In the ancient world, the rich held themselves to very different standards from the poor. Not much has changed, argues classical historian Mary Beard…
“By and large, posh Romans didn’t have much time for poor Romans, free or slave – although they were no doubt a bit scared of them too. They regularly referred to them as a “turba” (rabble) or “multitudo” (the masses).
Interestingly, given the recent fuss, plebs wasn’t usually their insult of choice. It’s true that they did sometimes use the word in that way.
The historian Tacitus, for example, wrote of the plebs sordida (and you don’t need me to translate that). But plebs was just as often used to refer, in neutral or even complimentary terms, to the noble stock of the worthy Roman yeomanry.
It was only in English, and in the late 18th Century that the word lost its final “s” and became solely derogatory, as in “you filthy little pleb”…
The other way in which the comfortably-off traditionally talk of those less fortunate than themselves is, of course, to divide them into the Good Poor and the Bad Poor.
In fact, when Tacitus wrote of the plebs sordida it was explicitly to contrast them with what he called “the respectable elements among the common people”.Talk
ing about the death of the monstrous emperor Nero, he claimed the “filthy poor”, the squanderers and the racing addicts, lamented the death (for Nero had been an easy touch for entertainments and hand-outs).
Predictably enough, the “respectable elements” were those who welcomed the new regime of austerity and cost-cutting under the in-coming emperor Galba.
That division is still with us. The 19th Century notoriously had its “deserving” and “undeserving poor”. Our own equivalent of the “deserving poor” is “hard-working families”.
