Pompeii was not one city but two. Its wealthiest families owned slaves and lived in multi-storied, seaside mansions, one of which was more than half the size of the White House. They dined in rooms with costly frescoes, strolled in private gardens, and soaked in private baths. In the Roman Empire 1.5% of thehouseholds controlled 20% of the income by the late 2nd century C.E., according to one recent study. Meanwhile, at least one-third of all Pompeiian households scraped to make ends meet, with families dwelling in single rooms behind workshops, in dark service quarters, or in small houses.
The Roman Empire's Gini for income was about 0.43, the pair reported in 2009 in The Journal of Roman Studies—close to the 0.49 for pretax income in the United States in 2010. In fact, Rome's super-rich had wealth on the scale of today's billionaires. The income of the wealthy Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus equaled about $1 billion per year today, reported economist Branko Milanovic, of the Luxembourg Income Study Center of the City University of New York in New York City, and his colleagues in a working paper in 2007; that's not quite up to Bill Gates's more than $2 billion per year.
According to Bringmann, Römische Geschichte, Beck 2008: "The differences in income - the proconsul of Asia received approximately thousand times as much as the simple soldier -was a true picture of social differentiation and differences in wealth of the Roman empire" [1st century] and "One has calculated that the top fortunes of about 400 million sesterces, which we know about, are 30 to 40 times as much as the largest private fortunes in England in the 17th century."
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6186/822.full
The Roman Empire's Gini for income was about 0.43, the pair reported in 2009 in The Journal of Roman Studies—close to the 0.49 for pretax income in the United States in 2010. In fact, Rome's super-rich had wealth on the scale of today's billionaires. The income of the wealthy Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus equaled about $1 billion per year today, reported economist Branko Milanovic, of the Luxembourg Income Study Center of the City University of New York in New York City, and his colleagues in a working paper in 2007; that's not quite up to Bill Gates's more than $2 billion per year.
According to Bringmann, Römische Geschichte, Beck 2008: "The differences in income - the proconsul of Asia received approximately thousand times as much as the simple soldier -was a true picture of social differentiation and differences in wealth of the Roman empire" [1st century] and "One has calculated that the top fortunes of about 400 million sesterces, which we know about, are 30 to 40 times as much as the largest private fortunes in England in the 17th century."
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6186/822.full
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