INTRODUCTION

In the broad history of ancient poverty Roman Egypt is no exception. Christianisation in the fourth century made poverty prominent. In Christian literature from Egypt charity to the poor is a virtue preached constantly and generally, enacted by individuals and the church itself. For instance, a late antique pilgrim found the porch of a church in Oxyrhynchus crowded with poor people sleeping over in anticipation of the weekly hand-out on Sunday morning. When papyrus documents re-emerge in the late fifth century after their curious near disappearance during the previous hundred years, they too attest regular support by church organisations for the poor – widows especially, but also orphans, the old and the infirm – mainly in the form of provision of foodstuffs and clothing. In Roman Egypt of the first to third centuries ad, as elsewhere in the Roman world, there is no comparable literature of poverty, no comparable ideology of charity and no comparable documented institutions of poor-relief. The same seems largely true of Ptolemaic Egypt.

Three main hypotheses are on offer for this striking difference. All have been proposed for the Roman and Byzantine worlds in general rather than for Egypt in particular, but they are transferable as models.