was thought of as more enduring, with the average man regarding the court of Heaven to be the archetype of the imperial court in Constantinople. This society included various classes of people that were neither exclusive nor immutable. The most characteristic were the poor, the peasants, the soldiers, the teachers, entrepreneurs, and clergy. The poor According to a text dated to AD 533, a man was termed "poor" if he did not have 50 gold coins (aurei), which was a modest though not negligible sum. The Byzantines were heirs to the Greek concepts of charity for the sake of the polis; nevertheless it was the Christian concepts attested in the Bible that animated their giving habits, and specifically the examples of Basil of Caesarea (who is the Greek equivalent of Santa Claus), Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom. The number of the poor fluctuated in the many centuries of Byzantium's existence, but they provided a constant supply of muscle power for the building projects and rural work. Their numbers apparently increased in the late fourth and early fifth centuries as barbarian raids and a desire to avoid taxation pushed rural populations into cities. Since Homeric times, there were several categories of poverty: the ptochos (, "passive poor") was lower than the penes (, "active poor"). They formed the majority of the infamous Constantinopolitan mob whose function was similar to the mob of the First Rome. However, while there are instances of riots attributed to the poor, the majority of civil disturbances were specifically attributable to the various factions of the Hippodrome like the Greens and Blues. The poor made up a non-negligible percentage of the population, but they influenced the Christian society of Byzantium to create a large network of hospitals (iatreia, ) and almshouses, and a religious and social model largely justified by the existence of the poor and born out of the Christian transformation of classical society. Peasantry Byzantine state and society relied on the Hellenistic system of joint tax liability due to the easy handling, fast and simple revenue for the state from the different towns and villages chorio, komai mostly made up of peasants, who were the main income. There are no reliable figures as to the numbers of the peasantry, yet it is widely assumed that the vast majority of Byzantine Greeks lived in rural and agrarian areas. In the Taktika of Emperor Leo VI