By the standards of any contemporary western political culture, ancient societies, both Greek and Roman, were strikingly hierarchical. Only in the programmatic dreams of the most wild-eyed reformers could we expect to find an ideological commitment to general social equality. Of course, the notion that there should be equality of political rights among those fortunate enough to be classed as full citizens was somewhat commoner. But what we might call the ‘real world’ of social relations was based on dramatic differences in status, power, and wealth, which few if any could seriously imagine challenging.

From the fourth century BC onwards political and social thinkers were reflectively aware of the important role played in such a society by the doing of ‘good deeds’, services or gifts to other members of society for which some sort of return, even if only the expression of gratitude, was normally expected. Although the idea is in some form as old as Greek culture itself, it is fitting that we find clearly expressed in a pseudo-Aristotelian letter to Philip of Macedon the notion that such good deeds and the return for them served to ‘hold together’ (sunechein) society.