Not at all a general introduction to its topic, this volume is a collection of essays in tribute to Peter Garnsey, noted Roman social historian, the result of a Cambridge conference held in his honor by a group of scholars all somehow related to him professionally, most as former students. The introductory chapter by Robin Osborne lays out some of the thematic issues to be dealt with, including the classic Greek distinction given by Aristophanes between a penēs who survives on modest means and a ptōchos who barely survives. Another distinction important in ancient thinking is that between what the author calls structural poverty, that is, the permanent situation, and conjunctural poverty, or sudden deprivation. He also notes a conceptual change that happened in the fifth century bce: transition from “the poor are bad people” to poverty as a problem. But of course, the issue is far more complex. Osborne notes that Garnsey is one of the rare exceptions to the rule that scholars who study ideas about poverty do not study the actual poor, and vice versa.

In chapter two, Neville Morley looks to the poor of the city of Rome itself by examining how various theorists of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries brought to bear their own economic theories on the evidence. It is much easier to study the elites of Rome and their attitudes toward the poor than to study the poor themselves. Chapter three by Walter Scheidel highlights the difficulties of categorizing social groups in Roman antiquity based on any contemporary criteria. The mismatch between wealth and class in Roman society continues to be elusive, yet there are a recognizable number of people somewhere in the middle between the extremes of high and low social status, with no name for their social situation. This is an important topic, not often highlighted. Chapter four by Anneliese Parkin explores what many would like to know: what were the attitudes about almsgiving and how did it affect those who needed it? The long Roman tradition of beneficentia reinforced ideas by which the “haves” had a responsibility to bestow munificence upon those without the same means. A stereotype of this patronage system would suggest no motivation to give to those who cannot reciprocate, but that is to oversimplify. Stoic ethics encouraged giving alms to beggars but without feeling pity for them, and beggars seem to have been everywhere, those really indigent as well as those who faked injuries and disabilities. Begging children were often pitied, but their unscrupulous handlers were also known to maim and exploit them to produce the desired effect.

In chapter five, Greg Woolf explores literary attitudes toward poverty, which seldom had any connection to the reality, but instead focused on elites' fears of their own possible impoverishment. Dominic Rathbone takes us to Egypt in chapter six and to the first of the inevitable crossings into the Christian empire with its somewhat changed attitudes. He notes the paucity of evidence for poverty there until the Christian era. Was it just not talked about previously, or did this happen because of some economic reversal? Rathbone concludes for greater actual impoverishment in the later centuries because of the privatization of public land and other economic factors.

Now securely in the Christian era, there are two definite changes: first, an inversion of the rich-poor evaluation driven by Judaeo-Christian ideology; second, admiration of the voluntary poverty of ascetics. These two factors remain steady through the period, and there is a gradual introduction of a social leveling between rich and poor with regard to sanctions and punishments. Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe in chapter seven casts the shadowy figure of Ambrosiaster as a mid-fourth century Roman opponent of the growing valuation of asceticism. Richard Finn in chapter eight reveals attitudes toward the poor in some fourth and fifth century writers. Lucy Grig in chapter nine gives a charming account of the dinners for the poor held by the great elite benefactors, the Roman senator Pammachius and Paulinus of Nola. Their discourse was elite to elite, nonetheless holding the poor as God's favored ones, an attitude not found in earlier Roman thinking.

In chapter ten, Cam Grey looks at the mid-fifth century Gaul author Salvian and his broadside against the Roman elite of his day for their economic exploitation of small landowners by the burden of taxation. The result was increasing loss of land and tenancy, the beginnings of medieval serfdom. The situation created expanded patrocinium, a structure once viewed as positive but by now associated with exploitation. The final chapter on Poverty and Roman Law by Caroline Humphress is helpful in pulling together many of the threads left floating through the previous chapters.

Although the information contained in this volume is immense and not easily integrated, several main lines do occur. For the most part, it is the elite who speak. They fear the possibility of poverty for themselves. They discuss the relatively poor, but the real poor remain hidden from sight. There are always, in both Roman and Christian discourses, two running themes: first, what to do in regard to those less fortunate; second, how does the virtuous person respond out of inner character and not out of surface pity? In the later Christian framework, the second question takes on the nature of a moral dilemma: the poor are blessed by God, but can the wealthy person find salvation? God made both rich and poor, and the divine plan is that the rich help the poor and the poor pray for the rich. Always missing is anything like what we might call social analysis, the asking of the question why some are poor in the first place. It would be many centuries before that question would be seriously raised.