Children as Office Holders and Benefactors in the Eastern Part of the Roman Empire
Konstantinos Mantas (Athens)
POLIS: Revista de ideas y formas políticas de las Antigüedad Clásica 18, 2006, pp. 163-186.
Abstract
One of the most striking features of euergetism in the Román imperial period was the participation in public Ufe of individuáis belonging to previously «marginal» groups: women, children even-to a certain extent- «freed slaves» and their descendants. This was due to the radical transformation of civic life, and the city itself as a socio/political entity, from the Hellenistic period on- wards. In the democratic or even in the modérate oligarchic city-states of fifth and fourth century BC Greece, all the individuáis who were unable to act as warriors were disqualifíed from citizenship and thus from office-holding. The city was the body of the «autochthonus» adult males who voted and held office because they could hold weapons’.
Of course, there were differences in the degree of the marginality of women, children and slaves: A male child would grow up to join the male-only club of the city; a slave could be manumitted but he very rarely had the opportunity to be enfranchised (only in cases of extreme peril when male slaves were needed to join the city’s army), but a woman could never escape from her «non-active-citizen» status. Nevertheless, the idea of a boy being an official would have seemed ludicrous to Greeks of the classical era: children simply did not have their mental capacities fiílly developed . Children could not become priests or priestesses, al- though adult women frequently held priesthoods of female deities; women were, according to the Aristotelian logic, weaker in mind but not incapable of thinking rationally.
Children as Office Holders and Benefactors in the Eastern Part of the Roman Empire
Konstantinos Mantas (Athens)
POLIS: Revista de ideas y formas políticas de las Antigüedad Clásica 18, 2006, pp. 163-186.
Abstract
One of the most striking features of euergetism in the Román imperial period was the participation in public Ufe of individuáis belonging to previously «marginal» groups: women, children even-to a certain extent- «freed slaves» and their descendants. This was due to the radical transformation of civic life, and the city itself as a socio/political entity, from the Hellenistic period on- wards. In the democratic or even in the modérate oligarchic city-states of fifth and fourth century BC Greece, all the individuáis who were unable to act as warriors were disqualifíed from citizenship and thus from office-holding. The city was the body of the «autochthonus» adult males who voted and held office because they could hold weapons’.
Of course, there were differences in the degree of the marginality of women, children and slaves: A male child would grow up to join the male-only club of the city; a slave could be manumitted but he very rarely had the opportunity to be enfranchised (only in cases of extreme peril when male slaves were needed to join the city’s army), but a woman could never escape from her «non-active-citizen» status. Nevertheless, the idea of a boy being an official would have seemed ludicrous to Greeks of the classical era: children simply did not have their mental capacities fiílly developed . Children could not become priests or priestesses, al- though adult women frequently held priesthoods of female deities; women were, according to the Aristotelian logic, weaker in mind but not incapable of thinking rationally.
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