Benefactors and the Polis: The Public Gift in the Greek Cities from the Homeric World to Late Antiquity

Description

Historians generally study elite public gift-giving in ancient Greek cities as a phenomenon that gained prominence only in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods. The contributors to this volume challenge this perspective by offering analyses of various manifestations of elite public giving in the Greek cities from Homeric times until Late Antiquity, highlighting this as a structural feature of polis society from its origins in the early Archaic age to the world of the Christian Greek city in the early Byzantine period. They discuss existing interpretations, offer novel ideas and arguments, and stress continuities and changes over time. Bracketed by a substantial Introduction and Conclusion, the volume is accessible both to ancient historians and to scholars studying gift-giving in other times and places.

Marc Domingo Gygax is Professor of Classics at Princeton University. He is the author of Untersuchungen zu den lykischen Gemeinwesen in klassischer und hellenistischer Zeit (2001) and Benefaction and Rewards in the Ancient Greek City: The Origins of Euergetism (Cambridge, 2016), which was joint winner of the 2017 Runciman Book Award. Arjan Zuiderhoek is an Associate Professor of Ancient History at Universiteit Gent. He is the author of The Politics of Munificence in the Roman Empire: Citizens, Elites and Benefactors in Asia Minor (Cambridge, 2009) and The Ancient City (Cambridge, 2017) and co-editor of Ownership and Exploitation of Land and Natural Resources in the Roman World (2015; with Paul Erdkamp and Koenraad Verboven), Imperial Identities in the Roman World (2016; with Wouter Vanacker) and Capital, Investment, and Innovation in the Roman World (2020; with Paul Erdkamp and Koenraad Verboven).