Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations of Epigraphic Corpora
- Maps
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Rhodian Democracy
- 3 The Oikos
- 4 Public Associations
- 5 Private Associations
- 6 Private Associations and Human Resources
- 7 The Civic Aspirations of Private Associations
- 8 The Corporate Polis
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- General Index
7 - The Civic Aspirations of Private Associations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations of Epigraphic Corpora
- Maps
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Rhodian Democracy
- 3 The Oikos
- 4 Public Associations
- 5 Private Associations
- 6 Private Associations and Human Resources
- 7 The Civic Aspirations of Private Associations
- 8 The Corporate Polis
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- General Index
Summary
No ancient author as far as we know ever undertook a comprehensive description of the association phenomenon. When ancient authors did comment on private associations it was usually with scepticism and occasionally with outright criticism. For Polybios, private associations were directly responsible for the downfall of the formerly proud people of Boeotia:
For childless men, when they died, did not leave their property to their nearest heirs, as had formerly been the custom there, but disposed of it for purposes of junketing and banqueting and made it the common property of their friends. Even many who had families distributed the greater part of their fortune among their clubs, so that there were many Boeotians who had each month more dinners than there were days in the calendar.
Though Polybios does not condemn the activities of associations as such, he is nevertheless clear about the detrimental effects the association habit had on the state. Associations turned the attention of the citizens away from political society and had a damaging effect on the family too.
Livy was less restrained in his criticism of associations, both of internal matters and of their effects on the state. Associations enter his history of Republican Rome through the vehicle of a Greek sorcerer, who preached a gospel of drunkenness and sexual depravity in Etruria. From there it soon spread to Rome, according to Livy, who has Hispala, a freedwoman with some knowledge of the group, divulge their secrets to the consul:
At first that shrine had been limited to women, she said, with no male admitted there. They had three days a year set aside for initiation in the Bacchic rites in a daylight ceremony, and married women were usually appointed to the priesthood in turns. It was Paculla Annia, a priestess from Campania, who had made the radical changes, supposedly at the prompting of the gods. She was the first to have initiated males (her own sons, Minius and Herennius Cerrinius) and she had made it a nighttime as opposed to a daylight ceremony, with five days of rites per month instead of three in a year. Ever since the rites were integrated, with men mixed with women, and with darkness giving participants freedom of action, there was no crime and no shameful act omitted from them.
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- Information
- The Politics of Association in Hellenistic Rhodes , pp. 129 - 159Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020