The Representation of Poverty in the Roman Empire

This dissertation investigates the cultural imagination of Roman elites regarding poverty in their society – how it was defined, how traditional and accepted images of poverty were deployed for rhetorical effect, and in what way elite attitudes toward poverty evolved over the course of the first century and a half under the Empire. It contends that the Roman conception of poverty was as a disordered discourse involving multiple competing definitions which frequently overlapped in practice. It argues that the inherent contradictions in Roman thought about poverty were rarely addressed or acknowledged by authors during this period. The Introduction summarizes scholarly approaches toward Roman perceptions of poverty and offers a set of definitions which describe the variant images of poverty in elite texts. The first chapter addresses poverty’s role in the histories of Livy, and the ways in which his presentation of poverty diverge from his assertion that the loss of paupertas was key to the decline of the Roman state. The second chapter analyzes rich and poor characters in Roman declamation, arguing that this genre’s place in education impressed upon young elites a vision of the poor citizen as noble and worthy of protection. In the third chapter I investigate poverty’s place in the literary generation of Pliny, Suetonius, and Tacitus, concluding that their era saw the advertisement of a frugal, rustic identity among Italian and provincial aristocrats. My fourth chapter evaluates specifically urban poverty as seen in Roman satire; it argues that Martial and Juvenal construct their personas as eyewitnesses to poverty, but that only Juvenal views the Roman poor with compassion. My final section outlines the representation of poverty and labor in Roman art, concluding that, despite a general absence of poverty in domestic art, the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian saw a new trend of representing the poor as ideological symbols on state monuments and addressing their needs in public policy. The Conclusion suggests that the early 2nd century CE witnessed the increasing visibility of the poor in elite culture, with aristocrats of the era being more willing to portray the contemporary poor, and also willing to portray them in a positive light