les 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 precise: they make it easier to compare ancient society with other premodern societies, and they highlight the difficult issues involved in choosing the right words to describe antiquity, where more “everyday” language might conceal the fact that there is a problem.