We have seen that public benefaction could cost a lot of time and trouble as well as money. It is natural to wonder, what was in it for the donor? Why did these wealthy citizens choose to adorn their cities more lavishly than their private villas? A crucial factor was their sense of an audience. A few dozen dinner guests was not audience enough. Well into the Roman period, Greeks clung stubbornly to the belief that the proper audience for an aristocrat’s identity-performance was the city. Wealth came from inherited land and the exploitation of rural labor, but one performed one’s entitlement to that inheritance in the city. Time and again euergetists were acclaimed in the theater as ‘‘Aristocrats, Olympians, Saviors, Nourishers’’ (D. Chr. 48.10). These moments of glorious recognition served both to establish social distance between the benefactor and his public, and to confirm the public’s exclusive right to validate that distance. One might say that the euergetist invested some of his wealth in envy-reduction. As Plutarch advised a wealthy citizen of Sardis, ‘‘the people think worse of a rich man who does not share his money with them than they do of a poor man who steals from common funds, for they think that a rich man [who does not perform liturgies] looks down on them and despises them... ’’ (Mor. 822a). Of course the envy that a rich man reduced in his inferiors might recrudesce in his peers, but from the people’s point of view, competition between benefactors was all to the good. Aristocrats certainly could be pressured by unfavorable comparisons with their political rivals; a crowd that could chant ‘‘Olympian!’’ could also scream ‘‘Cheapskate!’’ Aristocrats were also under pressure to live up to the munificence of their own parents and ancestors. Honorific decrees insistently note how the honorand renews the generosity of his or her forebears. Dio’s ancestors had been honored with statues and decrees, his mother even with a shrine (D. Chr. 44.3).
The most common forms of material recognition awarded to euergetists were statues and honorific decrees. These decrees were not intended to adorn the walls of the honorand’s private office. Rather, they were inscribed on stone walls and statue
Figure 12.2a The theater at Ephesus. Originally constructed in the time of King Lysimachus, the theater was frequently embellished by local benefactors. The typical imperial alteration, whereby the lower courses of seats were removed to facilitate beast hunts and gladiatorial combat is evident in this photo. The theater also offered a venue for citizens to protest, as in the story in the Gospel of Luke about the complaints of the silversmiths against the activities of Paul (photo courtesy of Sarah Levin-Richardson)
Figure 12.2b Tetrapylon at Aphrodisias. A tourist attraction in both ancient and modern times, the Tetrapylon, framing the approach to the temple of Aphrodite, was repeatedly rebuilt. The original civic building is a splendid example of second-century civic pride expressed in public architecture. Interestingly, the building was rebuilt in the fourth century, when the temple of Aphrodite was presumably less of an attraction than it was in the second century (photo courtesy of Sarah Levin-Richardson)
Bases in all the city’s most important public spaces. Indeed, the entire landscape of the city served as a mnemonic device. One could not move through the agora, the gymnasium, or the colonnaded streets without being reminded of the generosity and achievements of the city’s elite, extending back for generations. The wording and placement of these honors were the result of extensive negotiation and discussion in the council and assembly: ‘‘It seemed best to the Council and the people... to crown Diodoros with a gold crown and to construct for him an exhedra in the new gymnasium, between the solarium and the portico. . . in which a marble statue of him is to be erected...’’ (IGRR 4.293). Presumably the Council had more say in these details than the assembly, but even members of an occupational association might ask for permission to put up an inscription honoring a prominent citizen, and so get themselves on the map, as it were, of the city’s commemorative system (van Nijf2000).
Now it must be confessed that the public image presented by a Greek city’s official inscriptions - a harmonious sodality of gracious benefactors and grateful beneficiaries - is somewhat misleading. Not everyone was willing to spend who should have been, and some categories of persons had official exemptions. Educators and physicians performed a public service by exercising their professions. Therefore Hadrian ‘‘wrote that philosophers, rhetoricians, grammarians, physicians were immune from the offices of gymnasiarch, agoranomos, priesthoods, from the provision of lodging (to servants of the imperial government), service as buyers of grain or oil, that they were not to be jurors, ambassadors, or to be enrolled either in the army against their will or to be compelled into any provincial or other service’’ (D. 27.1.6.8 = Oliver and Clinton 1989: App. 9). Hadrian’s successor had to limit the number of such exemptions allowed in any one city:
The smallest cities may keep five physicians, three sophists, and the same number of grammarians free of liturgical duties. The bigger cities [where assizes are held] may have seven healers and four teachers of each type. The biggest cities [metropoleis] may have immunity for ten doctors and five rhetors and five grammarians... .There is no set number for philosophers, since philosophers are so rare. But I think that those who are extremely wealthy will offer the benefit of their wealth voluntarily to their hometown. For a person who quibbles about money shows himself no philosopher.
Aelius Aristides quibbled. A rhetorician born in the insignificant city of Hadria-notherae, he made his home at Smyrna, when not taking the cure at Pergamum’s sanctuary of Asclepius. Because he was a man of considerable wealth, he was pestered from all sides by demands that he perform liturgies. He resisted with energy remarkable in an invalid. First Smyrna tried to elect him high priest of the Imperial Cult. Then they nominated him tax collector. Clearly, Smyrna was not willing to count him as one of their liturgically-immune teachers of rhetoric. They had a point: he didn’t teach. But on the strength of his reputation as a ‘‘star’’ of Hellenism, Aristides appealed to the emperor, from whom he was eventually able to present letters affirming his immunity. Until these arrived, he trailed after the governor from one assize-city to the next awaiting various hearings. During this period his native city hopefully nominated him to the governor as a candidate for Chief of Police (here we can see in miniature how reluctance at the local level promoted Roman intervention in municipal affairs). In Pergamum, while waiting for his case to be called, Aristides received another summons, this time from Smyrna, appointing him prytanis (chair of a standing committee of the Council). When called before the governor, he delivered an oration that consumed five measures of the water clock. (‘‘More like a display performance than a lawsuit,’’ he noted with satisfaction in his diary.) The opposing advocate from Smyrna was stunned; he could muster only a few words. The governor sent him back to Smyrna with an order that Aristides’ immunity be confirmed (Aristid. Or. 50.68-103).
Clearly, too many such grants of immunity would weaken the system. Athletes, performing artists, and victors in the sacred games often were granted immunity; poets and surveyors sought it in vain (D. 27.1.6.13; 50.4.11.4; Millar 1977: 456-63 on athletes and performers). But the key change came in the fourth century when emperors began to reward those who held posts in the imperial civil service, along with the Christian clergy, with immunity from Council membership and the other liturgical obligations of their native cities. This change had the intended effect of shifting the focus of elite ambition away from the cities and towards the imperial court. The unintended effect of this change was to hamstring the fiscal system of the Greek cities.
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