What's up with all these questions about the urban plebs recently? Not that I'm complaining, it's great, but when did people on this sub start giving a crap about the urban plebs?

Augustus' largess of HS 300 per (adult male) citizen according to Caesar's will, and his later donations of HS 400 per (adult male) citizen (once in his fifth consulship, again in his tenth consulship, and then again in his twelfth year of tribunician power as a private citizen. He also gave to 320,000 people HS 240 per man in his twelfth consulship, and again to 200,000 people in his thirteenth) were nice, but probably not very economically significant. HS 300 per man was a chunk of change, but hardly a huge sum, and nowhere near enough to support even an individual for a year, let alone a family. Cicero (probably ideally) claims that even an unskilled slave could earn three denarii per day as a day-laborer. That's probably pretty inflated (for all kinds of reasons) but it's usually taken as a convenient, if not necessarily correct, daily wage for the average Roman day-laborer, who made up the vast majority of the urban population. Three denarii per day is barely enough to survive in the ancient city. Rome was expensive as all hell--rents were inflated (and often paid daily, so much of the population didn't exactly have permanent housing as they searched for work), food prices were extremely variable and could be quite absurd at times, clothing and other amenities had to be purchased, etc. Even if we assume (as is likely) that a family's women and children would also have had to work the daily income of an urban family was probably miserable. HS 300 is less than a sestertius a day for a year--in the long run that's practically nothing, and it would only have been distributed to the adult male citizens within the city, excluding the sizable female and underage population and apparently disregarding the rural plebs. I should also point out that Augustus' largess was not to every urban citizen, nor did he claim that they were. Augustus says of his largess that his three gifts of HS 400 and the distribution of HS 300 according to Caesar's will that:

quae mea congiaria pervenerunt ad hominum millia numquam minus quinquaginta et ducenta

These largesses of mine never went out to fewer than 250,000 people."

That doesn't tell us the maximum number of people that the largess went out to, but the implication is ~250,000, maybe up into 300,000 or 350,000. That's like a quarter of the city's population, so pretty good--but still not really all that much in comparison to the big picture, and quite tiny when you add in the population of rural Italy, which only ever received donations as part of Augustus' colonial foundations, in which case the money went to his veterans, not the rural poor. Augustus' other donations were of a similar quality. He says of his donations in his thirteenth consulship that:

sexagenos denarios plebei quae tum frumentum publicum accipiebat dedi; ea millia hominum paullo plura quam ducenta fuerunt.

I gave sixty denarii each to the plebs who were then receiving public grain; they were a little more than 200,000 in number

His donations of his twelfth consulship were very similar:

Tribuniciae potestatis duodevicensimum, consul XII, trecentis et viginti millibus plebis urbanae sexagenos denarios viritim dedi

In my eighteenth year of tribunician power and my twelfth consulship I gave to 320,000 of the urban plebs 60 denarii each.

Again he probably means here the recipients of the public grain. Which leads me to another important point: the public grain was neither a right of all citizens nor was it necessarily all that great. I had an older thread about the public grain, but the gist of it is, as my thesis director put it once, humorously: "it was nice, but it wasn't going to feed your family." Prior to Augustus various grain laws had existed, from Gaius Gracchus' (really rather conservative, actually) measure to standardize the price of publicly-subsidized grain at no higher than 6 1/3 asses per modius (still a chunk of change for a Roman laborer--with a limit of only 5 modii per month!) to Publius Clodius' measure to extend free public grain distributions to all citizens, regardless of status (which caused a lot of abuses by people freeing their slaves to cash in on free grain and almost certainly contributed to the famine that broke out a couple years later). Augustus' grain laws were actually a step backward in a lot of respects. For one thing they severely limited the number of people who could receive distributions. This was not unprecedented--during the disastrous famine that followed Clodius' tribunate Pompey as curator annonae was forced to reduce the public grain distributions to a list of 350,000 people. Augustus, however, reduced it down eventually to only 200,000 people, at which level they remained throughout the Principate. Now, the public grain lists had been lower than that before--Caesar had reduced it to only 150,000--but that had been because Caesar had established a system by which the most needy automatically were enrolled when a listed recipient died. The Augustan public grain distributions didn't work that way, Augustus didn't order his curators or praetors to figure out who should replace deceased members and who shouldn't. The public grain supply under Augustus worked by tickets--you were issued a ticket (or more like a voucher--it was a little tablet that you hung onto and showed to people, you kept it permanently rather than having it collected and continuously re-issued like a ration card) which allowed you to cash in on public grain. These tickets could be sold and they could be passed on to children--what that means is that access to the public grain supply was in fact the privilege of a relatively few, and as time went on it became increasingly restricted. In any case, none of these distributions were enough to feed a family, or even really an individual. Gaius Gracchus' limit of 5 modii of state-subsidized grain per month, a trivially low amount, was the norm. In other words, even recipients of public grain had to purchase additional grain on the market. Now, to be fair, Augustan legislation and regulations ensured a stable, relatively low price of grain generally, which was perhaps his great genius, but the point is that the public grain supply hardly allowed the urban poor a surplus of money that they would otherwise have been paying for food with.

All in all the economic consequences of the Augustan largess was probably pretty minimal, if felt at all. The average urban laborer would have found it nice to have, but it wouldn't have made a serious impact on his economic purchasing power in the long run, although maybe he could use it to buy some drinks for a few weeks, which was nice. I should add that in many ways the consequences of the Augustan largess might have actually hurt the urban plebs. Distributions of money or food at the expense of private citizens was not only common in the Republic, it was normal business at every social level. Patrons gave their clients little gifts frequently, sometimes in money and sometimes in food, magistrates (especially aediles) distributed public or private money during festivals and on other occasions, and candidates for office were expected to distribute some amount of their private cash to the citizen body as part of their canvass for office--failure to do so was unimaginable, even Quintus Cicero thought it was an expected fact of life. To much of the urban poor these cash distributions were a vital lifeline of ready cash to supplement their own miserable wages or to make up for losses if they couldn't get work that day. It wasn't necessarily a lot per person, but in the Republic distributions of these kinds were everywhere and were relied on by the urban plebs. In the Principate these distributions, or at least the plentiful supply of many, many independent sources of distributions, were cut off. Magistrates and candidates for office could no longer distribute private or public funds freely, and while in the past the urban plebs had looked to all the high-profile people of the city for such largess now they looked only at the emperor and his immediate circle--Augustus was the patron par excellence of the Principate, partly because he had a stupidly large amount of wealth but also because nobody else was allowed to distribute what he was distributing. Now, naturally the idea was to connect the urban plebs more closely to the princeps directly as the city's greatest patron, but it also meant that many sources of additional wealth were cut off. How much of a real impact that might have had, given the enormous size of Augustan largess and the general stabilization of the economy in the Principate, I'm not too sure off--you'd probably have to ask an economist for something like that--but it's certainly food for thought. In any case the imperial largesses hardly meant that the urban plebs were rolling around in surplus cash, it was a nice little bump, but little more than that