Aida Fernandez Prieto, Manchester Metropolitan University
Ending poverty is essential in ensuring social justice (United Nations, n.d., b). Although poverty eradication is the first of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, n.d. a), poverty figures have increased worldwide in the last few years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and new armed conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine (United Nations, n.d., a; World Bank Group 2020: 21).
The rise in the number of people living in poverty has also been accompanied by an increase in aporophobia ("fear or hatred of the poor") (Cortina 2017, see esp. Ch. 1). Aporophobic behaviours have been fed by a series of stereotypes and prejudices, such as those underlying anthropologist O. Lewis' notion of a "culture of poverty", later reformulated by other authors (Lewis 1966 [1972]: 9, 11, 13-19; McDermott & Vossoughi 2020). While there is no doubt that aporophobia is a critical problem today, often leading to extreme violence against the poor, fear and rejection of the poor are neither new nor exclusive to today's societies.
The aim of this paper is to examine the way in which the ancient Greeks, from the Homeric poems to the Classical period, established a series of stereotypes, mainly negative, about the poor and their poverty, especially about beggars. Beggars, among other negative qualities, were often portrayed in Greek literature as idlers who did not want to work for a living (Cecchet 2015: 27-33, 49-66; Taylor 2017: 45, n.69; Fernández Prieto 2022: 342-353), but even as potential or the facto criminals:
“Then it’s clear,” I said, “whenever you see beggars in a city [ἐν πόλει οὗ ἂν ἴδῃς πτωχούς], that there are, I suppose, hidden somewhere in this place thieves and muggers, temple robbers and perpetrators of all misdeeds of this kind.” (Pl. R., 552d)
The stigmatisation and criminalisation of Greek beggars can be defined in terms of symbolic violence (Fernández Prieto 2019, esp. 80ss.), which would serve to "justify", as we will see, other forms of violence - verbal and physical - towards them.
By looking at the Greek past, this paper aims then to contribute to understanding and addressing the crucial problem of aporophobia facing the world today.