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http://ancienthistory.about.com/b/2009/11/05/thursdays-term-to-learn-plutocracy.htm In his first satire, Juvenal asks if he has to sit back, listening to all the rantings going on around him. By line 30 he has covered so much of what he thinks is wrong with his society that he comments
difficile est saturam non scribere
'It's hard to not-write satire.'
This programmatic satire flashed through my mind when this morning's Today Show announced that Goldman Sachs had received 200 doses of the H1N1 vaccine. If there were adequate supplies to go around, it wouldn't have raised an eyebrow, but there aren't, yet. Immediate questions are of the type: Why does Wall Street get government-funded vaccines ahead of, say, the school-aged (statistically said to be more at risk than healthy adults) kids in my town? There are explanations for it (see Amid shortage, big NYC firms get swine vaccine), but before I read them or even thought seriously about the pros and cons, or researched whether the vaccines were actually being distributed gratis, or checked whether Goldman-Sachs routinely employs statistically-at risk individuals, a topical word for this week's Thursday's Term, Plutocracy, had lodged itself in my brain. I'm truly sorry I can't produce a Roman satire -- in dactylic hexameter or anything else.
Plutocracy comes from two Greek words, ploutos 'wealth' and kratia 'power'. Ploutos should be familiar from the name Pluto that belongs to a former-planet. It comes from Greek mythology: the Underworld god is often called Pluto. The name Pluto suggests the god is the giver of wealth, since it is from the earth that metals come. Plutocracy doesn't necessarily mean rule by the wealthy -- that would be plutarchy; however, the Greek-English lexicon Liddell-Scott defines ploutokratia as an oligarchy of wealth, and cites Xenophon's use of the term.
Among other instances, plutocracy has been used to describe the late archaic and classical age Spartan system, where the elite paid high taxes in order to keep their full political rights, according to "Population Patterns in Late Archaic and Classical Sparta Population," by Thomas J. Figueira. Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), Vol. 116, (1986), pp. 165-213.
Previous Thursdays' Terms to Learn:
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