Thanks, Les.
What was originally meant was the common people, not the privileged wealthy. The common people asked for bread, and a cure.
Well, you have to define 'common' here. I'd like to impress upon those reading this that there were many gradations in lifestyle in the ancient world that were between 'poor, as in close to starvation' and 'privileged wealthy'.
One of my interests is reading about the ancient world, starting in college, including probably 30 histories of it in the past year or so. I don't claim to be an expert, but I'm fairly knowledgeable, especially about the Roman, Greek and Byzantine eras. I'll define that (for purposes of discussion) as the Early Bronze Age up to the Early Medieval period (the Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire and it lasted until 1452, but I'll set the defining line between the late ancient world and the early medieval period as the death of the Emperor Justinian I, so about 565 AD, though one could argue it was closer to 800 AD when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in the West.
Either way, those eras and worlds incorporated an awful lot of people.
I'm less well-read regarding Asian and South American cultures, though I've got just enough information to get myself in trouble!
During most of these ancient periods in the west, farmers were rarely living subsistence/brink of starvation lives; that happened during droughts, plagues or other catastrophes, but they weren't the norm.
There were enough of our ancient ancestors living decently enough to thrive that we're here today.
The very poor who lived in cities in the ancient world were more at risk, but that was not the rule. Most people in what we call the ancient era farmed and/or raised cattle. They retained enough of the food they grew and raised to thrive.
Though a minority of common people, there was the comparatively privileged Roman military - a well paid professional force by the standards of the time after the reforms of Gaius Marius (110 BC-ish), who were given land grants after long service and successful campaigns. At the height of the Empire, that would be 33 Legions totaling about a half million soldiers at any given time, plus auxiliaries. Roman soldiers were not supposed to marry during their long term of service, BUT they were allowed common law wives and families, so military encampments had lots of people.
Every city in the UK, for example, whose name ends in "caster" or "chester", such as Lancaster, Leicester, Chester, Bicester, Cirencester, Caister, Colchester, Gloucester, Manchester, Tadcaster, Winchester, etc., was a former Roman military camp, in Latin, C
astra. The population stayed on and these camps were large enough to become cities.
German cities like Mainz, Aachen, Speyer, Frankfurt, Cologne and Augsburg were former Roman camps and cities. France and Spain are literally loaded with former Roman camps and the towns that grew up around them. Same with Eastern Europe; in fact the empire went as far as Bactria (now Afghanistan!) and Armenia, as did Alexander the Great's empire.
There is continuity between the ancient and modern worlds that's kinda surprising until you think about it - continuity in human existence makes sense.
Consider that in the modern world, we have the third largest military, at about 1.4 million people, and the population of the ancient world was way lower. Now imagine our soldiers being given enough land to farm upon discharge. So this was pretty important stuff, and lots of people served over the 600 years following the Marian reforms. Millions lived on former Roman soldiers' landholdings and farms, even in the ancient world.
Their heirs lived largely what we'd compare to middle class farmer's lives, and/or joined the military themselves. There were also Roman allies who supplied "alia" or "auxiliary" soldiers who were well paid for the time, and granted citizenship and land. Many of the Legions' descendants live in what is today Romania - hence the name - a country whose language is today the closest Romance language to Latin, that was part of what the Romans called Illyria. They went there because they were awarded free land, but they also got free land in parts of Italy and all over the Roman Empire.
The Roman military also had the most sophisticated medical system in the history of the Western world
until the days following the US Civil War! I've attended lectures on this by one of the medical history professors at the U of Mich Medical School and it's pretty fascinating stuff.
All people in territories controlled by Rome were granted full citizenship in the early 3rd century AD, and that gave them certain rights, privileges, and additional earning potential.
There were plenty of skilled crafts class people in cities, which is why they offered a modicum of opportunity and were somewhat akin to what we'd today call lower-middle class. They weren't starving. The poor in Rome itself got free bread.
But you didn't want to be a slave. That was not a good thing. However, a great many plebeian families, and especially military families in Ancient Rome, owned slaves. That was expensive - they had to be fed, housed, and clothed or you'd lose your investment - so these plebeian families were actually pretty well off compared to the truly poor ones; well off enough to buy them, feed extra mouths and provide clothing and shelter.
I want to be double clear here: Slavery was horrible stuff. The only point I'm making is that you had to be fairly well off in order to hold slaves, and there were plenty of regular, 'common' people who were slaveholders in the ancient world, including farmers.
There were also lots of freed slaves in the Roman and Greek worlds. There's still a strange looking structure shaped like a bakery from Ancient Rome right by the walls of the city, that was the tomb of a freed slave who became rich on his craft, enough to build an imposing structure, and this kind of success was not as uncommon as you might imagine, though the wealthier Romans looked down their noses at these nouveau riche.
But heck, in my area we have two owners of Detroit sports teams (one a former owner) who became millionaires on pizza, so there's your modern analog, The ancient world wasn't all that crazy-different.
In many ways, the ancient world has been mythologized as this terrifying place where you were either practically a slave, a slave, or ridiculously rich, and that simply isn't true. It's more a product of literature than history,
Regular ancient people in farming areas didn't live much different than American pioneers, with their small landholdings; many lived better. Each would have recognized the other's lifestyles as similar to their own except for clothing and firearms.
Until the late 19th century, ancient and modern cities both stank and were filthy, except Ancient Rome and Constantinople had much better plumbing systems, and sewage was run through the Cloaca Maxima, which is STILL in use in Rome; Constantinople had sophisticated water cisterns that are still there and still working (it's now Istanbul).
In modern times, there were plenty of homeless people living in 'workhouses' without homes until very recently, and then there was debtor's prison, again, abolished pretty recently. We had slavery in the modern era. There were tenements in Ancient Rome that many of our grandparents and great-grandparents would have been able to relate to in modern cities, except the Roman ones were only 3-5 stories tall.
But there weren't breadlines unless there was a national catastrophe in either era, or in modern times, "panics" and "great depressions".
