Elite Roman writers were mostly disdainful of those less fortunate, and less rich, than themselves. Apart from their nostalgic admiration of a simple peasant way of life – a fantasy of country picnics, and lazy afternoons under shady trees – they found little virtue in poverty or in the poor or even in earning an honest day’s wages. Juvenal is not the only one to write off the priorities of the Roman people as ‘bread and circuses’. Fronto, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, makes exactly the same point when he writes of the emperor Trajan that ‘he understood that the Roman people are kept in line by two things beyond all else: the corn dole and entertainments’. Cicero turned his scorn on those who worked for a living: ‘The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentleman … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.’ It became a cliché of Roman moralising that a true gentleman was supported by the profits of his estates, not by wage labour, which was inherently dishonourable. Latin vocabulary itself captured the idea: the desired state of humanity was otium (not so much ‘leisure’, as it is usually translated, but the state of being in control of one’s own time); ‘business’ of any kind was its undesirable opposite, negotium (‘not otium’).

Those who became wealthy from nothing were equally the objects of snobbish derision, as jumped-up arrivistes. The character of Trimalchio, the nouveau riche ex-slave in Petronius’ Satyricon who has made his fortune trading everything from bacon and perfume to slaves, is a simultaneously engaging and ghastly fictional parody of a man with more cash than good taste, who repeatedly gets proper elite behaviour slightly wrong. He keeps his own slaves in rather too vulgar designer uniforms (the porter at Trimalchio’s front door is dressed in green with a red belt and spends his time shelling peas into a silver bowl); the walls of his house are boastfully decorated with paintings that tell the story of his career, from the slave market to his current splendour, under the protection of Mercury, the god of moneymaking; and the dinner party he hosts is an impossible combination of every Roman fancy food, from dormice, prepared in honey and poppyseeds, to wine that was well over a hundred years old, vintage 121 BCE, ‘when Opimius was consul’. The ignorant Trimalchio presumably does not realise that the name of the diehard conservative who in 121 BCE had 3,000 supporters of Gaius Gracchus put to death is hardly an auspicious name for a vintage, even if wine lasted that long anyway.

— SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (71%)