Tellus of Athens, Walmart and Economic Inequality

Tellus of Athens did not shop at Walmart. 

Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, 77.

This is a great sentence. One can picture the confused ancient Athenian strolling the great retailer's aisles whilst straining his confused, premodern mind in a vain attempt to understand what a BOGO is. 

Joking aside, Tellus of Athens is, according to the story told to us by Herodotus, Solon's happiest man to ever live. Tellus was happiest because he was a flourishing man in a flourishing city. Ober uses Tellus of Athens to illustrate the thesis of the fourth chapter of his book, that classical Greece was an unusually efflorescent society. He supports this claim first by comparing classical Greece to other periods in Greek history as well as to other premodern and modern societies. Then, data richly, he shows how the Greeks of the classical period enjoyed a relatively dense, urban and healthy lifestyle. Finally, he closes by examining the classical Greek distribution of wealth. He finds it to be particularly equitable. This point offers us today's closing thought. 

Historically, all complex societies have been characterized by economic inequality. Yet when wealth and income are distributed extremely inequitably, such that society is bimodally segmented into a tiny elite of the very wealthy and a great mass of individuals living at subsistence, there is correspondingly little room for  sustained economic growth. It is only with the emergence of a substantial and stable middle class of people living well above the level of subsistence, and therefore willing and able to purchase goods unnecessary for their mere survival, that societal consumption becomes a driver of economic growth. 

Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, 89.