Introduction
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Texte intégral
1The wealth of the sanctuary of Delian Apollo and of the Delians stirred up much envy even in Antiquity, but ultimately it has roused little interest among researchers. Ever since Théophile Homolle’s Les archives de l’Intendance sacrée in the late nineteenth century, many epigraphists have exploited the Delian documentation as a secondary source for analysing Delian society and institutions, the island economy, agricultural and pastoral activity in the Cyclades, and the building trade, while Apollo’s monetary wealth itself remained unexplored. True, the documentation looks off‑putting at first glance, even if the reading of the accounts illuminates the serried ranks of inscriptions with a host of minor details of everyday life.
2The challenge facing this research was therefore to understand how Delian prosperity emerged and thrived and to measure its effects on the visible growth of Apollo’s island down the centuries. This meant considering the sources as a continuity, without stopping at the political and institutional dividing lines, from the acts of the Athenian officials of the fourth century BC through to those of the second century BC, by way of the accounts of the hieropoioi which, between the two periods of Athenian domination, made up the interval containing the most information.
3This book is the continuation of a study I made of the administration of the Delian sanctuary in classical times.1 Analysis of the administrative construction developed by the Athenians from the fifth century onwards gave me to understand that it was in this first period of Athenian domination that the foundations of the Delian sanctuary’s prosperity, which also underpinned the prosperity of the Delian economy as a whole, were to be sought. The Athenian administrators had set up a system for the rational stewardship of the sanctuary’s assets that can be reviewed in detail through the wealth of information supplied by the accounting inscriptions. While establishing an administrative organization, they also shaped an effective financial instrument to serve Athenian power in the Aegean Sea.
4It was worth trying to understand, then, what became of this administrative system after the departure of the Athenians, from the time of Delian Independence, which, in 314 BC, saw the sanctuary become entirely the responsibility of the Delian city‑state. As was to be expected, the Delians inherited the organization established by the Athenians and continued it in large part, while introducing a number of changes both in the management of the sacred property itself and in the drafting of the administrative records. Between the late fourth and mid‑second centuries BC, they sought to align the administration of the sanctuary with their new political situation but equally to adapt it to the changing world around them. The administrative acts of the Second Athenian Domination, after 166 BC, in turn accounted for the changes made and I have endeavoured, insofar as the epigraphic and to a lesser extent archaeological records allow, not to limit this study to the period of Independence alone but to extend it to the second century BC.
5The Delian accounts, when it comes down to it, are the best history book of Delos. They can be read both as financial archives providing us with a statement of the sacred fortune and changes to it over three centuries, between the fourth and second centuries BC, and as the testimony of the slow and complex adaptation of a society to the monetary, financial and economic changes that the Aegean world experienced in Hellenistic times. The sanctuary does indeed appear to have been an exceptional resource for the city‑state of Delos that was in charge of it. That city‑state regularly took decisions reflecting issues that extended well beyond its territory: it merely reacted to a political, social and economic context while attempting to protect its interests. In the same way as the collective personality of a civic community may be apparent behind its institutions,2 one may perceive behind the accounting records the collective or individual choices and behaviours that bear witness to real people and that help to reconstruct the attitude of the Delian community in the face of economic and political changes in the world about them.
6After the end of Independence and with the island being returned to Athenian authority by Rome along with the proclamation of its status as a free port, the nature of the epigraphic records changed radically. The engraving of accounts was discontinued around 140 BC, a sign perhaps of a loss of interest for the heritage aspect of the public display of these monuments. The practices for managing the sanctuary probably continued, but the light they cast on the island society goes out for ever. And yet, the abundant dedications and a few decrees enable us to continue to monitor the changes that came about in the Aegean Sea.
7Accordingly the island of Delos, with its prolific epigraphic records, appears not as an exception to be set apart from the series, but on the contrary as a prime vantage point from which to study the transformations of the Aegean area during the Hellenistic period, from the reshaping of the Hellenistic kingdoms to the emergence of new maritime powers and to the development of Roman influence. This book is therefore a study in economic history that seeks, on the basis of the wealth of Delian documentation, to cast new light on both the understanding of the finances and markets of the ancient world, and also on economic behaviour.
8From this perspective, the book has three objectives:
91. To describe the complete state of the sacred fortune and understand its development.
Since the publication of the Delian accounts and inventories was completed, no study has sought to evaluate the whole of the sacred fortune, probably primarily because of the complex mass of figures to be handled. Some of the works that have skimmed over the question of the changes to the sacred fortune are based on misreadings of figures or misinterpretations of movements of monies. The present evaluation is based on several revisions of readings of the figures, sometimes mistakenly read on the stone and wrongly transcribed in the corpus. Photographs of the inscriptions and also squeezes representing an early state of the stones have made it possible to palliate the deterioration of several stelae that are less legible nowadays than they were when the corpus was first assembled. The squeeze collection of Théophile Homolle, in particular, at the Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres and provisionally deposited at the HiSoMA of the Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée in Lyon, has enabled several readings of numbers to be checked. Accordingly this work is preparatory to a subsequent stage, the re‑publication in digital form of the Delian administrative inscriptions (acts of the Athenian magistrates of the classical period, accounts of the heiropoioi of the period of Independence, acts of the Athenian officials of the period of the free port) by incorporating the contribution from the photographic records but also from the squeeze collections.3
10Several funds circulated between the sacred chest and the public chest ou chest and light needs to be shed on these different movements of monies in order to achieve an accurate interpretation of the data. A part of this study also concerns the public fund of the city‑state of Delos, not just because it too was housed in Apollo’s sanctuary, but above all because, during the period of Independence, the Delians had set up a system of interlinked coffers as attested by the movements of monies between the sacred fund and the public fund and the accounting statements of the two funds drawn up by the hieropoioi in the second century.
11There arises from this valuation of Apollo’s fortune a fresh take on the conception of the sacred in terms of finances that can nuance the traditional interpretation of the separation between things sacred and things public. On Delos as elsewhere, the complexity of financial situations is striking and extends beyond certain ready-made categories of historiography.
122. To understand the book-keeping methods and financial strategies that may have lain behind the development of the sanctuary’s fortune.
Through the study of the accounts and inventories, it is possible to make out the development of a genuine accounting organization which, over the years, built up effective methods and adapted its resources to achieve the necessary efficiency for managing Delian finances. The study of Delian financial organization also reveals the obstacles inherent in the system, which, when brought to light, can besides help to situate the Greek case more accurately in the general development of accounting systems and with respect to the issue of the development of “double-entry book-keeping”. The analysis of the changes in accounting methods, based on the technical terminology of the accounts, leads us at the same time to clarify several points relating to financial institutions, and in some instances to modify certain explanations previously put forward.
13The study of Delian accountancy is compounded by the examination of the monetary data available from Delian epigraphic sources. Their comparison with the numismatic facts as can be observed from coin finds, and especially for the coinage of the city‑state of Delos, accounts more completely for the financial and monetary situation of Apollo’s treasury. The chronology and metrology of the civic coinage, that can be established by cross-comparing the evidence of coins with that of the inscriptions, makes it possible to understand a number of expressions in the Delian accounts that had remained obscure.
14A clearer picture forms, then, of what might be called the monetary policy of the Delians, defined on the basis of the choices that took into consideration the monetary situation of the Aegean in the third and second centuries BC. The observations that can be made on the basis of the Delian accounts also have repercussions on our understanding of certain monetary phenomena and find parallels and confirmations in other financial documents at Delphi as in Boeotia. From this point of view, Delos is no exception but its particularly rich documentation makes it easier to grasp the monetary orientations of Hellenistic Greek city‑states.
153. To review the economic situation of Delos.
Once the financial, accounting and monetary framework has been laid out, it remains for us to relate the sanctuary’s financial situation to the island’s economic situation. Being necessarily focused on the sanctuary because of the sources, this review should, of course, be supplemented by specialists from other archaeological disciplines (ceramology and amphorology especially) to make it more complete. But what is foremost to achieve is a more accurate perception of the economic situation as revealed by the sanctuary’s documentation. Although the accounts of the hieropoioi have provided material for many economic analyses because of the price lists they contain, the nature of the market that transpires from these accounts remains controversial. Can these prices be read as the reflection of an economic situation and on what scale should they be interpreted: regional, Aegean, Mediterranean? What is revealed by the transition to the free port under the dual authority of Athens and Rome?
16The findings from the previous two points provide a sturdier basis for a synthesis of the Delian economy. The evaluation of the Delian treasury and of the civic finances related to it, the analysis of the island’s monetary situation and of the financial choices made by the administration of the sanctuary account for an economic potential that can now be tied in with the organization of the Delian market. The degree of technical proficiency achieved by the accounting methods, the degree of efficacy of the monetary and financial policies can, after a fashion and in a way that is invariably qualitative rather than quantitative, be used to measure the performance of the Delian economy, its capacity to respond to conjunctural difficulties and also an analysis of its impediments and its limitations.
17This study was first presented at the Ecole pratique des hautes études in June 2011 as an unpublished dissertation to earn the qualification of research supervisor, after which certain points were examined in more detail in a number of papers. This book, then, takes up, occasionally corrects and more widely develops the material of several of my early studies, part of the contents of which are often reworked here. On a number of points, analyses I had previously published seemed incomplete and the writing of this book has enabled me to take the interpretation further by means of the work on synthesizing the sources required for it.
18The Delian bibliography that has fuelled this study is abundant, both for the period of Independence and for the period of the free port.4
19The origin of this project, based on the study of Delian accounts, goes back to the pioneering and foundational work of Théophile Homolle, Les archives de l’Intendance sacrée à Délos, 215‑166 av. J.‑C. (1887) who, in exploiting the inscriptions that had just been revealed by the major excavations of the island, had realized that the accounts of the hieropoioi and the administrative acts held the key to understanding an entire society.
20My work draws largely on earlier studies of the institutions of independent Delos and especially Claude Vial’s Délos indépendante (1984), which efficaciously illuminated the specific character of the Delian institutions in their island context to identify thereby the characteristics and behaviours of a civic community. But it adopts a different point of view: whereas Claude Vial highlighted a distribution of tasks and remits among magistrates, I have begun with the analysis of the monetary funds, their nature or their purpose, in an attempt to understand how the Delians built their economic and financial relations with their environment.
21Gary Reger’s Regionalism and Change in the Economy of Independent Delos (1994), re‑opened the path to studies of the Delian economy while contributing to make known to an English-language readership what was very largely a French bibliography. This decompartmentalization has been very fruitful and even if my conclusions diverge from his in many respects, my work owes a great deal to his attempt to place Delos at the heart of the debate about the ancient economy.
22Léopold Migeotte has always taken an interest in Delian matters, whether the question of loans or the analysis of financial institutions. In his recent synthesis, Les finances des cités grecques (2014), he devotes a chapter of a hundred or so pages to the specific case of the Delian documentation, studying the organization of public and sacred finances of Apollo’s island. His account is primarily descriptive and sets out a state of organization of Delian accounts which I return to on several occasions. Despite a few disagreements already expressed elsewhere, it goes without saying that my work has benefitted extensively from his thorough knowledge of the financial institutions of the Greek world.
23The pages that follow also owe a great deal to exchanges developed both from regular consultation of a number of books and from discussions with their authors. May this Delian essay attest to my deep gratitude to Jean Andreau, Alain Bresson, François de Callataÿ, Raymond Descat, Christophe Feyel, Denis Knoepfler, Patrick Marchetti, Jean‑Charles Moretti, Olivier Picard, Denis Rousset and also in memoriam Philippe Gauthier, to whom I owe a love of Greek epigraphy, Philippe Bruneau who watched over the “Delian family”, Raymond Bogaert whom I had the good fortune to meet and Jacques Tréheux whom I did not know but have much read; this is not to forget all those who know how much I owe to their friendship and to their conversation.
Notes de bas de page
1 Chankowski 2008. Since, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, there was no “amphictyony” on Delos in charge of the sanctuary, unlike at Delphi, but an Athenian authority that enjoyed Delian cooperation, it is better to relinquish the misleading name of “period of the amphictyony” inherited from the corpus of J. Coupry, that is still sometimes used to refer to the classical period.
2 As shown by the C. Vial’s book on the Delian city‑state in the period of Independence (Vial 1984).
3 Chankowski 2013, pp. 952‑953. Appendix 1 contains several photographs supporting corrections to the readings.
4 See the historiographic review in Chankowski 2013, pp. 917‑918. See also the books by Constantakopoulou 2017 and Etienne et al. 2018.
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