'Bread and Circuses'

Euergetism and municipal patronage in Roman Italy

Tim Cornell, Kathryn Lomas, Tim Cornell, Dr Kathryn Lomas, Kathryn Lomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134756315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Cities in the ancient world relied on private generosity to provide many basic amenities, as well as expecting leading citizens to pay for 'bread and circuses' - free food and public entertainment. This collection of essays by leading scholars from the UK and USA explores the important phenomenon of benefaction and public patronage in Roman Italy.
Ranging from the late republican period to the later Roman Empire, the contributions cover a wide range of topics, including the impact of benefactions and benefactors on the urban development of Roman Italy, on cultural and economic activity, and on the changing role of games and festivals in Roman society. They also explore the relationship between communities and their benefactors, whether these were local notables, senators, or the emperor himself, and examine how the nature of benefaction changed under the Empire.

1
THE PATRON AS BANKER

Thomas Wiedemann

A generation ago, analysis of the economic structure of the ancient world, where it did not concentrate on the effects of slavery, tended to be in terms of the polarity between a ‘primitivist’ and a ‘modernist’ interpretation. Early twentieth-century ‘modernists’ such as Meyer and Hasebroek emphasised those elements which seemed to have analogues in nineteenth-century economics such as the search for colonies in response to the need for raw materials, long-distance trade and increased population; the ‘primitivists’, influenced by Marx, Weber and Polanyi, saw the ancient economy as embedded in social structures and therefore quite different to a modern industrial world in which capitalism had made the economy autonomous and supreme. In his discussion in the 1970s of the origins of the Peloponnesian War, de Ste Croix minimised the role of the commercial interests which Cornford in the heyday of European imperialism had posited as controlling Athenian policy. Finley in particular preferred to see the ancient economy as based on small-scale units of production centred on the individual oikos or domus, and aiming at self-sufficiency rather than producing for the marketplace. ¹

Finley (and other scholars who followed Marx and Weber) appeared to have won the argument in favour of the ‘primitivist’ approach, and the view that antiquity was fundamentally unlike our own world continues to be important to the way in which it is represented by many social historians. But there is now a large corpus of detailed work on different aspects of the economy of the ancient world which shows that the two views do not need to be as mutually exclusive as Finley’s polemics made them seem. Finley’s lasting contribution to English-speaking scholarship was to draw attention to the importance of slavery and the primacy of agriculture. By the 1980s scholars – some of them Finley’s own students and collaborators – had moved on to look at the ways in which other kinds of labour were being exploited, and at the complexities of agriculture and manufacturing in specific contexts; amongst the new influences have been feminism and environmentalism.² It became clear that the model of the economically self-sufficient household, while a useful starting-point for an analysis of the ancient economy, was indeed only a starting point. Antiquity may have had institutions which, whether ‘primitive’ or not, were quite unlike those of the modern world, but they did not inhibit economic and commercial activity of great complexity – or at any rate, if they prevented some activities, they enabled other things to be done, in ways that might be quite different to those of the modern world. But it is perverse to be apologetic about the economic impact of (for example) a project such as the construction of Hadrian’s Wall because it employed a state-funded workforce with no formal negotiating rights and directed by state officials rather than venture capital freely provided by private individuals with a view to maximising their profits.³

A further element in recent years has been the interest in quantification and the recognition that accounting is not merely a fashion of modern business administration, but something that had been of major significance in Roman culture in particular.⁴ The Roman need to quantify will have had several roots. Apart from the unusual interest in census figures required by a state in which military requirements were given unusual emphasis, we may identify one such root in the competitiveness of political life: a simple way of proving one’s superiority over a rival to the electorate was by quantifying one’s deeds. Hence the sometimes nauseous precision with the number of enemies destroyed in battle is specified. Pliny the Elder tells us that the temple which Pompey dedicated to Minerva boasted of the 12,183,000 persons routed or scattered in battle or killed or surrendered, 846 ships sunk, and 1,538 towns and cities capitulated. Caesar’s account of the defeat of the Helvetii and their allies in 58BC gives figures for before and after. Statistics were broadcast of wounds received in battle and of decorations awarded (Pliny NH 7.97f.; Caes. BG 1.29.2f.; Pliny NH 7.101–6). We might also associate the Roman interest in statistics psychologically with the practice of successful imperial domination over long distances, and socially with the integration of Italy following the Social War and the development of a single market in land of a kind not seen again until the nineteenth century (Rawson 1976: 85–102). The landowner who had inherited or acquired estates all over Italy but spent most of the year in Rome needed statistical reports on a scale which had previously only been seen in the redistributive palace economies of the Near East.

The cultural effect is striking: we just have to think of the way Catullus notoriously quantifies erotic acts. Lesbia’s kisses are counted in hundreds and thousands. The poet’s ‘puella’ embraces 300 lovers; he hopes that intercourse will take place nine times in succession; the departing Caecilius is called back ‘milies’ by his girl; Ameana is described as mad for asking him for 10,000 sesterces for sex; Catullus wishes to kiss Iuventius’ eyes 300,000 times. But quantification occurs in a wide range of Catullan contexts: a friend (Furius) is worth more than 300,000 sesterces, and elsewhere told not to beg for 100; his villa is said to be mortgaged for 15,200. An enemy is threatened with 300 lines of hendecasyllables, one of Caesar’s officers lampooned for consuming 200,000 or 300,000 sesterces (Catullus 5.10f.; 11.18; 32.8; 35.8; 41.2; 48.3; 9.2; 23.26; 26.4; 12.10; 29.14.).

Quantification, accounting, financial management, were crucial in Roman culture. We have seen that they were used to make moral claims in the contexts of political competition and of erotic literature. But those who have assumed that they could be found in the context of anything like modern systems for supplying credit and investing savings have been disappointed. It may help to explain that absence of evidence if we distinguish between different functions to which the modern concept of banking is applied, and the different kinds of ‘bankers’ associated with them. Analyses of Roman bankers show that the range of services they provided did not correspond to that provided by modern bankers. Jean Andreau (1987), in his La Vie financière dans le monde romain, mentioned two main approaches to the topic, the legal and the philological. Kirschenbaum’s Sons, Slaves and Freedmen in Roman Commerce (1987) is very much in the first tradition, and Andreau’s own approach seems to be very much tied to the philological method which he criticises for restricting itself to literary texts. He carefully examines epigraphic as well as literary evidence for a range of Latin words, and then assigns some of them to the category of ‘bankers’: argentarius (provider of currency), coactor (debt collector, often on behalf of the state), stipulator (moneylender in the sense of creditor), nummularius (currency exchanger), mensarius (paymaster, including one who paid out coin on behalf of the state), and the Greek word trapezites; while the words saccularii (swindlers) and mutatores (dealers in goods), he decides, cannot be held to refer to financial activity. These groups of professional Roman money-handlers (those for whom, as for other traders and craftsmen, their skills provided their livelihood) typically were involved in dealings which were not just relatively small-scale, as short-term.

The distinction between a moneylender or pawnbroker and a banker may be a fluid one.⁵ But the professions identified by Andreau clearly did not provide Romans with the range of financial services of modern bankers. For leading, high-status figures such as the Rothschilds, Barings and Warburgs, we clearly have to look elsewhere, and Atticus is the obvious example of such a figure (Perlwitz 1992). He has nothing in common with the argentarii who changed money in the forum except that, two millenia later, both could be classified in modern European languages as ‘bankers’. Rather than analysing all possible Latin words for ‘banker’ (and incurring disappointment at the results), what is required is to look for the contexts of different financial activities within Roman society, as Edward Cohen and Paul Millett did so successfully for Athens (Cohen 1992; Millett 1991). This is not to suggest that the small-scale, short-term and low-status context in which argentarii etc. worked was not unimportant – Vitruvius pointed out how essential it was for someone laying out a new forum to provide for their booths (Vitruv. Arch. 5, 1.2) – but the sophisticated provision of credit and of investment opportunities occurred within a quite different context, not the familiar ‘market’ but the apparently ‘primitive’ context of the domus.

Recent studies have shown that it was the requirements of supervising the management of estates, especially over long distances, that lay behind the development of the competence of the procurator in Roman practice and law; his role should be seen as an extension of that of sons within the household, not a response to the needs of long-distance trade or shipping (Aubert 1994). The ‘modernists’’ mistake was not to assert that the legal powers and economic potential of the Roman procuratorship were sophisticated, but that they developed for reasons more familiar to nineteenth century economic practice but anachronistic in ancient terms. And it is within that same apparently ‘primitive’ context of the Roman household and its wider connections that the provision of financial services, no matter how sophisticated, should be located: in particular, the relationship which the Romans called amicitia, though in many cases the ‘friendship’ was so asymmetrical that it is properly translated as ‘patronage’ in English. As ancient texts discussing friendship make clear, friends are supposed to help each other not just with advice, but with money. Indeed, Seneca puts money first in the list he gives at De Beneficiis 1.2.4: ‘Help one man with your money, another by standing surety for him, another by applying your influence, another by giving him advice, another with helpful maxims’. Res, money, heads the list.⁶

If we want to see in which respects the management of money in the Roman world was a function of patronage, and how that affected the provision of banking services, it might help to consider the basic if banal distinction between accepting money, and providing money: deposits and loans. Economic historians sometimes seem to have been more interested in examining the provision of loans, large or small-scale, e.g. to governments or long-distance traders; assumptions about the superiority of medieval banking provision over that of the ancient world appear to be based on the ability to fund long-distance trade or travel (including crusading) and to provide for the financial needs of rulers and particularly of the papacy at one end of the spectrum, and to lend money in return for security on a small scale (i.e., pawnbroking) at the other. ⁷ But it is obvious that no banking operation can survive unless it attracts more money than it provides, in the form of deposits from investors as well as interest from debtors.

It has been held to be one of the characteristics of pre-capitalist cultures that producers do not produce so as to maximise income, but only to cover expected needs. But good harvests cannot be avoided any more than poor harvests. What could a Roman do with his surplus? A surplus of agricultural produce can of course be stored against time of need (though the storerooms and granaries of Roman villas are more likely to have been intended as protection against the annual shortages of the months before the next harvest than for long-term insurance). Alternatively, they can be marketed and converted into cash; agricultural textbooks note how important it is that estates should have access to road-or water-ways in order to minimise the cost of marketing surplus produce (Varro RR 1.16.2 and 6. On markets, Frayn 1993). But cash, too, needs to be securely stored. Providing such security has been one of the functions of modern banking systems; but at Rome that was not a service provided by any of the professions listed by Andreau. Treasure was kept in the house, in the strong-box (arca). If additional security was required – for instance, if someone would be absent from home for some time – it could only be provided by persons who both were more powerful, and could be trusted. One could assume that both conditions were fulfilled by the gods: their temples were structurally more resistant to damage than ordinary buildings, and also protected from robbery by laws against sacrilege. Temples or churches have always been normal places for depositing valuables securely.⁸ Alternatively, one could turn to a human ‘friend’. What was needed here was a guarantee that that person would return the deposit when it was needed; and that required, not the anonymity of a business arrangement with a professional banker, but a strong inter-personal bond the breaking of which would have dire consequences for any partner who felt powerful enough to do so. That bond was expressed by the Latin concept of fides, the responsibility which the stronger partner in an asymmetrical relationship had not to exploit the weaker. The emphasis of ancient sources on fides as a component in the unequal relationships between Rome and her allies, or of formal patrons to their clients, shows how the Romans found the psychological security that we have traditionally look for in our bank manager in their amici. Amicitia implies fides.⁹

The other aspect of financial provision is the need to borrow. Surpluses deposited in the arca or with amici regularly need to be drawn upon for family or household expenditure. There are predictable surges in e...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1: The patron as banker
• 2: Public building, urban renewal and euergetism in early imperial italy
• 3: The development of public entertainment venues in rome and italy
• 4: Euergetism in its place
• 5: The emperor and the cities of italy
• 6: Imperial building at rome
• 7: Favor populi
• 8: ‘Restored utility, eternal city’