Preindustrial Inequality

The industrial revolution brought a huge economic development, but was this Economic improvement for everyone or for the few upper class? We know about the existence of inequality in our modern societies, where the top one percent accumulates a huge amount of wealth, while the population of the lower class struggles to survive. Was inequality lower or higher in the Roman Empire? If we look at the standards of living, it is easy to think that inequality was way worse in antiquity. To understand inequality we don't look at the standards of living of the poor but at the distribution of wealth in a given society. Each society has to distribute its income in such a way as to guarantee the subsistence minimum for its poorer classes. The remainder of the total income is the surplus, this surplus is then shared among the richer classes. 

We have multiple ways to analyze inequality in a given society, but the best way to do it is to look at what percent of the wealth is controlled by the top one percent. We see this expressed as the GINI index, where 0 means perfect equality and 1 means perfect inequality.

We have seen this inequality in every antique Roman city we have visited so far, from the Doge's Palace in Venice to the city of Pompeii, and even in the Colosseum in Rome. Social classes were clearly differentiated. The power and grandeur of the upper class can be admired in every monument and building we have seen.

Colosseum. Seats on the bottom were reserved for
Senators and important families, each would have its own seat
sometimes decorated in marble.

Yesterday we visited Pompeii, where we saw the difference in accommodations from the upper class and all the way down to the slaves. Pompeii is a great place to grasp an idea of the different living standards because it is amazingly preserved. It is hard to find Roman ruins that represent the lower 99% of the population. The ruins we see are mostly the privileged and rich. What we see as the glory of Rome was built on the backs of poor farmers, laborers, and slaves, traces of whom have all but vanished. This is why visiting Pompeii was so important to really understand the social organization of antique Roman societies. 

At Pompeii, we saw a patriarch's house that was about 20,000 sqft. The house had marble accents, huge rooms, and beautifully painted walls. The owner's rooms were downstairs with a great view of the inner courtyard, an important part of Roman's houses, while the slaves had to sleep upstairs where the rooms would be cold in winter and really hot during the summer. Even more, as we walked through the streets of Pompeii we saw on both sides the smaller and more modest houses of the lower/middle class but the biggest shock was to see the place where sex slaves were forced to live. It was a tiny room with only a stone bed inside, granted they would put a mattress on top but I am sure that didn't make it any better. 

Street in Pompeii

Slave's room at the Brothel

The adage goes that if we do not learn from our past than we are bound to repeat it. Today's inequality is not much different and in some cases higher than what they were in ancient preindustrial societies. Rome's top 1% controlled 16 percent of the wealth, compared to modern America where the top 1% controls 40 percent of the wealth. So, if Rome's decline is believed to be tied to its increasing inequality, we should reconsider the way modern societies are managed in order to address the problem and avoid repeating ancient mistakes.