Poverty, Wealth, and Well-Being: Experiencing Penia in Democratic Athens by Claire Taylor (review)

With the recent surge of interest in wealth inequality and in reconstructing the lives of the underprivileged in the ancient world, poverty has become a very hot topic in Athenian history. But because of the difficulties of interpreting the source material and creating quantitative demographic models based on that evidence, scholars still are puzzled about just how widespread poverty was among the Athenian dêmos, how poor penêtes actually were, and how they felt about their condition. Claire Taylor confronts these fundamental problems in a book that acts as a corrective to earlier approaches to the topic of poverty and offers new directions for future research. Focusing on Athens from c. 420–c. 320 b.c.e., she packs an enormous amount of material into this book, and with an impressive eye for detail, she provides as comprehensive an examination of this field and its associated issues as one could hope for in a single monograph.

Chapter 1, “Poverty and Penia,” serves as the introduction with a methodological outline and programmatic statement for how one should proceed to examine poverty in classical Athens, and Taylor lays out a sophisticated, thoroughly-considered, and theoretically well-informed approach to her topic. Eschewing anachronistic notions of poverty based purely on wealth or material welfare, Taylor instead attempts to view Athenian conceptions in their own terms, with particular emphasis on ptôcheia, penia, and aporia, and employs Amartya Sen’s capability approach to capture the relative conceptualization of poverty in non-western cultures, a useful counter to the absolute measures of poverty that often prevail in modern social science. In contrast to a static view of class structure (and of an individual’s place within it), Taylor provides a dynamic view of well-being that transcends simple economic baselines, incorporates social capital in the form of relationships as resources, and allows the inclusion of women and slaves into the analysis instead of only male citizens. This approach also considers agency, which in turn can translate into social mobility; conversely, social exclusion can seriously impede one’s ability to operate as an economic actor, which complicates older models focused simply on ‘hard surfaces.’ Absolute measures of material welfare are not lacking, however, as she incorporates osteological evidence to provide a yardstick for contextualizing the depictions of poverty in the written sources. While such skeletal sources may not be entirely representative of Athenian society overall and are perhaps skewed to the higher levels of society, they nevertheless constitute a baseline for measuring Athenian standards of living and health both against other premodern societies and against the claims that are made in contemporary Athenian sources. The variety of source material in this chapter acts as a preview of the wide range of evidence Taylor draws upon in the rest of the book—comedy, philosophy, epigraphy, archaeological material, and modern quantitative demographic models.

Chapter 2, “Poverty and Poverty Discourses,” provides detailed overviews of the concepts of ptôcheia, penia, endeia, and chreia as they are depicted in Athenian sources. The link between moral and material deficiencies is explored in depth, as is the rhetorical use of these terms within the context of Athenian political and social discourse. Perhaps most shocking about the people that could be labeled as penêtes in Athenian sources is that many of them were not poor by our standards at all—the term simply denotes someone who needed to work for a living, in contrast to the leisured plousioi, and as Taylor emphasizes, penêtes could actually be quite wealthy. Bipolar oppositions dominate Athenian discussions of wealth and poverty, and obscure the wide spectrum of economic gradations that must have existed. Rich claim to be poor in oratory, and many of the poor and ptôchoi that we see in tragedy are wealthy (or even royalty) fallen from their station, so rather than providing insight into poverty per se, such examples only reveal...