Conclusion
p. 295-298
Texte intégral
1“The koinon of the Eleodytae”, or the eternal servants of the sacrificial kitchen: this is what, according to Athenaeus, the Rhenean Polycration son of Crithon called the Delians in a court hearing, mocking both the amount of time they devoted to organizing religious ceremonies and the advantages they derived therefrom. “Parasites of the god”, they were called by Crito the comic poet, expressing through this feeding metaphor the vital bond uniting the Delians and their sanctuary.1 The portrait of the Delians, created in Athenaeus by the collection of these different quotes, is one of a population characterized by a degree of obsequiousness, in an atmosphere of banquet preparations that was both servile and effeminate, in stark contrast with the traditional ideal of the citizen-soldier of other city-states. As viewed by others, Delians were different. Mocked above all by the Athenians, as was the case of Crito the comic poet, winner of the Dionysiae of 183 or 167 BC,2 the Delians and their marketplace had acquired an importance that could not even so, to Athenian eyes, rival that of the Piraeus.
2In countering Athenian claims by defining themselves, as early as the fifth century BC, as a “sacred people”, the Delians had tied their existence to the activity of their sanctuary.3 This role, from the period of collaboration with the Athenian authorities in the classical age – since, contrary to a misnomer, there was no “amphictyony” in the fourth and fifth centuries BC on Delos – meant they were to watch over Apollo’s sanctuary and they confined their city-state to political neutrality in terms of its relations with other communities. Liberated from Athenian guardianship in the late fourth century, they developed to the full their status as a sacred civic community in charge of the sanctuary.
3Parasites of the god, such were the Delians when they used the sacred fund as a reserve of credit for the spending of their city‑state, or when they had the god’s treasury finance public building projects, and also when, with the backing of their sanctuary, they promoted the formation of a market that ensured them more regular supplies than any other island in the Cyclades could have counted on. But the expression “parasites of the god” refers at the same time to the constraint that the great sanctuary of Apollo placed on the everyday life of the population: the attractive character of the temples and ceremonies meant the Delians had to share their land and the supplies in their marketplace with a large number of foreigners and islanders from the vicinity, but they also had to align their political decisions with the interests of the sacred chest that ensured their subsistence. The citizens who were designated to fill the charge of the hieropoioi devoted their time to a complex administration that involved both the management of the god’s land, property and monetary assets and also the fastidious stock-taking of some fifty talents of precious metal offerings built up over the centuries. The Delians were in the service of the sanctuary and shouldered its constraints while enjoying its benefits.
4The stewardship of Apollo’s estate, which could vie with some of the great private fortunes of the classical period and of early Hellenistic times, led them to develop accounting skills that were probably particularly refined compared with the position in other city‑states. By following the model introduced by the Athenians in classical times, the Delians managed to construct these highly effective management instruments that enabled the sanctuary to continue to finance from its own resources not only the ceremonies of religious life but also many building projects both in the public domain and the sacred domain, thereby creating a market that exploited the region’s capacities for economic development to the full. The sacred funds and the public funds were firmly interlocked, demonstrating that the religious rules of separation between the sacred and the profane did not extend to financial practices of profit-making. Aristotle himself concurred with this as regards the principles of life in the city-state: even some politicians managed to specialize their political activity in financial speculation techniques.4 This is also what the Delians sought to do for both their sanctuary and their city-state when they arranged contracts for construction and for the supply of materials so as to keep prices as low as possible, when they lent out endowment capital so as to make it fructify, or when they exploited the monetary diversity of the sacred and public cash holdings in loans or investments.
5In so doing, the Delians patently showed great inventiveness in terms of financial techniques and administrative policy. In attempting to maintain, in a constantly changing Hellenistic world, the interests of the sanctuary which they largely shared, they sometimes made errors of judgement or did not have sufficient authority to impose more favourable choices. This is what happened, for instance, with the depletion of the share of alexanders in the sanctuary’s cash holdings. In one sense, observation of monetary and economic changes in the Aegean shows that the model the Delians defended was doomed to failure: they had managed to develop an Aegean economic and financial centre, but without the military and political authority capable of sustaining its independence.
6We also have a better understanding, in the light of the island’s economic and financial situation, of what the independence of Delos was: foremost a form of neutrality that was reflected both by a diplomatic policy and by a policy of tax exemption, but without forming a power of arbitration or regulation even so. In monetary and financial matters, the Delians were alert to any major transformations in the Hellenistic Aegean and aligned themselves with the policies of Rhodes and the prevailing great powers. This is why the Delian records provide extraordinary insight into the Aegean economic situation, far more than into a regional context whose economic coherence seems debateable to say the least.
7Yet Rome’s take-over, under Athenian authority, of the economic and financial situation of Delos as from 167 BC did not end the neutrality of the trading post that the Delians laid claim to, and which achieved its most accomplished form in the cosmopolitism of the second and first centuries; nor did it end its role as a business centre that they had helped to develop and that reached its fullest extent in the context of the free port. The role of a storehouse that Delos had played ever since the fifth century BC did not fail over the centuries, so much so that the lex Gabinia Calpurnia proposed by the two Roman consuls of 58 BC attested to the role of Delos as a hub and an entrepot for the distribution of grain.5 This role as a warehouse, as a distribution centre, as a “reservoir” as the second-century inscriptions named it, relied on the drawing power of the trading place through forms of tax exemption by way of the ateleia that, from before 167 BC, exonerated at least some of the actors in the redistribution trade from customs duties. This fiscal choice, made initially by the Delians, was rendered possible by the prosperity of the entity formed by the city‑state and the sanctuary in close interaction. The presence of sufficient alternative income enabled the civic community to steer the island in this direction. The Roman authorities, in 167 BC, made it systematic by maintaining the continuity of this Aegean construction.
8Overall, continuity appeared stronger than change in the economic operation of the marketplace of Delos, with changes of scale from the fifth to the first centuries BC. Later still, after the Mithridatic crises, the lex Gabinia Calpurnia reaffirmed by a curious short‑cut this continuity of Delian history: … Delum insulam, in qua insula Apollinem et Dianam n[atos esse arbitrantur], vecteigalibus leiberari, quae insula post homnium me[moriam omnium] regum ceivitatium nationumque imperieis sacra leib[era immunis fuit], “… that this island, on which it is thought Apollo and Diana were born, be exempted of taxes, an island which, for all time, has always been independent of the authority of all kings, city‑states and peoples, divine property and exempted of taxes” (ID 1511, l. 10‑13).6
9Yet, significant changes arose also in the behaviour of the Delians themselves from the third to the second centuries. Delian society might be profoundly divided by them, as suggested by the few clues that show the development of more intensive and more competitive wheeling-and-dealing among the islands over the decades.
10It may have been this apprenticeship in profit-making techniques that, ultimately, prompted the Delians to escape their condition of “parasites of the god”. Despite its burdens, dependence on the sanctuary had long been a guarantee of stability for the Delians and for the regional economy alike. When they managed to put together a fund for purchasing public grain within the public treasury, in the way many other city‑states of the Greek world already had done, they stopped borrowing capital from the sanctuary in order to purchase grain that was sold on to the citizens in the marketplace, and set to managing the fund efficiently. When wood and charcoal provided an opportunity to turn a profit on the regional scale in the Delian market, some of the island’s inhabitants were probably tempted by the potential gains that speculation offered them, perhaps to the detriment of supplying the sanctuary at advantageous prices. The sanctuary, then, had ceased to serve as a protective screen between the Delians and the Aegean market. It had also ceased to be an instrument by which the city-state of Delos could regulate market activities.
11The status of “parasites of the god” therefore also characterized an economic system which disappeared with the creation of the free port in 167 BC: a financial and economic organization based on public capital, whether from the sanctuary or the city-state, rather than on individual wealth. The great financiers of the period of the free port could more than compete with what Apollo’s treasury had provided to the Delians. They had probably already been operating from before 167 BC for that matter. The disappearance of the Delian civic community, that gave way to Athenian administrative officials to ensure the everyday needs of the populations, transformed the island’s population into a colourful crowd, already settled in part before 167 BC, that fostered more profit and more competition: Athenians from good families eager to maintain their ancestral traditions, Greek, Italian and Oriental traders and businessmen, slaves and freedmen settled on the island.7 This population obviously needed provisions but it no longer shared the common interests that had for centuries united the community of Delians with the business of the sanctuary.
12As a vantage point for Aegean economic changes in Antiquity, Delos also made visible that other “great transformation”, to borrow Karl Polanyi’s expression, in the transition from regulation of the economy and finance on the scale of the city-state to a far more individualized form of confrontation of economic and financial interests. Not that this new form went unregulated: the power of Rome, on another scale, was already constructing a framework for it, as part of a rationale of empire.
Notes de bas de page
1 Athenaeus, IV, 173 b‑c.
2 IG II2 2323, l. 151 and l. 210.
3 Herodotus, VI, 97. Chankowski 2008a, pp. 144‑145 and 158‑159, on the Delians’ collaboration with the Athenian administration. In the quote from Criton (Athenaeus IV, 173c), it is most likely that the “law of the Amphictyons” written with ‑υ‑ for Ἀµφικτυόνων, refers to the Athenian magistrates of the classical period and not to the Delphic organization (Chankowski 2008a, pp. 45‑52 on the name of the Athenian magistrates on Delos in classical times). The Athenian authorities had secured the collaboration of the Delians for a number of subordinate tasks in administering the sanctuary.
4 The Politics, I, xi, 1259a, on the monopoly of oil presses rented by Thales.
5 Nicolet 1980, p. 99. The law of 58 BC abolished the vectigalia imposed on Delos probably by Sulla and restored the position of before the Mithridatic crises.
6 Translated from Nicolet 1980, p. 76.
7 On the communities to be found on Delos, see Roussel 1916 (1987); Rossi 2012 and most recently Müller 2017, who provides a review without any new elements.
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