4 - The concentration of wealth and power

Summary

In a Greek horoscope dating from the second century ad we read the following, apt, summary of an ancient success-story career:

…then later, getting an inheritance and improving his means by shrewd enterprises, he became ambitious, dominant and munificent…and he provided temples and public works, and gained perpetual remembrance.

There was, as I shall try to show, nothing accidental about the link the horoscope text makes between the accumulation of wealth, political dominance and munificence. In this chapter, we shall consider several long-term developments in imperial Greek civic society during the first two centuries ad that, I argue, provided the most important stimulus for the unprecedented proliferation of euergetism in the eastern cities at the time. These developments can be summarised as a growing accumulation and concentration of wealth and social and political power in the hands of elite citizens, and the social antagonism that resulted from this. We shall start with the first factor, the rise of elite incomes.

GROWING ELITE WEALTH

A simple neo-Ricardian model can easily account for slow but inexorably increasing inequalities of wealth between urban elites consisting of large estate-owners on the one hand and small landowners and the non-landowning population on the other during the first two centuries ad. In such a model, population is the crucial variable. If population grows, then land becomes scarce relative to labour. Owners of large estates, as were most members of urban elites in the Roman Empire, become better off because rents start to rise.