Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In The Republic , Socrates describes income segregation in the Ancient Greek polis and goes on to prescribe policy: For, indeed any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor the other of the rich; these are at war with one another; and in either there are many smaller divisions, and you would be altogether beside the mark if you treated them as a single State. But if you deal with them as many, and give the wealth or power or persons of the one to the other, you will always have a great many friends and not many enemies. ( Jowett 1999 , pp. 137–8) Later, in ancient Rome, integration of the rich (the patricians) and the poor (the plebeians) was apparently enforced by urban design: First of all is the close juxtaposition of the houses of the wealthy and the single-room high-rise apartment dwellings of the poor. As this and many other plan fragments show, there was no significant economic segregation in Rome . . . In our present example of imperial Rome, it is interesting to consider the reality of close physical mixing of social classes against the literary image of the distinct separation of those classes in many social practices. ( Reynolds 1997 , p. 16) Although segregation by income need not imply ethnic segregation, the two are correlated, and evidence of this abounds from later periods. For example, in Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern ... log in or subscribe to read full text