Social welfare in the Greco-Roman world as a background for early Christian practice
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Date
2016
Authors
Lampe, P.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Faculty of Theology, University of the Free State
Abstract
The essay investigates if and how Greco-Roman theorists attempted to motivate
altruistic behaviour and devise a social-welfare ethics. In comparison, it studies
actual social-welfare practices on both the private and the state level. Various
social-welfare tasks are touched upon – health care; care for the elderly, widows,
orphans and invalids; the patron-client system as countermeasure to unemployment;
distribution of land, grain, meals and money; alms, donations, foundations as
well as education – with hardly any one of them being especially tailored to the
poor. The enormous role of civil society – private persons, their households
and associations – in holding up social-welfare functions is shown. By contrast,
the state was comparatively less involved, the commonwealth of the Romans,
especially in Republican times, even less than the Greek city-states. The Greek
poleis often invested income such as wealthy citizens’ donations in social welfare,
thus brokering between wealthy private donors and less well-to-do persons. The
church, living in private household structures during the first centuries, took over
the social-welfare tasks of the Greco-Roman household and reviewed them in the
light of Hebrew and Hellenistic-Jewish moral traditions.
Description
Keywords
Alimenta, Alms, Altruism, Clients, Donations, Education, Elderly, Empathy, Foundations, Freed persons, Grain distributions, Health care, Invalids, Land distributions, Loans, Meal distributions, Money distributions, Orphans, Patron, Physicians, Poor, Selflessness, Slaves, Social welfare, Widows, Women
Citation
Lampe, P. (2016). Social welfare in the Greco-Roman world as a background for early Christian practice. Acta Theologica, 23, 1-28.