Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome by Matthew B. Roller

Author:Matthew B. Roller [Matthew B. Roller]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

5. IMPERIAL AUTHORITY AND GIFT GIVING

It is well known, and massively documented, that the emperor had at his disposal an enormous quantity of goods and services, of every variety and size, to bestow on people of all ranks and stations, in every part of the Roman world, and that these goods and services were constantly and continuously being disbursed either by him or in his name. A full list of attested dispensations, if such a list could even be compiled, would run to many pages, and is neither possible nor necessary to produce here, especially since several thorough overviews of imperial giving already exist.⁷¹ As noted in section 1 above, however, an objection has been raised regarding the social efficacy of the emperor’s giving: Veyne and others have suggested that much, if not all, of such giving should be seen as the operation of a (in Weberian terms) rational-legal bureaucracy discharging normal, necessary governmental functions: that the emperor is not a gift-transactor but an euergetes, a sponsor of essentially public services whose beneficiaries feel no obligation or gratitude, nor incur gift-debt. For the most part Veyne is speaking of distributions aimed at large numbers of people: donatives to soldiers, grain to the urban plebs, public works (1990: 390–92, 361–66)—cases in which, indeed, it would be hard to maintain that there is a personal relationship forged between emperor and each of the numerous beneficiaries of such distributions. Yet he also maintains this view for ad hoc imperial grants to specific individuals, such as grants of citizenship, entry into the equestrian order (348), and even grants of senatorial census (356).⁷² Here I seek in part to test Veyne’s contention, especially the latter portion: to consider whether the emperor’s ad hoc distributions to individual aristocrats are better regarded as gift giving, with the concomitant social obligations, or as euergetism which entails no such obligations. To this end, I examine texts dating from or referring to the Julio-Claudian period in which claims of personal subordination to the emperor are directly linked with statements that one has received goods and services from him. More broadly, I aim here to document the range of views of their relationship with the emperor that contemporary aristocrats articulate, in light of what they receive from him. I will argue that the social dynamics described above for the giving and receiving of food, speech, etc. in convivial contexts are also operative in other arenas of exchange between ruler and subject (especially aristocratic subjects); in particular they apply to those exchanges in which the emperor gives clementia. Thus I seek to broaden the results obtained above, and so to articulate better the social consequences of exchange in elite Roman society.

In a number of texts, the ability to give and the potential to rule (i.e., to make oneself preeminent and subordinate others) are closely linked. I begin with a pair of texts describing events that fall just outside the bounds of the Julio-Claudian period, specifically the rise of Julius Caesar and the rise of Otho.

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