ral practices; these groups are arranged in a hierarchy, and membership of a group determines one’s level of access to political power and other resources as well as shaping social behavior. This can clearly be seen in republican Rome, where “new men” like Cicero who aspired to join the established elite had to adopt wholesale the attitudes and customs of that elite, and where political rivals constantly sought to show how their opponents’ behavior was unworthy of their status; to be “slavish” in any respect was a devastating indictment. Considering such a status society, the crucial issue for historians is to explore how far the groups were closed and how far social mobility was possible; this involves consideration both of the actors’ perspective (Rome had a long-established hereditary elite which only rarely accepted new blood) and of the likely reality (the elite did not breed fast enough to replace itself, and so always depended on absorbing new members: Hopkins 1983).
In the absence of direct evidence, it is impossible to say whether the elite obsession with status was echoed in other groups. According to Cicero, manual labor, crafts and petty trade were “slavish” and so degrading (Off. 1.151); the fact that potters signed their work and merchants recorded their trading activities on their tombstones suggest that elite attitudes were not universally accepted. However, the main objection to the idea of status groups is not that they did not exist or did not affect individuals’ behavior, but that they were less important than other sorts of social groups. In particular, status divisions are seen to be secondary to class divisions. Following the ideas sketched out by Marx, society is understood in terms of different classes, defined by their position within the organization of production. Wealthy owners of land and other capital, free peasants with small plots of their own land, free laborers who needed to rent land or to hire themselves out to make a living, and different sorts of slaves, all had different roles and different levels of access to resources and power - slaves, tenants and smallholders were all exploited, but in quite different ways. Whereas status groups might coexist quite peacefully, classes exist in an antagonistic relationship, as the interests of one can be served only at the expense of another: what’s good for landlords is rarely good for their tenants. The historian’s prime task, then, is to study the forms of exploitation, the social conflict that this produced, and the way that this shaped the course of events. Classical Athens was the great exception to the ancient norm, as the masses seized power and put limits on the power of the rich (Wood 1988); in Rome, however, the changing balance of power in the struggle between the classes of landowners, peasants and slaves has been seen as the primary cause of upheaval in the late republic (de Ste. Croix 1981).
Two obvious objections to the use of “class” as a means of analyzing ancient society are first that it is overtly political - something which Marxist historians never deny - and second that it is anachronistic to apply it to a premodern society. Describing Athens or Rome in terms of “observers’ categories,” it is argued, presents ancient society as more modern than it really was, creating a false and misleading impression; it is no different, even if it is rather more systematic, from Rostovtzeff’s habit of describing certain groups in the cities of the Hellenistic East as “bourgeoisie.” The problem is that there is no truly neutral, non-anachronistic terminology which we could use instead; even if we use the ancients’ own terms, we have to translate them and understand them in terms of our own experiences and knowledge. The decision as to whether the Roman word ordo should be translated as rank, order, class or station - or, if it is simply italicized and left untranslated, how it is explained to the reader - depends on assumptions both about the workings of society in general and about the nature of Roman society. Modern concepts are more p