Among the inhabitants of the Hellenistic states, the socioeconomic distinctions were no doubt sharper than they had been in the classical Greek cities. That had everything to do with the enormous expansion of Greeks and Macedonians to the east and the new possibilities, and the concomitant opportunities for some to become extremely rich. It had also to do with the rather sudden and deep inflation that struck the Greek world on the return of thousands of Alexander’s veterans with their newly minted gold and silver, an inflation that hit those who had only their labor to sell the hardest. Finally, it had also to do with the loss of democracy in many Greek poleis, which only deepened the gulf between rich and poor citizens. In the Greek motherland, we hear in this period of an emerging large landownership and a growing landless debt-ridden agrarian proletariat. The Macedonian kings, and later the Romans, wholeheartedly supported the rich landowners against possible revolutionary changes. The few such attempts, in the uprisings in Greece in 146 BC and in the kingdom of Pergamon in 133 BC, were repressed by Rome with brute force. The unrest here involved Greek citizens as well as groups of slaves, as in Pergamon. Elsewhere in Asia, the poor were primarily the non-Greek inhabitants of the countryside, who were political outsiders with no tradition of pushing through reforms by institutional means. We do not hear of any rebelliousness on their part, except where the discontent and the resentment could be channeled by religious conviction, as in the messianic movements among the Jews. Elsewhere, resistance was mostly passive, for instance in Egypt, where it sometimes took the form of a flight into the wilderness outside the Nile Valley, or to the temples, which offered asylum. Apart from the traditional rural poverty, in this period in some big cities an urban proletariat appeared, which was probably a new phenomenon. Essentially, the urban poor had to try to maintain themselves by begging or by casual labor for more wealthy “entrepreneurs” or the government—for instance, in construction work. In fact, we do not know very much about the employment of the poor citizens in cities such as Alexandria or Rome, except that charity on the part of rich citizens and the government must have played an important role. In the Greek cities, wealthy citizens could on certain occasions, whether in times of general scarcity or when some public festivities were to be celebrated, help their poor fellow citizens with food or grain, thereby winning gratitude and prestige and at the same time helping the poor earn their livelihood. In Rome since Gaius Gracchus, the state took care of the grain supply for the proletarii by offering cheap grain imported from Sicily, later also from North Africa and Egypt; Julius Caesar gifted 150,000 poor citizens free grain, a number that would be raised to 200,000 under the first emperor.
We hardly know more about the middle-income groups that mainly must have been living in the cities than we know about the very poor. The latter are often estimated, in analogy with cities in Early Renaissance Italy, about which we know more, at one-third of the citizenry. The groups “in the middle,” from the almost poor to the almost rich, then, should have formed nearly two-thirds, for the elite from which councilors and
Magistrates were selected was always small, a few percentage points at most. The various professions in the Hellenistic cities, mentioned earlier, must nearly all have been practiced by representatives of these groups “in the middle.” These practitioners, though, certainly were not all of them citizens of the cities where they lived, but in not a few cases foreign residents, freedmen, or sometimes even slaves who ran their own businesses and shared the profit with their masters. In any case, the “middle groups” must have been rather diverse, certainly in the bigger cities where much ethnic diversity could be found.
World History
