Preliminary Programme

The phenomenon of euergetism seems to be a well-known subject for Hellenistic Greece, after P. Veyne’s (1976) and Ph. Gauthier’s (1985) monographs, dedicated to what appears to be a “fait social total”. Both studies have greatly enlightened its sociological and political aspects, but the economic impact of individual benefactions has not yet been thoroughly, nor systematically, analyzed, apart from the role played by kings and princes (see e.g. Kl. Bringmann’s works). As L. Migeotte states, in an article entitled “L’évergétisme des citoyens aux périodes classique et hellénistique”, Xe Congrès international d’épigraphie grecque et latine, 1992 [1997], « un bilan d’ensemble est ici presque impossible à présenter, car cette question n’a fait l’objet jusqu’à maintenant d’aucune étude relativement systématique, ni même à ma connaissance, d’aucune recherche précise qui aurait, par exemple dans telle cité à tel moment, tenté d’évaluer le rôle financier des évergésies en relation avec d’autres ressources publiques ». Despite this situation, the theme appears to be a crucial one, through which one can offer a close scrutiny of the relationship between wealth and power and its potential evolution throughout the whole Hellenistic period. It allows hopefully to answer such questions as who possesses economic power in the cities, the state or a few wealthy individuals, and what role civic institutions play in the process, the idea being that the control exercised by institutions (as shown by Gauthier) doesn’t necessarily imply that the polis still maintain a real economic power. Therefore, this paper will aim at evaluating, based on a few well-documented case-studies and a quantitative approach, the role played through benefaction by individual (local and foreign) wealth in civic expenses. (Show less)

Il s'agit de reconsidérer la place de la richesse et de l'enrichissement dans la poésie grecque archaïque en terme de représentation et de réévaluer la part du cadre de la production poétique dans l'image qui nous est donné des rapports sociaux. Les travaux de I. Morris ont permis d'appréhender le corpus en terme de répartition bipolaire (appartenance ou non à la"middling ideology")et de proposer une grille de lecture pour l'ensemble de la poésie archaïque. Il s'agit ici d'aborder la question des particularismes régionaux. (Show less)

From the IVth century BC, the ancients (mainly Aristotle and Plutarch) described the context in which Solon became archôn as a stasis, a violent civil strife opposing a great number of poor Athenians to a small group of wealthy land owners. In Solon’s poems, which were composed during these troubled times, we find the same antagonism between the rich, having money and power, and the poor, claiming for a new sharing out of land. Moreover Solon’s poems prove that at this time some « nouveaux riches » existed in the Athenian society, wealthy people but set apart from the others by their birth or occupation. At the reading of Solon’s poems it seems obvious that, at this time, some Athenian did not accept anymore the traditional structures of the Athenian society and political system in which birth and wealth legitimated political power. What did Solon try to do to bring back social and political concord in his homeland ?

First we shall try to specify what Solon meant by « the poor » and « the rich » in his poems : who were they ? what were their claims ? This could only be possible by a precise analysis of Solon’s socio-political vocabular.
Then we hope to make clearer some crucial historical points :
1 – From a socio-economic point of view, Solon certainly tried to remove some unfair practices (as debts bondage) but did not remove the distinction between rich and poor (he did not give satisfaction to those who claimed a new share of land, for exemple).
2 – From a political point of view, wealth remained the fundamental criterion of political power. But two main changes must be mentionned : first, political power seems to be based, at least in theory, on wealth only and not birth – Solon clearly avoided to oppose the « well born » to the others as far as political power is concerned ; second, the poorest are not excluded from any political role : it seems that, from Solon’s laws, the fact that they are admitted to the ecclesia became an essential political right, that they share equally with the rich.
3 – But from a legal point of view, laws are the same for all Athenian, rich or poor, well born or not. This is the only way to ensure eunomia and cohesion in the political community. And, to some extent, some poems of Solon already announce the Clisthenian isonomia. (Show less)

The notion of economic power has many useful aspects, two of which will be at the center of the present contribution. The first is that it reminds us that power matters in economics, and that economics are not a world separated from other aspects of social evolution, even if embeddedness in the classical, polanyian sense not always allows a satisfying description of facts. The second is that economy and its structure can be part of a more general structure of power and sustain or modify the equilibrium of other types of power, and therefore the history of politics (‘le politique’) cannot be separated from economic history: this marks the limits not only of the classical political history (‘histoire bataille’) which has so often been the aim of critics, but also the limitations of the new history of the politics successfull in France since the 80s. The paper will begin with a brief assesment of these two points in a historiographical perspective in which Perry Anderson’s critics of postmodernity will be essential, but the main aim is to assess two aspects of economic power in archaic Greece.
1. Power in the economy: the mobilization of workforce in the agriculture
Before classical slavery, a number of statuses exist in the 7th and 6th centuries throughout the Greek world. They reflect the existence of many means of mobilizing workforce in a context of concentration and augmentation of wealth. Many of these statuses have their Near Eastern and even Italian or Iberian equivalents, a fact which should invite us to write an integrated history of the archaic Mediterranean and not of separated ethnic entities connected only by orientalizing prestige objects. This will rely on conclusions from a colloquium I organized in Athens at the end of 2008.
2. Economics in the economy of power
The evolution of power in Archaic Greece is often interpreted as a change from a traditional domination based on the large family or clientelism towards a more institutionalized political power accompagned by a more exploitative economic power based on slavery. This should be described in more precise terms to avoide the abstract and anachronistic history of the absolute creation of politics (our politics) in Greece. The consequences of economic transformation in the political evolution of Greek cities lead to a reassesment of the importance of social movements, particularly from the peasantry, in the shaping of civic institutions. This leads again to an integrated mediterranean history as opposed to the structuralist version of the Greek miracle in politics. (Show less)