on capabilities and on alternative ways of measuring poverty and assessing coping mechanisms is an important contribution to this topic. It will give the field, if that is what we should call it, a nudge in a new direction, and we will be better off as she and others take the scholarly discourse on poverty into the future, on poverty both ancient and modern.
A couple of recent books on poverty and related issues appeared too recently for T. to incorporate into her excellent monograph. L. Cecchet's Poverty in Athenian Public Discourse (2015) enriches her use of the literary materials from stage, court and salon, by connecting these later accounts of poverty to the Homeric presentation of Odysseus as beggar (ptochos). Portions of S. Wijma's Embracing the Immigrant (2014) can now be read profitably next to T.’s excellent discussion of gendered poverty (esp. pp. 133ff.).
