(1) Div., “A Companion to Roman Religion”, Blackwell ?; “After the reign of Hadrian, the Panhellenion opened a new area of activity for ambitious aristocrats, since contribution to the preparation of the candidature dossier and then participation in the administration of the League was a great honor, in that all its important officials were rich Roman citizens and some of these, or some of their descendants, had had senatorial or equestrian career. The prestige inherent in serving in the League arose from the close association of the Panhellenion with the ruling power. Service in the Panhellenion might also be a means of furthering one’s career. It offered members of the local elite the opportunity of contact with a Roman institution at a time when, although the senate and the equestrian order were open to provincials, the places available in these orders were severely limited. By their actions that did such good to their cities, these personages invested in their future and strengthened the chances of ensuring a successful career for their descendants, since it was the privileged political and judicial status of local families that brought future knights and senators to the attention of the Roman authorities.”
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(2) Arjan Zuiderhoek, “The politics of munificence in the Roman world- Citizens, elites and benefactors in Asia Minor”, Cambridge University Press 2009; “The old polis ideal, which defined the city essentially as a community of people, of citizens, had remained central to Greek civic ideology during the Roman imperial period. This is evident, for instance, from the way cities always described themselves, or were referred to, as a community of people – the Athenians, the Pergamenes, the Prusans – instead of a place. It also shows from the great value people attached to their civic affiliation, referring to it whenever possible, in inscriptions, papyri and so forth. It shows from the fact that Roman citizenship, which became increasingly widespread in the east during the second century ad, never managed to replace local citizenship. Instead, the two statuses simply co-existed. And it shows from the fact that cities regarded the grant of their citizenship to outsiders who had done them well as one of the highest honours they could bestow, at least on a foreigner.2 Members of the urban elites, however powerful, wealthy or influential in the wider world of the Empire, first and foremost felt themselves to be citizens of their native communities, and, most importantly, fellow citizens of their poorer compatriots. Dio Chrysostom told the assembly of his native Prusa that no praise was dearer to him than that of his fellow citizens, ‘even if the whole Greek world and the Roman people too, were to admire and praise me’. He went on to say that he would not have preferred even Athens, Argos or Sparta, ‘the first and most famous of the Greek cities’, to Prusa: For although many people in many lands have invited me both to make my home with them and to take charge of their public affairs . . . yet I never accepted such a proposal even by so much as a single word, and I did not even acquire a house or a plot of ground anywhere abroad, so that I might have nothing to suggest ahome-land anywhere but here.
(3) Passim: We should of course allow for the rhetoric, but even if we do, the sentiment still strikes sincere. Dio, we should remember, was something of a celebrity. He had travelled widely and seen many of the Empire’s great cities, including Rome, with his own eyes.He had high friends everywhere, and was even an acquaintance of the emperors Nerva and Trajan. And yet, he devoted much of his life and energies to politics and munificence in small-town Bithynian Prusa, in spite of considerable and frequently nasty opposition from jealous local rivals. It is a pattern known also from the careers of other eastern grandees. In a recent study Giovanni Salmeri provides a whole list of eastern aristocrats who, despite great wealth and wide political influence, chose to devote much of their lives to Greek municipal politics in the east, sometimes even aborting senatorial or equestrian careers for the purpose. Among them are the sophist M. Antonius Polemo, the grand Lycian benefactor Opramoas of Rhodiapolis (who was not even a Roman citizen), the historians-cum-senators Flavius Arrianus and A. Claudius Charax, the 2 Roman emperors could and did acknowledge the importance polis ideals and institutions held for their Greek-speaking subjects. For a startling recent example see the letter by the (admittedly philhellene) emperor Hadrian to the citizens of Naryka in eastern Locris published by Jones (2006). … equestrian C. Iulius Demosthenes of Oenoanda, and, famously, Herodes Atticus.4 Like Dio and (probably) the individuals just mentioned, Plutarch too extols the ideal of service to one’s native community, criticising those wealthy eastern citizens who scorned local politics out of eagerness for a career in the Roman administration.
(4) Passim: Local patriotism and love of one’s fellow citizens is also the motive most frequently encountered in inscriptions recording gifts by generous members of the urban elite. Hence when elite donors motivate their gifts by saying that they have ‘loved my dearest homeland from my earliest youth’ or wish ‘to requite the native town that bred and loves me’ we have no reason to doubt their sincerity. As always, the discourse of praise of honorific inscriptions is instructive: as Peter Brown notes, a rich benefactor was invariably praised ‘for being a philopatris, a “lover of his home-city”, never for being a philoptochos, a ‘lover of the poor.’ / As these last two examples indicate, it is euergetism which perhaps allows us to appreciate best just how central the notion of citizen community was to the civic ideology of the imperial Greek cities. As I shall demonstrate in this section, benefactors by means of their gifts to the citizen community helped to define that community in a very real sense. Through the character and structure of their public generosity, elite benefactors managed to endow their communities with a specific sense of corporate, collective identity. Their selection of what to donate and what not betrays a clear and sharply defined sense of what was needed for ‘the good life’ of the Greco-Roman citizen, and this was what they provided their fellow citizens with. Given its central ideological focus on the citizen community and the citizen ‘good life’, it is no wonder that euergetism proliferated precisely during the second century ad. As we saw in the previous chapter, it was during this period that great disparities of wealth between elite and non-elite citizens became increasingly strongly felt in urban society, as civic elites reached new and unprecedented levels of riches, while a socially and politically restive demos, some of whom perhaps saw their income rise a little as well (though not nearly as fast or on so large a scale as those of the elite), staked out a claim to a share of the new elite wealth.
(5) Passim: Also, political power had largely become the prerogative of a privileged group of very rich elite families active in the urban council, whose members acquired ever more characteristics of a true ordo, separated culturally, socially, politically and economically from the mass of ordinary citizens. These developments had the potential to erode the unifying ideal of citizen community, the very ideological notion that provided much of the basis for social and political stability in the post-Classical Greek cities. Open large-scale social conflict was perhaps rare, but contemporary commentators were acutely aware of the tension that was constantly brewing under the skin of civic life, as was Plutarch when he implored elite politicians by all means not to neglect their role as benefactors. Moreover, we frequently hear of what were sometimes violent clashes between elite and non-elite citizens in the late first and second centuries ad. These, as we saw in the previous chapter, usually took the shape of conflicts between the boule/the notables on the one hand, and the demos on the other. Given the continuous threat of social antagonism as a consequence of contemporary economic and socio-political developments, the unifying ideal of citizen community increasingly needed to be re-emphasised, and euergetism turned out to be the ideal instrument to do just that. Not only did most benefactors emphasise with their gifts the importance of the citizen community and the civic way of life, but also the very process of exchange that constituted euergetism can be said to have exemplified the ideological centrality of the citizen body. By means of a sort of unspoken, perhaps even largely unconscious, ‘pact’ elite citizens through their munificence made it in fact possible for their poorer fellow citizens to enjoy those amenities essential to the life of the trueGreco-Roman citizen.
(6) Passim: In exchange, the non-elite citizenry, despite occasional struggles, in the end accepted the rule of the rich bouleutic families and through their consent legitimated the latter’s position of power. Euergetism thus prevented the unifying notions of citizenship and citizen-community from losing their meaning completely in an age of ever-growing disparities of wealth and political power within the citizen body. By allowing poorer citizens unhindered access to all the amenities necessary for the citizen-‘good life’ – gymnasia, baths, theatres, temples, games, festivals, distributions – euergetism did not just serve to define the very notion of the Greco-Roman ‘good life’. By unceasingly honouring the entitlements implicit in citizenship, euergetism also powerfully and unequivocally underlined the fact that citizenship still constituted the primary organising principle of civic life. Consequently, For the concept of entitlement see Sen (1982) 1–8. Broadly following Sen, I think we could define entitlements as those aspects of an individual’s legal, social, political and economic position that largely because of euergetism, it still meant something to be a citizen of a polis during the high Roman Empire. In plain terms, citizenship often allowed you a larger share of the cake than you would have received had you simply been a non-citizen resident. Euergetism thus functioned as the primary distribution mechanism that turned citizenship-entitlements from a theoretical possibility into an everyday reality. As such, euergetism’s palliative social effects were increasingly needed during the second century ad, when the divisions of wealth and power within the citizen body slowly reached their apex and their corroding influence on civic unity needed to be battled against on all fronts.
(7) Passim: It is no coincidence that the theme of homonoia figures so prominently in the literature and epigraphy of the east during the high Empire. Euergetism did much to make homonoia possible and to ensure its continuous existence; non-elite citizens considered it only natural that the elite did their best to allow them their rightful share of the increasingly sumptuous forms of civic life the new wealth made possible. The balance, however, was precarious. As Plutarch realised, the elite had better live up to the facts of nature . . . We should however note that, over the course of many centuries since the Classical period, the civic ideal did not remain unchanged. The notion of the polis as a community of political equals, which had prevailed in Classical times, started to make less and less sense in the far more oligarchic Greek civic world which came into existence from the later Hellenistic period onwards. Consequently, during the Roman imperial period, when the oligarchisation and hierarchisation of urban society became increasingly visible and institutionally formalised, the civic ideal had taken on a decidedly new form. The citizen community was, as we just saw, still the central element around which civic ideology was constructed, but it was now refashioned into a far more hierarchical shape. We can see this clearly in various areas of euergetism. Public distributions almost invariably determine the extent to which he has access to the resources he needs. In the words of Sen (1982), economists often tend to argue ‘in terms of what exists rather than in terms of who can command what’ (Sen’s emphasis). A citizen of a Greek polis or the Roman Republic/Empire could, in various ways, more easily command access to (vital) resources than a non-citizen, hence in the ancient world citizenship functioned as a form of entitlement. See also Jongman (2002b) and (2006) for the benefits Roman citizenship might confer.
(8) Passim: This ‘naturalness’ was underwritten ideologically by the populace’s use of ‘family language’ while addressing or honouring generous elite members, calling them ‘fathers’ or ‘mothers’ of the city or demos: see Pleket (1998) 213–14 for evidence and literature. What is more natural for fathers or mothers than to desire to feed their children, and to provide them, as far as possible, with the essentials they need to lead a proper and fulfilling life? The notion must however also have been congenial to an oligarchic elite, since it implied a patriarchal, deferential society in which the poor ‘children’ are submissive and obey the rich ‘fathers’. See also van Rossum (1988) 152–5; Robert (1966) 85–6; Zuiderhoek (2008). Focused on citizens, and if they sometimes included non-citizen groups, these mostly received (far) less than citizens. However, within the citizenry, as we shall see, a variety of privileged groups received handouts that were sometimes considerably larger than those granted to ordinary citizens (politai).11 Festivals usually expressly involved the entire citizen body, and even glorified its unity, as citizens together worshipped their gods, honoured their traditions, commemorated their collective past and collectively enjoyed and participated in games and athletics. On closer inspection, however, there are often many hints suggesting that this same citizen body was now perceived as structured in a distinctly hierarchical way. Such a hierarchical definition of civic society made far more ideological sense in a society where power structures were so explicitly founded on a highly unequal division of wealth, power and prestige. Indeed, I would argue that it was precisely this redefinition of the citizen community in terms of a hierarchy of status groups that allowed the oligarchic urban societies of the Roman east to retain their sense of civic unity.
(9) Passim: By integrating the concept of status hierarchy into their idealised picture of the citizen community, the urban societies of the Roman east managed to devise an ideological justification for the huge social cleavages dividing their citizen bodies. The compromise was frequently an uneasy one, as our evidence for social tensions reveals, but it tended to work reasonably well provided that its central message was continuously reinforced and the elite lived up to their side of the bargain. Once more we see how crucial euergetism was to the stable functioning of urban society in the Roman east.”
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(10) Arjan Zuiderhoek, “The politics of munificence in the Roman world- Citizens, elites and benefactors in Asia Minor”, Cambridge University Press 2009; “Although the ancient world knew rural shrines and temples, the city was in many ways a focal point of religious activity.Moreover, collective engagement in religious cults, festivals and ceremonies created strong symbolic bonds between citizens, thus reinforcing their sense of unity and corporate identity. Hence, a true polis was rich in temples, shrines, sanctuaries, altars, statues of the gods, and munificence abundantly reflects this. The preponderance of donations of religious structures which Fig. 5.2 reveals is indicative of a pronounced religious dimension of euergetism that, as will become evident below, we can also discern in many donated games and festivals. If euergetism was, as I argue, strongly bound up with ideas of civic identity and Greco-Roman ideals of urban civilisation and civic life, then the religious aspect of many forms of munificence indicates how deeply religiously embedded such ideas and ideals were. The inhabitants of the cities of the eastern Roman Empire in the second century ad still very much lived in a world full of gods. This was no pagan world in decline, as some older authors would have us believe, and euergetism decidedly shows this. Many elite benefactors had been priests at some stage in their career, and not a few actually donated in that capacity. We should note that among benefactors’ contributions, temples and sanctuaries for Roman emperors and the imperial cult figure almost as frequently as structures for other Greek, Greco-Roman or local deities. Here we touch on the almost seamless integration of the religious and the political in Greco-Roman civic life that was so strongly emphasised by Simon Price in his briljant study of the Roman imperial cult in Asia Minor. At the local level, this integration might manifest itself in the community’s political mythology, which might relate the foundation and history of the city to important deities, or events and places important to the life of gods or demi-gods.
(11) Passim: Empire-wide, it showed in the cultivation of the religious connections between the deified Roman emperors and the faithful cities that were their subjects. The recurring ritual celebration of the community’s relations with the divine, whether in the shape of a living or deceased emperor, Olympian gods, demi-gods or local deities, strongly stimulated a sense of civic unity by symbolically placing the community as a corporate entity over and against its gods. Small wonder, therefore, that elites, interested as they were in maintaining such a sense of unity among the citizenry in the face of growing disparities of wealth and power within it, made religion such a prominent area of their munificence. As with Price’s study of the imperial cult, it is the integration of religion and politics that provides the key to the explanation.”
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(12) Arjan Zuiderhoek, “The politics of munificence in the Roman world- Citizens, elites and benefactors in Asia Minor”, Cambridge University Press 2009; “The second most popular type of structure among elite appears to have been the stoa. Here, financial calculation may have played a part. Stoas of course could be frightfully expensive, especially large and sumptuous ones. On the whole, however, it seems reasonable to think that a normal-sized stoa would have been a cheaper option, if one wished to donate an entire new building and not merely to make a contribution to an existing structure, than, say, an entire theatre or bath–gymnasium complex. Hence budgetary shrewdness might go a long way towards explaining the popularity of the stoa among civic benefactors, but financial considerations are not the whole story. The eastern stoa or colonnaded avenue, with its air of luxurious urbanity, was a highly appreciated architectural form in the cities of imperial Asia Minor, and we find it almost everywhere. As a combination of the traditional Greek stoa and the Roman via portica, it was a crucial element of what has been termed the typical ‘Asiatic urbanism’ of the cities of AsiaMinor in imperial times, a creative synthesis of Hellenistic and Roman architectural ideas that revitalised the ‘Romanized Greek polis in luxurious, nearly Baroque architectural forms’. The so-called ‘Syrian’ colonnades – the first large one was built by Herod the Great in Syrian Antioch around 20 bc – provided an essential material backdrop to civic life (much like skyscrapers have become the emblematic structures of modern American cities), as the ruins of modern Turkey still testify. They surrounded agoras and the courts of gymnasia, lined major streets and functioned as covered walks wherever they could be squeezed into the urban layout.
(13) Passim: Dio Chrysostom went to great lengths to have one constructed at Prusa, as part of his grand scheme to turn his native town into a proper city worthy of the name. Elite benefactors, eager to transform their cities into magnificent civic landscapes, found in the colonnaded avenue their perfect form. Stoas, colonnaded streets, were civic surroundings par excellence. Next are baths and gymnasia. In Roman Asia Minor, these two were usually combined in one single complex, a synthesis of the Hellenistic gymnasium and the Roman bath building. As such, like the colonnaded streets, these complexes can also be considered part of the great ‘Asiatic’ architectural renewal of the Greek cities in AsiaMinor. In Greek culture, physical exercise and athletics in the gymnasium had always constituted an essential part of what it meant to be a citizen, as had bathing and its facilities in Rome (though the Greeks had their baths too). However, the proliferation of the bath–gymnasium complexes in Roman imperial Asia Minor was strongly associated with a general ‘renaissance’ of gymnasial culture, as evidenced by the contemporaneous craze for agonistic games and festivals, to which members of the civic elite contributed significantly both as benefactors and participants. The significance of the bath–gymnasium complexes for civic life and culture was, however, not confined to providing a context for agonistic contests. In many ways (and very much like the agoras of the Greek cities at this time), through their multiplicity of functions, the bath–gymnasium complexes became focal points of civic life and citizen interaction in the public sphere, combining leisure, sport, religion (most bath–gymnasium complexes included a sanctuary for the imperial cult)27, education and sociability, all in one building. In the words of the archaeologist George Hanfmann, ‘[w]ith its multiple functions as civic center, club house, leisure area, school, and place of worship of the emperors, the gymnasium now replaced the palace and the temples as the major concern of the Asiatic cities’.
(14) Passim: Given this centrality of bath–gymnasium complexes to contemporary civic culture, we can only conclude that elite benefactors’ fondness for donating them once again betrays their focus on providing their fellow citizens with the amenities essential to a proper citizen existence. From here on the discussion becomes slightly more complicated. Figure 5.2, the graph of whole buildings, gives the category ‘miscellaneous’ next, followed by the category ‘governmental structures’. However, if we look at Fig. 5.3, which is a graph that includes all contributions to public buildings in my database, i.e. also the partial ones, a somewhat different pattern emerges. We should of course bear in mind the classificatory problems associated with partial contributions discussed above, which make the classification in Fig. 5.3 somewhat more arbitrary than that in Fig. 5.2. Note that there are a few striking differences between the two graphs. First, when we include all recorded contributions to public building, the bath–gymnasium complex emerges as a more popular target for munificence than the stoa (in Fig. 5.2, it is the other way around). Second, whereas in Fig. 5.2 governmental structures (council houses, offices for the agoranomoi and so forth) surpass theatres, in Fig. 5.3 the theatre stands out as the more popular object of benefactions. The agora too appears as a more favoured object when we include all contributions (as in Fig. 5.3), instead of just donations of whole buildings (as in Fig. 5.2). The same is true, if only just, for libraries, while stadiums make their sole appearance in Fig. 5.3. In all these cases, I think the explanation for the difference between the two graphs is similar. Bath–gymnasium complexes, theatres, agoras, libraries and stadiums were often huge and complex structures, and hence frightfully expensive. Only the richest of the richest local elite families could afford to donate such buildings in their entirety.
(15) Passim: Given the prominence of bath–gymnasium complexes among the donations of whole buildings set out in Fig. 5.2, these seem to have been the least costly of the structures just mentioned. It is also quite conceivable that as gifts they were so popular among the citizenry, and hence brought donors such enormous prestige, that people were willing virtually to ruin themselves just to be able to provide one. As for religious structures, many of these would have been rather smallish shrines, not big temples (although these are also present among recorded gifts), and hence not extremely expensive. Their prominence in the subset of whole buildings (Fig. 5.2) should therefore not surprise us. The relative cheapness of stoas (not universal: we know of very extensive and sumptuous examples too) we have already discussed. What all buildings with different locations in Figs. 5.2 and 5.3, perhaps with the exception of libraries (bath–gymnasium complexes, theatres, agoras, stadiums) have in common is that they were both expensive and essential to civic life and a proper citizen existence. I have just discussed bath–gymnasium complexes. Theatres were used for plays, shows, gladiatorial combats, wild beast hunts, all kinds of festivities, religious happenings, but also for mass meetings of the citizenry, in assembly, to honour a benefactor, or welcome a governor. Thus, theatres provided the citizenry with crucial venues for collective entertainment, festivity, and the expression of communal feeling and popular political will. The centrality of the agora to civic life hardly needs explaining. Most agoras combined the functions of local market, place of worship, venue for social interaction and sociability, centre of competitive elite display (in the form of monuments and statues) and stage for general architectural and sculptural splendour. Hence, in a very literal sense, the agora was a centre of civic life. The stadium, again, would be crucial to certain types of public entertainment, the absence of which would be unthinkable in a truly civilised Greek urban community. As a venue for horse racing, athletics and other forms of sport and competition, with citizens as both spectators and participants, the stadium was indispensable. In fact, the comparison between Figs. 5.2 and 5.3 underscores in a crucial way the sheer importance to civic life of the structures just discussed, and hence their popularity among elite benefactors.
(16) For what the comparison primarily reveals is the absolute determination of elite benefactors to contribute to just this set of structures, despite the highly costly nature of many of the buildings in question. These were the buildings a benefactor was supposed to provide his fellow citizens with, no matter how expensive they were. If that meant that many such benefactions could only be partial contributions (embellishments, restorations, and gifts of architectural elements), then this did not trouble most donors too much. What mattered was that one was seen to be contributing to precisely those public buildings that so crucially marked out the civic character of the community, and that were so essential to the day-to-day experience of civic life. By contributing to these types of buildings, elite members would thus be able both (as individuals) to maximise prestige and (as a collective) to show that they lived up to their part of the bargain by providing their non-elite fellow citizens with precisely those architectural amenities which were indispensable to civic life.”
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(17) Arjan Zuiderhoek, “The politics of munificence in the Roman world- Citizens, elites and benefactors in Asia Minor”, Cambridge University Press 2009; “In his book on the Salutaris foundation and in a seminal paper on the festival of Demosthenes at Oenoanda, Guy Rogers has specifically, and, to a large extent, convincingly, stressed the importance of the political processes surrounding major acts of euergetism. And, though there has been some criticism, other ancient historians have tended to follow suit. In particular, Rogers has pointed out the role played by the demos in determining the outcome of proposed acts of munificence. It is specifically this element of his analysis that I want to elaborate in the context of the general thesis on euergetism developed in this study. Though the bouleutai represented the effective ruling class of the cities of the Roman east, the rest of the population was by no means completely powerless politically. To begin with, the non-elite citizenry could simply rebel. This might cause serious trouble for the elite, and they did their utmost to avoid it. And, as is one of the main themes of this study, euergetism was in fact a crucial element in their strategy of conflict-avoidance. Secondly, however, and this is vital, euergetism was fundamentally a process of exchange. Generous elite members wanted something in return for their gifts. And the things they wanted – honours, prestige, and, with an eye to their role as members of the ruling elite, social stability and the legitimation of their elite position – could only be secured from the demos, the non-elite citizenry. Up to a point, this fact afforded the demos a measure of control over the behaviour of their elite superiors, at least when it came to munificence.
(18) Passim: The people could (and sometimes did)69 simply refuse to bestow any honours on a benefactor. A politically shrewd benefactor would therefore allow some room for participation of the demos in the deliberations concerning the eventual outcome of his munificence, as Salutaris did at Ephesos, and Demosthenes at Oenoanda. Fellow elite members, however, could not be ignored either. Euergetism was a field of intense competition between elite individuals for honour and prestige, and a potential benefactor would be very unwise to bypass the boule during the planning phase of his munificence. The boule would be sure to claim a role for itself, would aim to prevent the rise of political mavericks, would attempt to make sure that one single individual did not gain too much prestige, and that some of the prestige gained would rub off on the council as a whole. Through the processes of deliberation taking place in the boule and the assembly after the benefaction had initially been proposed, other elite members and the nonelite citizenry would thus be able to influence both the nature and the shape of the eventual benefaction to their own advantage. However, the benefactors themselves also gained from the whole process. The devotion of large amounts of political time and energy to the benefactions of members of the ruling elite only served to underwrite the latter’s crucially important position at the head of the civic hierarchy. Thus context and meaning were added to their leading political role and to their generosity, by integrating both of these deeply into the social and political fabric of contemporary civic society.
(19) Passim: If this model of background negotiations and participation of boule and demos in the political processes surrounding benefactions is true for most benefactions we know of from the Roman east (as I think it is), then an important conclusion follows. This is that virtually all benefactions we know of, recorded as they were on honorific or building inscriptions, represent cases in which the euergetist system had ‘worked’. If the background negotiation model is broadly correct, it means that, in all these cases, the benefactor had got what he/she wanted in terms of prestige, legitimation and so forth. But it also means that the non-elite citizenry had been able to ensure, as far as was within its power, that the benefaction concerned would be such that they, as citizens, would gladly receive it, as befitting their status and preferences as members of a polis community. It implies that the ideas and ideologies concerning civic cohesion and civic hierarchy which we see represented in many acts of munificence, and which have been the subject of this chapter, by and large found broad acceptance among both elite benefactors and the non-elite recipients of their generosity. For, if any of the above conditions had not been fulfilled, the benefaction would never have made it through the negotiation process, and would never have reached the final stage of the honorific inscription. Ultimately, then, the thousands of honorific inscriptions for benefactors we have left from the Roman world constitute the surest indication we have for the success of the euergetist system in heading off social and political conflict. Precisely because they survive in such great numbers, however, the inscriptions are also our best evidence for the existence in theGreek cities of the Roman east of a constant necessity to invest in the prevention of such social conflicts.
(20) Passim: The system of exchange of benefactions for honours could never grind to a halt, on penalty of severe social disorder. What were the potential sources of such disorder? We have discussed in much detail the vastly expanding wealth of the elite and the increasing oligarchisation of socio-political life, together creating huge disparities of wealth and power within the citizenry, as one such source. To a large extent, these tendencies might explain the sheer proliferation of euergetism in the second century ad, when its function of maintaining social cohesion within the citizenry was needed more than ever before.We have also briefly discussed the consequences, for an oligarchic and hierarchically structured society, of a demographic regime of harsh and unpredictable mortality, and the high degree of social mobility it generated. We have seen how the constant upward and downward movement of families through the hierarchy represented a threat to the very continuation of the hierarchy itself, which could best be averted by a constant, ritual re-affirmation of the civic hierarchy, something to which euergetism was ideally suited. The preceding discussion, however, has provided us with yet another potential source of conflict. For the euergetist system did not always ‘work’. Elite benefactors and non-elite citizens might have entirely different opinions as to what types of munificence best served the needs of the citizenry, and in which way citizenship entitlements might best be honoured. The chance survival of a small inscription from Ephesos teaches us that resolving such a conflict might sometimes even involve the intervention of an authority no less than the emperor himself. The text, a letter of Antoninus Pius to the Ephesians dated to ad 145, reads:
(21) Passim: ‘Titus Aelius Hadrianus [Antoninus] Augustus Imperator Caesar, son of the divine Hadrian, grandson of the divine Trajanus Parthicus, greatgrandson of the divine Nerva, pontifex maximus, tribune for the eighth time, imperator for the second, consul for the fourth, father of the fatherland, to the officials of Ephesos, the council and the people. Greetings. / I learned about the generosity that Vedius Antoninus [a wealthy Ephesian notable] shows towards you, but not so much from your letters as from his; for when he wished to secure assistance from me for the adornment of the buildings he had promised you, he informed me of the many large buildings he is adding to the city but that you are rather unappreciative of his efforts. I on my part agreed with every request that he made and was appreciative of the fact that he does not follow the customary pattern of those who discharge their civic responsibility with a view to gaining instant recognition by spending their resources on theatrical shows and distributions and prizes for the games; instead he prefers to show his generosity through ways in which he can anticipate an even grander future for the city . . .’ // Clearly, in ad 145, the Ephesian demos held on to a somewhat different conception of the sort of benefactions that would fit the lifestyle of true citizens than did Vedius Antoninus the wealthy notable. Though, unsurprisingly, the epigraphic evidence is mostly silent on the topic, conflicts of this type may not have been particularly rare. Nor would they always have been particularly innocent. In fact, it may only have been the imperial intervention that caused the Ephesians finally, and belatedly, to acknowledge the generosity of Vedius, five years after the emperor’s original letter was sent. Evidently, the thin layer of homonoia that euergetism spread out over the social and political world of the eastern cities could be very brittle indeed.”
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(22) Arjan Zuiderhoek, “The politics of munificence in the Roman world- Citizens, elites and benefactors in Asia Minor”, Cambridge University Press 2009; “Analysing the main categories of benefactions we encounter in a large sample of gifts from Roman AsiaMinor, I argued that, in various ways, they all served the glorification of the Greco-Roman civic ideal.More specifically, benefactions primarily served to underwrite the continued importance of citizenship and the social cohesion of the citizen body by granting all citizens, regardless of wealth or social position, access to those amenities deemed essential to civilised urban life. Thus, elite munificence helped to keep alive the civic ideology which put the unified status group of citizens at the centre of the definition of polis society, in the face of strong countervailing tendencies that led to increasing disparities of wealth and political power within the citizenry. At the same time, euergetism reflected, and helped to propagate, a new hierarchical definition of the civic community. For, even though the citizen community remained of central ideological importance in the imperial Greek cities, the old Classical ideal of the political equality of all citizens made little sense in the oligarchic political environment of the Roman east. Hence the civic community was ideologically reconceptualised as a hierarchy of status groups, headed by the bouleutic elite that effectively governed the city. Such a redefinition was in line with the actual trend in civic society towards increasing hierarchisation (ordo-making), and, particularly in the area of festivals and distributions, benefactors contributed significantly to the propagation of the new ideal by continuously re-emphasising the importance of civic hierarchy.
(23) Passim: It is interesting to note that the hierarchies proposed in various distributions differ slightly in terms of their overall make-up. This leads to the conclusion that in each case a different bargain was struck between benefactor, boule and demos as to the proper definition of the society in which those involved thought they lived. Euergetism’s continuous re-affirmation of social hierarchy served still another purpose, however. The continuous, high rate of social mobility generated by the severe mortality regime of the Roman world presented a constant threat to the establishment of durable social hierarchies. In terms of the ‘personnel’ inhabiting the various ‘sections’ of the social order, society was in a constant state of flux. And who was to say that newcomers would always stick to the old ways and means? To keep this process of continuous change as changeless (in terms of maintaining the social and political order) as possible, a constant, unceasing re-affirmation of the hierarchical ideal to which society was expected to aspire was therefore a vital necessity. Here was a task that euergetism, being the preserve of the chief beneficiaries of the hierarchical system, could perform exceptionally well. One element has been conspicuously absent from the analysis of benefactors’ gifts presented in this chapter, and that is the role of the imperial exemplum. This absence is not without its reasons, and I shall give them here. Roman emperors were great public benefactors, as a casual glance at Suetonius’ biographies or the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, or, for that matter, collections of published inscriptions from just about anywhere in the Roman world will confirm. They gave to the population of Rome (Juvenal’s famous panem et circenses), to cities in Italy, and to cities in the provinces. And certainly, among local benefactors in the provinces, there is bound to have been some emulation of the emperor, or at least local benefactors and emperors often contributed the same sort of things, public buildings and festivals.
(24) Passim: I do not think, however, that the imperial example was one of the main driving forces behind the proliferation of provincial munificence during the late first and second centuries ad. Euergetism as a phenomenon pre-dated the Roman emperors by several centuries: it was essentially an ‘invention’ of late Classical/Hellenistic Greek civic culture. It was practised by both local elites and Hellenistic kings, and, during late Republican times, easily blended in with the Roman traditions of electoral gift-giving and patronage. Euergetism had been very ‘civic’ in character from the outset, focusing, as it did in imperial times, on the citizenry, and consisting primarily of public building, games and festivals, and distributions. It would thus be more accurate to say that, with the onset of the Empire, Roman emperors modelled their behaviour as benefactors very much on the euergetism of Hellenistic elites and, particularly, Hellenistic kings (though of course Rome’s own tradition of electoral public gifts and distributions was also a major influence). If the Roman imperial system had a major influence on the proliferation of public giving, as it surely did, then this was through the internal changes which the incorporation of the eastern cities into the imperial structure brought about in civic society, i.e. the growing oligarchisation of political life, and the increasing accumulation of wealth in the hands of tiny groups of rich families (see Chapter 4).Emperors, in fact, found themselves confronted with the same problem as the provincial oligarchies of rich citizens, only in even more acute form. For how could emperors effectively reconcile the naked truth that they were the absolutist rulers of a military empire with the – legitimating – ideological fiction that they were merely principes, first citizens among a large community of (Roman) citizens?
(25) Passim: To some extent, the Roman division of society in distinct ordines took care of the job: some citizens were simply better than others. Greater virtue, however, had to show from actions to be believable, and hence good emperors, like good notables in the provincial cities, had to demonstrate their possession of the cardinal virtues of philotimia, philopatria, liberalitas and so forth by public displays of care for 78 SeeGordon (1990). Also, the emperor’s name and/or image appeared on the buildings and during the festivals benefactors donated, and in the honorific inscriptions they received in return, but then the emperor was omnipresent in almost every other aspect of imperial public life (think of the coinage, the dating of documents and so forth). The references to the emperor in munificence simply show that euergetism conformed to the representational standards of Roman imperial public life, that is, it spoke the language of Roman power. This is a fascinating topic, worthy of investigation as such, but it does not, I think, provide a sufficient explanation for the peculiar proliferation of elite public generosity in the eastern provinces during the high Empire. For that, we have to look primarily to the effects incorporation into the Empire had on the internal socio-political dynamics of polis society.
(26) Passom: In this sense, emperors, senators and knights, and local notables, were simply all in the same boat. Hence, they sought similar ideological solutions: besides the reference to the virtues of the ‘good leading citizen’, characteristic of both imperial and local munificence, both emperors and local notables can also be seen to have employed the discourse of the family, with leading citizens being cast in the role of ‘fathers’ of their community,80 and the emperor as the pater patriae, the father of all. Local elites could certainly capitalise to some extent on the fact that they did for their fellow citizens what the emperor did for all, but it was the reality of power, its increasingly unequal distribution within the citizen bodies of the provincial cities, and the social tensions this created, not imitation of imperial example, that primarily drove the proliferation of munificence in the high Empire.”
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(27) Arjan Zuiderhoek, “The politics of munificence in the Roman world- Citizens, elites and benefactors in Asia Minor”, Cambridge University Press 2009; “MarcelMauss famously defined gift-exchange as a continuously re-enacted ‘peace contract’ between different social and/or ethnic groups in what he termed ‘archaic’ (i.e. pre-modern, non-western) societies. With its stress on reciprocal exchange as a mechanism for the preservation of social order, Mauss’s model would seem ideally suited to form the point of departure for any account of euergetism, which after all also involves the reciprocal exchange of gifts for honours. There is a drawback, however. The Maussian model, and its various offspring among anthropologists working in the substantivist tradition, was primarily developed to explain the maintenance of social stability in societies lacking formal institutions of government to which a monopoly on the use of violence could be entrusted. The Greek city, however, did have such formal governmental institutions: council, assembly, magistrates, courts and so forth. This fact should truly be central to any analysis of euergetism. Preservation of social stability was indeed a primary function of euergetism, but this preservation took on a very different shape than it did in Mauss’s ‘archaic societies’. It primarily concerned the prevention of conflicts arising within the civic institutional structure.
(28) Passim: That is, euergetism functioned to prevent, ease or overcome potential or actual social conflicts between elite and nonelite citizens resulting from increasing disparities of wealth and political power within the citizenry during the first two centuries ad. Such conflicts found their institutional expression mainly in clashes between boule and demos/assembly, which are quite often attested in the sources from the Roman east. What euergetism did, and that is the central argument of thischapter, was to function as a medium for establishing the legitimacy of the oligarchic socio-political order that had arisen, and continued to develop towards even greater oligarchisation, within an institutional configuration still largely, if remotely, based on the Classical democratic polis. This was one of the ways in which euergetism served to prevent the social conflicts that were bound to arise frequently from such a politically schizophrenic situation. … While political power slowly became the prerogative of a small minority of rich citizens, the members of this elite increasingly felt the need to display their moral superiority by means of various kinds of public contributions. On them rested the burden of proof to show that they truly deserved their elevated position on account of their innate virtuousness. Again, it was deeds that counted. The more privileged the position of the governing elite became, the more individual members had to give evidence of their moral superiority, and they had to do so in hard cash.
(29) Passim: Aristotle, sharp observer that he was, clearly saw the price the rich few had to pay if they wished to hold on to their positions of power: he magistracies of the highest rank, which ought to be in the hands of the governing body, should have expensive duties attached to them, and then the people will not desire them and will take no offence at the privileges of their rulers when they see that they [i.e. the rulers] pay a heavy fine for their dignity. It is fitting also that the magistrates on entering office should offer magnificent sacrifices or erect some public edifice, and then the people who participate in the entertainment, and see the city decorated with votive offerings and buildings, will not desire an alteration in the government, and the notables will have memorials of their munificence. Here, then, lies the origin of the system of public benefactions we call euergetism. The proliferation of benefactions and honorific inscriptions characteristic of political life in the post-Classical Greek city testifies more clearly than anything else to the pressing need of the members of its elite to acquire ideological legitimacy for their positions of power. The ideological ‘model’ developed in the earlier periods of Greek history as a solution to the problem of social and economic stratification in an egalitarian polis society proved to be eminently flexible. This ‘model’, centred on the notion of the rich man behaving as an …… who showed his philanthropy, generosity and patriotism by using his individual resources for the benefit of the community, in fact became the core notion of the new, more hierarchical, political culture that took shape in the oligarchic post-Classical Greek city.
(30) Passim: It is in essence this ideology of the notable who owes his powerful position to his virtuous character as exemplified by his benefactions to the community that we encounter in the Greek honorific inscriptions from the Roman imperial period. In this same period, the oligarchisation of political life in the Greek city reached its final stage with what H.W. Pleket has described as the internal oligarchisation of the urban councils. Increasingly, the councils became dominated by small groups of very rich, very influential families, the ….., or primores viri, as Hadrian calls them in a letter to the city of Klazomenai. These families alone among the urban upper classes possessed sufficient resources to make large benefactions frequently. More important in the present context, however, is the fact that their position at the very top of the urban status hierarchy provided them with a strong incentive often to display their moral excellence in the most grandiose fashion possible, and to have recorded, in an equally grandiose fashion, that they did so. As I wrote earlier, they had to show not only that they were good; they had to show that they were very, very good. …”
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(31) Charles Hainchelin, “Les origines de la religion”, Éditions sociales 1955; “Theorieën van Kautsky – Marx, in het manifest van de communistische partij, schreef dat het christendom de decadentie van de antieke maatschappij reflecteerde, een meer precieze aanwijzing, maar hij ging door om de decadentie, deze algemene crisis in de zijn compleetheid te organiseren. In het algemeen, volgens een slecht voorbeeld dat Karl Kautsky heeft gegeven, waarbij hij zich toonde op een abstracte en simplistische manier, die hem limieten opdrukte. / De slaven, werkers die niet tot vrijen werden getransformeerd, en feitelijk als productiemiddelen fungeerden. Doch zij produceerden niet genoeg, het geboortecijfer was zeer laag, het sterftecijfer was zeer hoog, en een economisch system gevestigd op de slavernij kon niet functioneren met alleen natuurlijke vermenigvuldiging. Ook waren er nieuwe oorlogen noodzakelijk om de effectieve bestanden aan arbeidskrachten aan te vullen, om zo de ergastules [werkkazernes] weer aan te vullen. Maar op het moment dat het christendom gaat opkomen, is het zo dat de nieuwe veroveringen aan de grenzen van het imperium, welke nodig zijn om nieuwe razzia’s voor mensen te organiseren, onmogelijk worden; de pax romana, als veelgeprezen, presenteerde zich nu niet als een werkelijkheid, in de tijd die volgde op de decadentie van de antieke slavernij, en nu, in de laatste jaren van de republiek, verhoogde de prijs van de slaven zich, onder het imperium, toonde hen versterkte tewerkstelling zich economisch onvoordelig en in het verloop van de IIIe eeuw – was het moment van de ineenstorting. Aan de andere kant, toonde zich ook geen vergroting van de arbeidsproductiviteit. Het werk van de slaaf werd niet voordelig ten opzichte van de vooruitgang in de techniek, men was vijandig tegenover dit initiatief, een volledige nieuwigheid, en men kende geen andere stimulans dan het geweld.
(32) Passim: Kautsky en zijn epigonen continueerden en bevestigden dat de Romeinse economie zich voorgaande karakteriseerden door het regime van de het grote eigendom, door het bestaan van de latifundia, die de vrije boeren vernietigde; de boeren, verdrongen door de campagnes, gingen naar de steden, zij stonden tegenover de stad, de rangen van het antieke proletariaat versterkend, de klasse welke door de Duitse sociaal-democratie benaderd werd alsof zij gelijk stond aan het moderne proletariaat; deze val van de boeren, die de militaire kracht continueerden, vernietigde ook de hoop op expansieve oorlogen. De maatschappelijke oudheid bewoog zich in een vicieuze cirkel. / Een bepaald tableau van de antieke economie, omvat een gigantische machine die altijd slaven en oorlogen vereist, is aantrekkelijk simpel; het onthoudt talloze juiste trekken, maar het heeft drie essentiële fouten, die haar waarde verminderen. / Vervolgens is er een appel aan het geografisch materialisme, dat meer betwistbaar is; het geografische milieu is, in feite, niet direct verantwoordelijk voor de politieke en ideologische bovenbouw. Haar actie is indirect, bemiddeld, het is fout om op directe wijze te praten over de indirecte invloed op de productie, want zij is variabel met de ontwikkeling van de productiekrachten. Op de tweede plaats schematiseerde Kautsky het exces van een complexe werkelijkheid, die hij analyseerde en die, wij zeggen het, geheel verschillend is van het tableau dat hij gaf; de gentiele maatschappijen die in ontbinding zijn, en bestaan aan de grens van het imperium, enz. / en tenslotte, en dit helemaal, vervangt het de analyse van de interne tegenstellingen door een appel aan de externe antagonismen; het imperium wordt opgerold onder de herhaalde slagen van de barbaren [de Germaanse these van de feodaliteit], maar hoe was het nu met de interne uitholling? En de Romeinse vrede, kon die een andere keus zijn dan de consequentie van deze interne decadentie? Men merkt voorzichtig op dat de financiële moeilijkheden minder kostbaar waren dan de oorlog, die ervoor zorgde dat men ondersteuningen moest betalen aan de Germaanse stamhoofden. Met Kautsky, wordt de oorlog – de externe – en niet de strijd van de klassen de motor van de geschiedenis. /
(33) Passim: Als, in Italië en Sicilië, in de eerste eeuwen, de landbouw domineerde, op de Griekse wijze – en als Griekenland deel uitmaakte van het Romeinse imperium – ontstond er een maatschappelijk karakter dat meer handelsgericht was. Wat meer is, de latifundia, wiens formering de definitieve overwinning van de grote slavenhouders bevestigde, kwamen we niet tegen in ieder deel van het Romeinse rijk, zij domineren allen in Italië, in Sicilië en in Spanje. Zes grote grondbezitters bezitten de helft van Afrika. Nero is er een van. [Plinius, ‘Naturalis Historia’] In deze enorme bezittingen, bestaan alle werknemer bijna helemaal uit slaven, en het slechts effect dat het slavenwerk altijd heeft is zeer bekend, maar het was het zelfde in Syrië, in Egypte, landen waar de landbouwproductie een enorme rol speelde in het leven van het imperium, en waar pachters of semi-pachters bestonden. / Zeker, ging de slavernij voort met de dominerende vorm van exploitatie te zijn, maar het was niet noodzakelijk zo dat we kunnen weten dat het vrije werk volledig verdwenen was. Men vindt ook loonarbeiders op de velden in het zomerseizoen, zeker op het moment van de oogst, het hooien, en de wijnoogst – de stedelijke corporaties gingen hier nog een ongetwijfeld belangrijke rol spelen. / Wij kunnen deze voorbeelden van de vergissingen die door Kautsky nog zijn begaan vermenigvuldigen. / Wij kunnen tegelijkertijd niet vergeten dat de lijnen die Rome, de hoofdstad van het imperium verenigen, ook middellandse zee landen zijn die, volgens de uitdrukking van Marx, zelf dienen als voetstuk. Rome leefde ook afhankelijk van de aristocratie, die zelf ook afhankelijk was van de enclaves en de provincies [doeleinden van de overwinningen, contributies van de oorlog, om daarna methodisch geëxploiteerd te worden]. Het waren alle provincies van Kleinazië en Syrië die leden onder deze exploitatie, de slavenrazzia’s; de massa’s waren hier arm en gedemoraliseerd, net zo god als in Rome en in Italië. Teksten van Latijnse auteurs, onder andere Cicero, tonen de verschillende afdrachten, die later uitgeleefd werden door middel van speculaties ten bate van de geldschieters, de proconsuls, de gouverneurs van de provincies. /
(34) Passim: Wat meer is, in de veroverde landen, vernietigt de invloed van Rome de oude sociale tostanden; de introductie van het Romeinse recht, de gouverneurs van Rome, het grote tribuut verandert ook het leven van de gens, en deze veranderingen, zetten de tendens tot nivellering [en tot aan de slavernij, het enige juridische verschil dat telt in de bevolking, is dat tussen Romeinse burgers, zolang er nog niet veel zijn] voort, welke zich vervolgens reflecteert in de religie, de locale culti verloren beetje voor beetje hen getrouwen, de verborgen ceremoniën telden minder en minder menigten, enz. In al deze domeinen werd er een zekere unificatie plaats, helemaal in de expansie van een ‘universele religie’. Die van het christendom. / Tot aan de Ie eeuw, verkreeg Rome van alle landen die het rijk uitmaakt een enorme kwantiteit aan waarden, maar ondertussen veranderde de situatie, De campagnes van Rome, voorzagen de graanzolders van de stad, maar ook de dienstkleding en het vlees van de troepen. De minder vruchtbare gronden, of de meer uitgeputte, worden verlaten. De eigen defensie schrijft voor dat Rome graan uit Egypte importeert. Rome weet zich onder de industriële en handelsafhankelijkheid van het Oosten, en dat is wat de campagnes verklaart van Crassus, Antonius, Diocletianus, enz. … Een gedeelte van het rijk gaat verder onder het oosterse despotisme van het late imperium. De handel met het buitenland is er ook nog, met China en met India, bijvoorbeeld, en de landen die in dit verband effectief doorgaan met de doorgangshandel – in de eerste plaats Egypte, Palestina, Syrië – kregen vervolgens ook een bijzondere betekenis, helemaal de havens. Egypte dreef handel met het verre oosten door de Nijl en het Rode meer. Deze stad ontving van China de zijde, het kaneel, het porselein; van het verre oosten, de kruiden, de specerijen; uit India, diamanten, parelen, kostbaar hout, goud; uit Arabië: wierook; in Antiochië arriveerden de karavanen uit Iran en Turkestan, welke zelf ook producten verkregen uit China, verschillende soorten hout; deze landen exporteerden de handel die zij verkregen naar Rome, en dat is waarom zich in deze stad, in Italië en in Gallië zich koloniën van oosterse handelaren vestigden, die de oosterse culti met hen meebrachten.”
Marx Caesar Asimov 