Poverty, Wealth, and Social Mobility : The Cases of Megara and Athens

This chapter discusses the bond between wealth, high birth, and political power attested in the Homeric poems. The following discussion will bring us to see how this bond came to be challenged in the Archaic Period, based on the case of Megara. In fact, an elite group is internally diverse, and the criteria for defining membership must be constantly reaffirmed, renegotiated, and performed, namely publicly demonstrated to the community. From this perspective, lineage and high birth are only two of the criteria that define elite status, but they are not the only, nor universal, criteria. Whereas, in the Homeric epics, the world of the poleis is only foreshadowed, in the corpus of elegies known as the Theognidea, the polis is the socio-political background in which the community of the aristocrats gathers, and where their symposia take place. The traditional interpretation understands them as referring, respectively, to the members of the aristocratic milieu and the ordinary people.