Regarding Economic Gap in Roman Empire

When we think of life as a common Roman during the time of the great empire, we think of a life of relative leisure. Images that come to mind may be those of people in togas taking a comfortable stroll down the Roman streets, eating in impressive dining halls, or taking in a gladiatorial game. Little thought is given to how the poor and destitute lived. In reality, there was a colossal gap between the lifestyles of the few but absurdly rich, and the vast majority of Roman inhabitants that were very poor, and this gap only widened as the Roman Empire continued to thrive. Some of the things that illustrated this gap between statuses were housing conditions, education, medical care, and of course, wealth. Alex Scobie, a former classicist at the University of Victoria, wrote primarily on the subject of the living conditions of the poor in ancient Rome, how they affected relations between the wealthy and the impoverished, and how they contributed to the high mortality rate of the time. From Scobie's paper we can see that however large the gap between wealthy and destitute, disease, illness, and mortality had little problem bridging it.

The rich in the Roman Empire were certainly that. Though there were those at the low end of the social totem-pole, there were some at the other end whose riches were so vast they could not hope to deplete them in their lives. For example, Pliny the Elder writes regarding the final will of Gaius Caecillius Claudius Isidorius that, "though he had suffered great losses by the civil wars, he was still able to leave behind him 4,116 slaves, 3,600 yoke of oxen, and 257,000 head of other cattle, besides in ready money 60,000,000 sesterces. Upon his funeral he ordered 1,100,000 sesterces to be expended (Elder, A Wealthy Roman's Fortune)." Rings worn on the fingers of the rich too told the story of their wealth. Again, Pliny the elder writes of the absurd lengths Roman luxury could, and would go, "At this day, however, with us, this [the middle finger] is the only finger that is excepted, for all the others are loaded with rings, smaller rings even being adapted for the smaller joints of the fingers (Elder, Luxury in the Use of Rings)." While the people that Pliny speaks of here decided what fingers to put rings on and how many of them to put on each finger, some of the more impoverished Romans were struggling enough with paying their daily rent that they were splitting what little room they had in their living quarters with other people in order to save on the rent (Scobie, 142). As Scobie states in his article, the gap between the rich and poor must have been aggravated by the knowledge of their own hopelessness, exacerbated by the obvious manner in which the rich flaunted their wealth. (Scobie, 144)

The living conditions in the days of the height of the Roman Empire spanned such a gap from rich to poor that there is little that can be done to illustrate a similar discrepancy in the modern world. Consider solely the amount of space that commoners had to live in. Those that were neither overly poor nor overly wealthy lived in attics called cenacula, or on the lower floors of apartment-type buildings called insulae, the upper floors of which housed lower-status Romans. The upper floors of these buildings offered a meager estimate of just over 30 square feet per person (Scobie, 141) and though the lower, more expensive floors were likely to be a bit more spacious, no accurate estimate of their size is available and it is unlikely that they would have been a great deal more spacious. These apartment buildings outnumbered large, single family dwellings called domus by 26:1 (Scobie, 126) and were, by building code, restricted from having party walls of more than 1 ½" thick in order to maximize living space. This restriction would certainly have compromised the structural stability of the building. Because of this instability, the risk of collapse was an everyday fear for the tenants therein. Strabo writes, "In Rome, there is continual need of wood and stone for ceaseless building caused by the frequent falling down of houses (Strabo)." However, as Scobie states in his article, Roman architects were incapable of calculating stresses in any given structure. Therefore, the risk of collapse would have existed for both rich and poor alike, though given the much sturdier materials used in the construction of rich houses, such a risk would have been far less immediate. (Scobie, 128) In contrast to this type of living quarters, the Palatium of Domitian (Emperor from 81-96 C.E.) provided 430,336 square feet of living space to accommodate emperors, their families, and their servants/slaves. This amount of living space means that the emperor would have to have, including slaves/servants family members, and guests, roughly 14,000 people under the same roof in order to equal the amount of space per person that was endured by those that lived on the upper floors of apartment-style housing. This was often enough to require the employment of a professional remembrancer(s) to recall the names of slaves and