THE EMBEDDED ECONOMY OF ROME
In his essay “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” Karl Polanyi distinguishes between capitalist societies that possess “an institutionally separate and motivationally distinct economic sphere of exchange” and those in which “the elements of the economy are … embedded in non-economic institutions.” In the latter type, no transaction has a purely economic value; rather, the “economic process itself … [is] … instituted through kinship, marriage, age-groups, secret societies, totemic associations, and public solemnities” (Polanyi 1968, 84). Premonetary societies most clearly display this social dimension of exchange in their many ritual forms of interaction. And though much of the work of cultural and economic anthropology focuses on societies that can be, or have been, studied as active systems, the literature of the ancient world provides abundant evidence of both premonetary gift exchange and its continued influence on social interaction even after coin was introduced. For example, the gifts that a host lavishes on a visitor in the Homeric poems are the material embodiment of the bond of xenia or “guest-host friendship.” The exchange of such goods serves the additional end of both social cohesion—oikoi or homes in different regions are linked together—and differentiation: that is, a certain gift or good might serve to distinguish its recipient as belonging to a particular rank.
[7] For a thorough reading of various types of exchange in Homer based on the models of reciprocity employed by Sahlins (1968, 1972), who modifies Polanyi, see Donlan 1993. In Sahlins's categories, Homeric gift exchange constitutes “balanced reciprocity,” a direct quid pro quo. Nonetheless, as Donlan observes, “the quasi-kinship quality of guest-friendship … imposes obligations of ‘generalized’ reciprocity, of the kind due from kin and friends, which go beyond the formal duties of hospitality and gift-giving”—i.e., balanced reciprocity (150).
To be sure, the Homeric world presents a fictional hybrid of different periods of early Greek history, and care must be taken in drawing firm conclusions about the reality of the economic practices depicted in the poems. All the same, their ideology of aristocratic gift exchange may be said to represent an early stage of the “status-based” or “embedded” ancient economy.[8] Donlan (1993, 137 n. 1) discusses the various problems associated with reading the Homeric poems for information about an actual social reality of the Greek world before the Archaic age. See Finley 1982 [1955] for such a reading.
Moses Finley, in particular, has developed this “primitivist” view of the classical economy, arguing that the idea of “profit” in a capitalist sense is
[9] See Finley 1973 for an overview of his ideas about the ancient economy; Finley's chapter “Aristotle and Economic Analysis” (1974) similarly concludes that the economy was not a separate sphere of activity in the ancient world—i.e., that it was not “disembedded,” to use Polanyi's term. For a view that challenges Finley's conclusions and the orientation of the Cambridge “primitivists,” see Cohen 1992 on Athenian banking.
As Keith Hopkins points out in a summary of Finley's conclusions, “classical man did not behave like economic man. There was in ancient society no moral reinforcement for productive investment, nor for profit maximization; no heavenly salvation was promised to the puritanical saver. Instead, high status involved competitive and ostentatious expenditure, whether in the service of the state, or in the local community, or in the pursuit of purely personal political glory” (Garnsey, Hopkins, and Whittaker 1983, xiii–xiv). But even though classical man may not have behaved like Max Weber's conventional economic man, Pierre Bourdieu suggests that the economic motive of acquiring “symbolic capital” drives the gift-giving impulse in primitive man and thus, for Finley, in classical man as well. “Symbolic capital” refers here to both the status that the giver accrues and the debt or obligation that donation imposes on another.[10] On “symbolic capital,” see Bourdieu 1977, 171–83; Marker, Mahar, and Wilkes 1990, 5, 13–14.
I shall discuss this term later in more detail, but the point here is that a form of economic calculation was very much present in classical man: the desire for symbolic returns, or “capital,” constitutes a wish for economic profit on one's expenditures. It is this relationship between debt, status, and expenditure that has led economists and historians alike to remark the gift-exchange ideology in both public and private benefactions in the Greco—Roman world: the posture of voluntary, decorous giving in fact serves to veil or mystify the economics of such exchange.It is important all the same to acknowledge that after the introduction of coinage, monetary transactions and modified markets were a distinct feature of ancient society.
[11] See Harl 1996 for the argument that Roman coinage was in use for both fiscal and commercial purposes more than scholars have previously acknowledged.
For Rome, in particular, scholars have emphasized that the second and first centuries B.C.E. saw a dramatic increase in the monetization of the economy.[12] Harl 1996, 38–72; Hopkins (1983b xx) notes that between 157 and 80 B.C.E., “the volume of roman silver coins in circulation increased tenfold (Hopkins (1980) 109).”
As Kenneth Harl notes, administrative and military costs of the Republic, and the imperial expansion of the years 200–90 B.C.E., demanded payrolls in coin; Hopkins, arguing for the “thickened network of Roman trade” in the first two centuries C.E., remarks that even in Egyptian villages labor contracts were often expressed in terms of money (Harl 1996, 38; Hopkins ig83a, xx). The work of these scholars is in keeping with Polanyi's claim that “the development from embedded to[13] Varro, Ling. 7.105 is a major source for interpretations of nexum. On both nexum and mancipatio, see Watson 1975, 111–49, esp. 135: “Mancipatio as contract is revealed by the weighing of bronze and the reference to it in the transferee's declaration, both of which are integral parts of the ceremony.”
Both of these were transactions conducted per aes et libram, an act that involved the weighing out of a fixed amount of bronze as a measure of value. Though nexum became obsolete in the late fourth century B.C.E., mancipatio continued into postclassical times. That these early forms of Roman contractus are roughly simultaneous with the advent of coinage underscores the relationship between money and contract as the beginnings of what eventually evolves into disembedded, motivationally distinct market systems.[14] Watson 1975, 137: “The business with bronze and scales involved an actual weighing out of the price and is not an indication of formalism in early Roman law. Not until around 280 B.C. did the Romans coin money[;] … the ceremony of mancipatio itself indicates unambiguously both that bronze had become the standard medium of exchange and that a fixed weight of bronze, such as a pound, had become a measure of value.”
And yet it is precisely the formulas involved in these exchanges, and the etymology of many of the terms referring to early forms of Roman contract, that led Marcel Mauss to perceive in them the older characteristics of primitive gift exchange (1990 [1950], 48–53). In light of Mauss's perception that early Roman law displays the “traces” of gift exchange, and that “the Semitic, Greek and Roman civilizations were the first to draw a strong distinction between obligations and services that are not given free, on the one hand, and gifts, on the other,” Bourdieu has commented: “It is no accident that the vocabulary of the archaic economy should be entirely composed of double-sided notions that are condemned to disintegrate in the course of the history of the economy, since, owing to their duality, the social relations they designate represent unstable structures.” (Mauss 1990 [1950], 48; Bourdieu 1977, 17s).
[15] See also Benveniste 1973, 53–162.
If the institution of nexum, or debt-bondage, suggests the initial ideological fallout or historical debris—one side of the earlier double-sided notion—then the Roman ideology of benefactions,[16] Eisenstadt and Roniger (1984, 166–85) discuss the mixture of clientelism (or patronage) and free market economy in terms of an “ascriptive-hierarchical” society in which clients have some access to markets, but still exchange goods and services with their patrons. Nicols (1995, 1–9) places Republican and Imperial Rome in this category.
Paul Veyne's monumental book on euergetism in the ancient world (1990) takes the concept of the gift as its organizing principle. As Oswyn Murray points out in his introduction to the English edition, Veyne's study in fact implies a distinction between the concepts of gift economy and gift exchange. A gift economy presumes the absence of real reciprocity—that is, the goods and services exchanged are incommensurable and cannot be acquired in any other way. Veyne's book deals with private expenditure for the public good, a subject somewhat different than personal patronage in the upper classes, but we should nonetheless recognize in the above distinction elements of Richard Sailer's definition: it is the asymmetry of the relationship—the difference in status and public position—that results in each person offering something to which the other does not have access. In contrast to such a “gift economy,” gift exchange implies a “society halfway to becoming ‘rational’ in our sense, since people could count the values in this exchange, and establish a market in the gift” (Murray 1990, xiv.).
[17] Indeed, this is precisely what Tchernia (1983, 101) argues to have occurred in the trade between the Gallic peoples and Italians in the first century B.C.E.: in return for a steady supply of Gallic slaves, Italian merchants traded wine; while the Gauls themselves distributed wine as a prestigious gift after the fashion of a potlatch, the Italian merchants, “By multiplying the occasions for the giving of gifts and counter-gifts between the Gallic peoples and the Romans, … conferred an exchange value upon commodities which had until then above all had a use value.”
In some ways, we could argue that this objection to the terminology of “exchange” retrojects the nineteenth-century application of the term in the analysis of market and commodity relations back onto the alien, “primitivist” economy. Moreover, as I shall discuss further, it is precisely the interconvertibility—or exchanges—of material and symbolic capital that distinguishes the economics of a gift economy. In any case, Veyne himself avoids the concept of exchange for other reasons as well: in keeping with the emphasis on voluntarism in the philosophical literature on benefactions, he stresses that the ancient world perceived public giving as a kind of duty and privilege reserved for the wealthy upper classes.This public or civic function of the private individual both subsumed the ideology of aristocratic gift exchange in the Greek polis and (more
[18] See Kurke 1991, 89, for the transition from aristocratic gift exchange to euergetism in the Greek polis; for the financial criteria of equites and senators, which changed under Augustus, and the need for conspicuous consumption to establish status and ensure political loyalty—the mark of an embedded economy—see Suet. Aug. 41; Finley 1973, 46, 53, 56; Duncan—Jones 1974, 17–32; Hopkins 1983, 168.
Indeed, the financial demands on the politically ambitious in the late Republic and early Empire were so great that the nobility, though rich in land, had to resort to borrowing huge sums of cash (Finley 1973, 56). But the spending of such vast amounts of money on public games, dinners, or distributions to the pkbs was expected of the powerful and, ideally, was supposed to be voluntary and free of self-interest. Discussing Aristotle's distinction between the liberal and the magnificent man (Me. Eth. 4.4), Veyne emphasizes that “Euergetism is the manifestation of an ‘ethical virtue,’ of a quality of character, namely magnificence,” and he goes on to comment that the magnificent man “gives without receiving presents in exchange. He devotes his fortune to higher values, civic or religious, and does not introduce his bounty into the system of exchange of favours that characterizes the more modest virtue of liberality” (1990, 14). In keeping with Aristotle's definition, Suetonius records Augustus as unstintingly generous to all classes, but willing to withhold distributions in order “to show that he did all this not to win popularity but to improve public welfare” (Aug. 42). And yet, as Tacitus so memorably acknowledges, Augustus maintained power by having “charmed all with the sweetness of leisure,”[19] Tac. Ann. 1.2: cunctos dulcedine otii pellexit.
a phrase that implies the effects of—or the “symbolic capital” garnered by—the emperor's considerable expenditures on “bread and circuses.”The Roman philosophical writers, too, analyzed the art of giving as a quality of character, and both Cicero's De officiis and Seneca's De beneficiis provide a kind of handbook for the proper behavior of a Roman aristocrat. However, even in the case of private benefaction, where the more modest virtue of liberality is exercised, an emphasis on voluntarism in these writers conflicts with and sometimes conceals the actual code of reciprocity. Seneca, for example, patently claims that “In benefits the book-keeping is simple—so much is paid out; if anything comes back, it is gain, if nothing comes back, there is no loss. I made the gift for the sake of giving. … The good man never thinks of [benefits] unless he is reminded of them by having them returned. … To regard a benefit as an amount advanced is putting it out at shameful interest.” On the other hand, in problematic contrast with the injunction to the giver to forget the benefit once conferred is the prescription “to surpass in deed and spirit those who have
[20] See also Sen. Ben. 2.17.7: “The best man is he who gives readily, never demands any return, rejoices if a return is made, who in all sincerity forgets what he has bestowed, and accepts a return in the spirit of one accepting a benefit.” All translations of De beneficiis are from the Loeb edition (Basore 1935), unless otherwise noted.
One might say that by placing the burden of gratitude on the recipient, the giver is free to forget in the secure, if repressed, knowledge of delayed return.Cicero acknowledges more explicitly the conflict between a prescriptive ideology of honorable giving and the self-interested exploitation of the system: “In granting favours, on the other hand, and in requiting gratitude, the most important function of duty (if all else is equal) is to enrich above all the person who is most in need of riches. But people generally do exactly the opposite; for they defer above all to him from whom they expect the most, even though he does not need them” (Off. 1.49).
[21] Unless otherwise noted, translations of De officiis are by M. Atkins from the edition of M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (1991).
Despite this acknowledgment, Cicero himself enacts a form of the conflict, insofar as the publication of his letters is a deliberate attempt to reap the symbolic capital of overt generosity (see Dixon 1993, 452). Discussing these paradoxes, the social historian Suzanne Dixon claims that they are more acute in the upper classes, where the “ideology of internal egalitarianism” leads to a certain “notional reticence about the essential reciprocity of all giving” (453, 454).As I have suggested, the economic transactions of literary patronage are embedded, to a certain degree, in these social practices of personal—as well as imperial—expenditure. However, the tensions in the prescriptive literature on benefaction are precisely what renders its explanatory power less than sufficient for my analysis of the relationship between the public poetry of Odes 1–3 as a form of “expenditure” and the more private poetry of Epistles 1. Thus, in keeping with historians such as Veyne and Dixon, I turn to the writings of cultural anthropology to provide a hermeneutic lens for the rhetoric of benefaction in Horatian verse, considering attributes of a gift economy from the perspectives of both anthropological functionalism and social domination.
Expenditure
In his seminal work on the nature of the gift, Essai sur le don, Marcel Mauss analyzes the phenomenon of expenditure in terms of the potlatch: the ritual giving, destruction, and consumption of goods practiced by native tribes and peoples of the American Northwest (Tlingit and Haida) and British Columbia (Haida, Tsimshian, and Kwakiutl). For these tribes, public ceremonies of gift giving, and sometimes pure destruction of goods, serve
Status here is best understood in terms of symbolic capital—both the reputation in the eyes of the community and the credit in relation to the recipient, which the giver accrues by giving away goods. By exercising the capacity to give away material worth, the giver converts material capital into the symbolic capital of honorable generosity. In keeping with Bourdieu's extension of this term, we may also consider it as the prestige value that material objects may possess, often in excess of their actual worth, or that less tangible “goods”—such as a poem's praise, a dedication, or the favor of a social introduction—confer on their recipient in the Roman context.
[22] Bourdieu 1977, 177–78: “The only way to escape from the ethnocentric naiveties of economism, without falling into populist exaltation of the generous naivety of earlier forms of society, is to carry out in full what economism does only partially, and to extend economic calculation to all the goods, material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation—which may be ‘fair words’ or smiles, handshakes or shrugs, compliments or attention, challenges or insults, honour or honours, powers or pleasures, gossip or scientific information, distinction or distinctions, etc.”
Moreover, as Bourdieu claims, social and economic values are entirely interconvertible: if certain material goods or “gifts” have a social or “prestige” value that confers symbolic capital on both the donor and the recipient, then this credit can be converted back into a narrowly conceived economic value. Again extending this idea to the Roman economy of patronal benefactions, we perceive that despite the incommensurability of the goods exchanged, it is their inaccessibility except through exchange that contributes to the economic value of symbolic goods and vice versa. Thus, we may consider again the example of Cicero's recommendation of Trebatius to Caesar, discussed in the introduction: when Cicero rebukes his youngThis loan of status, by which the gift reflects both on the recipient and back on the giver, is apparent in Horace's frequent use of the word decus to describe Maecenas in relation to himself: “glory,” “ornament,” “honor”—the range of meanings suggests the honor that Maecenas confers on the poet through association with him and by his benefactions to him, as well as the glory that the poet reciprocates by honoring his patron in his poems.
[23] Odes 1.1.2, 2.17.4, 3.16.20. P. White 1993, 18: “The loan of status was especially important for anyone who hoped to mix with the elite.” See Gold 1987, 121, on the phrase praesidium et dulce decus meum.
But this reciprocal exchange of status, in which giver and receiver are both distinguished by the gift, depends, as Mauss suggests, on a third party to witness the transaction. It is in the eyes of the community that the giver accrues status by giving away wealth; conversely, wealth confers status on the recipient by virtue of its desirability in the eyes of others. Status depends, to some degree, on the envy of those who possess less, and the public display by which this envy is incited underscores the word's etymological root in the Latin videre (to see). What we understand as a “status symbol” is ineffective unless it can both be read by a large audience that is literate in a particular cultural code and, at the same time, be accessible only to a fraction of that public. As Peter White points out, the gifts made by a potens amicus to a poet in the late Republic and early Empire might be of greater symbolic than material value, serving to distinguish the status of the beneficiary in connection to the donor (1993, 88). The complexity of this triangular relationship, and the necessity of the witness to exchanges of status, is concisely summed up in Andrew Wallace—Hadrill's comment about the delicate balances of political patronage: “The people below you estimate your standing in the eyes of those above you; and those aboveSocial Cohesion
The gift-exchange psychology underlying Roman patronage involves more than a competition for status. Though the rivalrous consumption and giving away of goods constitute a “war of property,” the obligation to receive gifts ensures the opposite—the creation of social bonds. Three related features of the process of gift exchange contribute to this creation of community or social interrelatedness: first, the tendency of the gift to pass to a third party in place of pure reciprocation; second, the tendency of the gift to increase in value—that is, the reciprocal gift is often larger than the initial one that elicited it; and third, the frequent “intermingling” of souls and objects, as Mauss would characterize it, that occurs when a person perceives the object given away as an extension of the self. Before exploring these features in relation to the Roman world and the Horatian experience of patronage, we should look more closely at the anthropological writings that best exhibit them.
In his analysis of the Maori, a hunting people of Polynesia, Mauss isolates a quality called the hau, or the spirit of the gift, which causes the receiver to reciprocate and give a present in return to the original donor.
[24] On the notion of the hau, see Mauss 1990 [1950], 10–13; Sahlins 1972, 150–83.
Though Mauss has been criticized for falsely perceiving a mystical force in the concept of hau, his study nonetheless points up both the essential movement of the gift—its tendency to be passed on—and the frequent presence of a third party that turns the simple exchange into a process of circulation.[25] Lévi—Strauss (1987, 47) writes, “But instead, in The Gift, Mauss strives to reconstruct a whole out of parts; and as that is manifestly not possible, he has to add to the mixture a supplemental quantity which gives him the illusion of squaring his account. This quantity is hau.” See Derrida 1992, 76–77, for further discussion of Levi—Strauss's critique of Mauss and Mauss's invention of the hau as an explanatory force.
For example, in Marshall Sahlins's revisionary treatment of Mauss's analysis, the hau is translated as an “excess”—that is, a “return on” or “product of” the original gift—that must be given back to its source. Sahlins cites the custom of Maori hunters who, when they have killed birds in the forest,Sahlins here prefers a purely economic understanding of the concept of hau, but a more recent interpretation of this Maori term inclines once again to the spiritual understanding of Mauss. Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property opens with chapters that explore the anthropological literature on gift exchange as a way of understanding characteristics of the gift that apply to art. Hyde's analysis of the Maori ritual particularly emphasizes the ceremony—called whangai hau, or “nourishing the spirit”—by which the priests return a portion of the birds to the forest. As Hyde points out, the etymological root of “generosity” is the word genus, generis, “offspring” or “stock”—a noun related to the verb gignere, “to beget” or “to produce” (1979, 35). In the animistic world of the Maori, the spirit of the forest is made generous, is encouraged to become abundant, by the ceremonial gifts of the priests. When Hyde generalizes this particular scenario into a paradigm that contrasts gift circulation with commodity exchange, he asserts that the spirit of increase or generosity has the effect of establishing social bonds between the parties involved (18–19, 35–39). Because hau can also mean “excess,” or the power of increase, it could suggest the libidinal element of emotion—the emotional excess that accompanies a gift. Hyde implies as much when he appropriates an essentially psychoanalytic language to discuss the communal ego created by gift circulation (17–18). Viewing the ego as an elastic concept, a libidinal pool of emotional energy that may widen to constitute a social entity, Hyde thus extends Mauss's observation that gift exchange causes souls and objects to intermingle. Understood psychoanalytically, such intermingling results from the libidinal cathexis, or emotional attachment, to the object given to another. It is this emotional valuation of the object exchanged that Hyde captures in the phrase “the erotic life of property.”
Hence, contrary to the exchange of commodities in a fully disembedded economy, where the precise monetary value of an object allows for the
[26] For descriptions and analysis of the kula, see Malinowski 1961 [1922], 81–104, 350–65; Mauss 1990 [1950], 21–31; Hyde 1979, 12–18.
These decorative goods are not simply traded between two individuals but rather are passed from one person to another in arcs extending over considerable geographical territory. Moreover, while the receiver of an object does acquire a form of “ownership” over it, the relation is, as Mauss remarks, far more complex, entailing “ownership and possession, a pledge and something hired out, a thing sold and bought, and at the same time deposited, mandated, and bequeathed in order to be passed on to another. For it is only given you on condition that you make use of it for another or pass it on to a third person, the ‘distant partner,’ the murimuri” (1990 [1950], 24). It is this tendency of a gift to pass on to a third person and not necessarily back to the original giver that helps create social bonds: for, as Sahlins notes, when two partners trade, “balanced exchange may tend toward self-liquidation.”[27] It is worth quoting Sahlins (1965, 178), in full here: “The casual received view of reciprocity supposes some fairly direct one-for-one exchange, balanced reciprocity, or a near approximation of balance. It may not be inappropriate, then, to footnote this discussion with a respectful demur: that in the main run of primitive societies, taking into account directly utilitarian as well as instrumental transactions, balanced reciprocity is not the prevalent form of exchange. A question might even be raised about the stability of balanced reciprocity. Balanced exchange may tend toward self-liquidation.”
The circulation of decorative objects among the “primitive” tribes of the islands off New Guinea may seem a far cry from the exchanges of Roman patronal relations, but, as will become clear, the point of the comparison lies in the cohesion that results from an ongoing passage of gifts. Such cohesion may be seen to be of two kinds, both integrating different social strata and solidifying bonds among those at the top of that hierarchy. Although persons of lower rank participate in many of the peripheral gift exchanges that take place beside and in conjunction with the trade of the kula, the giving and receiving of the bracelets and necklaces as high “prestige” objects is generally reserved for the “chiefs” alone (Mauss 1990 [1950], 27–29). Such objects serve to distinguish their recipient as belonging to a particular social stratum even as, by marking that rank, they underscore the recipient's obligation to give generously in keeping with the
It is the “symbolic capital” or prestige value of the ornamental jewelry that makes the analogy to the Roman world illuminating. Such objects fulfill a social function suggestively similar to that of such diverse symbolic goods in the Roman world as a book's dedication or the Roman office of the priesthood. Thus, when Horace calls Maecenas his decus, both “glory” and “ornament,” he not only displays the status that his patron's association and wealth have conferred on him, as discussed earlier, but also circulates this symbolic capital to those included as addressees in his poems. To be sure, Augustus, Vergil, Agrippa, and Pollio all possess their own resources, both material and symbolic. Nonetheless, the prestige of the dedication, as an ornament, casts its reflection on others: it creates a “ring” or network of status that reinforces the self-conception and interaffiliation of the elite. In contrast to such circulation among the upper echelons of society, we might consider the distinction or honor of a “symbolic good” such as the priesthood, a civic office generally filled by the elite—one that, as the next chapter argues, has particular relevance for Horace's public posture as “priest of the Muses.” Though many sacerdotal positions were electoral, under the Principate they were increasingly used as instruments of patronage (Gordon 1990c, 221). And as Gordon has claimed, the prestigious appointment to such an office brought with it the reciprocal duty of vast expenditure on real goods, a form of public prestation whose end was the creation of symbolic capital or the loyalty and gratitude of the masses (194). Thus munus, in its sense of “public office” or responsibility, evinces the double-sidedness of the vocabulary of the ancient economy and reveals its etymological origins in the Indo—European root *mei, meaning “exchange” (Benveniste 1973, 79). And yet these examples demonstrate not “balanced exchange [that] may tend toward self-liquidation,” but rather the circulation and transmutation of capital, both symbolic and material. It is in this regard—the socially motivated expenditure and interconvertibility of forms of wealth—that we remark the “gift economy” of patronage.
Disequilibrium and the Perpetuation of Debt
Though the circulation of many goods in primitive societies operates according to “spheres of exchange,” or social tiers, the stratification of Roman society was such that the “goods and services” exchanged in the patronal system often crossed lines of status and could not be acquired through
[28] See Gregory 1982, 49, on spheres of exchange.
Quoting Sahlins's view concerning the potential liquidation of balanced trade, Sailer specifies that “a precise one-for-one exchange—that is, a complete and conscious absolution of debt—leaves both parties free to break off the relationship without moral recriminations” (1982, 15–16). Sailer points here to the mutually reinforcing character of the criteria he uses to define patronage: because the unequal status of the two parties implies an incommensurability of the goods and favors exchanged, indebtedness is perpetual and ambiguous.[29] As Seneca (Ben. 3.9.3) comments, “Since benefits may be given in one form and repaid in another, it is difficult to establish their equality.”
Sailer addresses patronage in the upper classes, but one of the most conventional of such exchanges in formal patrocinium has traditionally been conceived in terms of the political support that a cliens gave to his patron in return for legal protection and material benefits (Sailer 1982, 29; Wallace—Hadrill 1989, 68–69). The nature of such favors or duties precludes precise determinations of value, because in an embedded economy they have no exact “exchange value”—they are outside a monetary system that could provide them with a common denominating term. Moreover, even if a good did have an exchange value, such as the legacies that clients often left their patrons as a final gesture of honor,[30] Sailer 1982, 29, 71–73. Significantly, Horace left all his property to Augustus, a gesture that points up the emperor's stature as a patron and that became common practice after his reign.
it was offered as a gift and hence carried an emotional value that eludes quantification. Such impossibility of determining precise values leads each party to feel potentially still in debt to the other, thereby ensuring that the relationship continues.Ambiguity of debt arises from other sources as well. For example, the rivalrous desire to outdo the other—as in the competitive potlatch-consistently produces a gift in excess of the first, thus maintaining and reconfiguring the disequilibrium of debt initiated by the initial expenditure.
[31] For such ambiguity, though not rivalrous on the surface, see Cic. Fam. 2.6.1–2 and the discussion of the passage in Sailer 1982, 17.
Moreover, in a highly stratified culture in which “gifts” are exchanged as benefida and officia across the invisible lines of status, the recipient of a benefaction remains, in a sense, forever indebted to a benefactor of a higher order. In contrast to actual monetary debt, Seneca claims that “to the [creditor for a benefit] I must make an additional payment, and even after I have paid my debt of gratitude, the bond between us still holds; for, just when I have finished paying it, I am obliged to begin again, and friendship endures” (Ben. 2.18.5). A person unable to repay his benefactor in full instead disseminates similar benefactions to those of lower status. In placeIn a telling passage of De officiis, Cicero himself distinguishes between monetary exchange (or debt absolved) and the duties and benefactions that characterize patronage: “As someone has happily said, A man has not repaid money, if he still has it; if he has repaid it, he has ceased to have it. But a man still has the sense of favour, if he has returned the favour; and if he has the sense of the favour, he has repaid it.”
[32] Cic. Off. 2.69: Commode autem, quicumque dixit, “pecuniam qui habeat, non reddidisse, qui reddiderit, non habere, gratiam autem et, qui rettulerit, habere et, qui habeat, rettulisse.” I translate here from the Loeb edition (W. Miller 1913).
Cicero quotes this dictum to point out that patronage of the poor who are unable to repay the service in kind leads to a lasting emotional gratitude that cultivation of the rich may not yield. Notwithstanding the problematic politics of his comment, his example underscores the contrast between the closure of a relationship based on monetary exchange and the sense of ongoing emotional indebtedness in response to a favor. Moreover, the paradox of still retaining the favor, despite having returned it, points up the social implications of the connotative range of the word gratia: on the one hand, gratia refers to a favor done by one person for another, and thus reflects a concrete action or service; on the other hand, the word suggests the feeling of gratitude—“the sense of the favor,” as the translation would have it—that the recipient of such a service experiences.[33] This latter meaning also reflects the sense of gratia as “influence” exercised by the benefactor over the recipient. Hellegouarc'h (1963, 202–8) provides the fullest lexical discussion of the term.
Hence, a person could both return a favor and yet still have it; most important, this double valency of the word, a kind of connotative elasticity, suggests the social function of cohesion that patronage serves.[34] See Sailer 1982, 69–78. Wallace—Hadrill (1989, 71–78) discusses patronage more in the context of social integration—the capacity of the system to incorporate “outsiders,” either those newly arrived in the city of Rome or people living on the city's periphery.
Though repaid, a favor leaves behind a sense of thankfulness that binds the receiver to the giver.Finally, we should note here a point to which we shall return in chapter 3. Couched in the comparative terms of monetary debt, Cicero's dictum illuminates the apparent paradox behind the exchange of favors (”apparent” because the connotations of gratia become paradoxical only in a monetary context): though repaid, gratia leaves behind an excess or residue, a trace of itself—something that, in fact, causes the favor to increase in value. Cicero refers to increase even more specifically when, quoting Hesiod, he claims: “But if, as Hesiod bids, one is to repay with interest, if possible, what one has borrowed in time of need, what, pray, ought we to do when challenged
[35] Trans. W. Miller 1913, Loeb edition: Quodsi ea, quae utenda acceperis, maiore mensura, si modopossis, iubet reddere ffesiodus, quidnam beneficioprovocati facere debemus? An imitari agros fertiles, qui multo plus effemnt quam acceperunt?
From the viewpoint of anthropological “functionalism,” this increase suggests both the Maori's concept of the hau and Hyde's idea of “libidinal excess”—the tendency of the gift to accrue value in its passage and to provide the social glue for community.
[36] See Sailer 1982, 37–38, for the conflict between Marxism and anthropological functionalism as opposing hermeneutic lenses for examining ancient patronage. The functionalist view suggests that “in societies with great differences of wealth and prestige, patron-client bonds, cemented in accordance with the reciprocity ethic, provide cohesion between different class and status groups” (37).
For it is precisely because a person can never truly pay back a benefit to the original donor-making gratia an ongoing emotion (or sense of obligation)—that the gift is passed down to a third party.[37] Seneca (Ben. 2.25.1) asserts: “For what so much proves a grateful heart as the impossibility of ever satisfying oneself, or of even attaining the hope of ever being able to make adequate return for a benefit.”
Hence, community arises both from the emotions stirred by the gift and from the movement of reciprocating benefactions down a hierarchical network of relations. Discussing this functionalist or integrative view, Wallace—Hadrill writes that “what justifies describing the network as a whole as a patronage network is that it involves exchanges between those closer to the centre of power and those more distant from it, and has the effect of mediating state resources through personal relationships” (1989, 77). While the functionalist view of patronage recognizes reciprocity as necessary to integration, it emphasizes the social rather than the economic dimension of exchange: that is, functionalism ultimately sees the exchange of goods and services as emanating from the need and desire for social cohesion rather than from a desire for profit. Cicero, again, suggests such a patronal ideology when he claims that people “are ‘bound’ together in strong fellowship, by the giving and receiving of benefactions [or favors], so long as they are mutual and pleasing” (ex beneficiis ultra et citro datis acceptis, quae et mutua et grata dum sunt … firma devinciuntur societate; Off. 1.56).[38] This is my own translation.
Delay and the Mystifications of Time
But the same qualities that provide for social cohesion may also be seen as exploitative. As Bourdieu points out, the temporal delay between a first gift and its reciprocation may symbolically bind the recipient to the donor, but it also serves to mystify the economic aspect of this type of exchange:
[39] See Bourdieu 1977, 188, on the reproduction of systems of domination.
Indeed, Seneca makes a point of distinguishing between the verb reddere, employed in the context of monetary repayment, and referre gratiam, “requiting a favor” in the economy of benefida:We are, as you know, wont to speak thus: “A. has made a return (gratiam rettulit) for the favour bestowed by B.” Making a return means handing over of your own accord that which you owe. We do not say, “He has paid back the favour” (gratiam reddidit); for “pay back” is used of a man upon whom a demand for payment is made, of those who pay against their will. … Making a return means offering something to him from whom you have received something. The phrase implies a voluntary return; he who has made such a return has served the writ upon himself. (Ep. 81.9)
[40] Trans. Gummere 1920, Loeb edition.
Yet the consistent use of analogies drawn from a monetary context in Seneca's and Cicero's examples reveals the “socially maintained discrepancy between the misrecognized or, one might say, socially repressed, objective truth of economic activity, and the social representation of production and exchange” (Bourdieu 1977, 172). Although such analogies are invoked to demonstrate the differences between the functioning of debt and credit in a coin or “disembedded” economy and their operation in a gift economy, the recourse to such models nonetheless points to the very real potential for economic calculation in the distribution of benefits.
[41] The use of economic metaphors to discuss interpersonal relations that were not specifically contractual is certainly not new in the Roman writers and was common among the Greeks; Aristotle considers certain categories of friendship in such terms. See the discussion in Konstan 1997, 78–82.
Such potential is underscored not only in verbs that elsewhere do refer to “returning” benefida as a specifically economic activity but also in the metaphor of “buried treasure” or “investment” used to characterize benefia[42] For the metaphor of buried treasure, see Sen. Dial. 7.24.2; Sailer (1982, 25) discusses the image. For the use of verbs that connote monetary activity, and that contradict Seneca's distinction between reddere and referre, cf. Sen. Ben. 3.9.3: Cum aliter benefidum detur, aliter reddatur, pariafacere difficile est.
When Seneca compares a benefidum to a thesaurus alte obrutus to be dug up only in need, his language quite literally “reveals” the concealing (obrutus) of an investment for the future. And the presence of a third party may contribute to the delay that conceals the economic interest in these transactions, further deflecting attention from the desire for profit.[43] Dixon (1993, 458) quotes Cicero writing to Atticus that when he praises Varro to Atticus, he wishes Atticus to tell Varro so that the latter might “give cause for satisfaction” (Att. 2.25.1).
When Bourdieu analyzes the “labor” devoted to the social repression of the “objective truth of economic activity” (1977, 172,194), he is concerned specifically with economies in which there are no markets, not the “ascriptive-hierarchical” society of Rome in which patronage coexisted with a modified market system. Yet as the discussion earlier in this chapter makes clear, Bourdieu's comments apply to benefaction as retaining an element of “double-sided notions that are condemned to disintegrate … since … the social relations they designate represent unstable structures which are condemned to split in two” (172). In this scheme, given that the two resulting types of relations originated in “one” set of social relations, it is reasonable that the social sphere should retain traces of the economic and vice versa: thus, just as the status system of patronage and benefactions contains elements of the economic calculation that Bourdieu perceives as the “repressed economic truth” of gift economies, so Mauss's analysis of early Roman contracts speculatively attributes a mystical or primitive attitude to a specific res, a thing or service, that is always part of the transaction.
Such an attitude, of course, is precisely one strategy of the mystification to which Bourdieu alludes. Thus the power inherent in the “thing,” or the hau of the Maori, which Mauss in essence generalized as the gift's power to compel reciprocation or circulation, serves to disguise the economic interest behind exchange by enchanting certain goods—“personalizing” them so that as gifts, they are extensions of the giver rather than embodiments of economic value. Again, we may note that the system of benefaction suggests just such social, even libidinal, enchantment or misrecognition in the multivalency of gratia as a “social” concept that expresses the gratitude, the concrete favor, or the influence and obligation generated by gifts. Alternately, the conventions that accompany the transfer in Roman contract may be traced back to the “power” of the thing in its social aspect (the “other side” of the double-sided originary notion). The etymology of
[44] See Watson 1975, 134–49, for the distinction between mandpatio and traditio: mandpatio, which constituted the transfer of res mancipi, or “land, rustic praedial servitudes, slaves, oxen, horses, mules, and asses,” included a ceremony per aes et libram, “with a scale and a fixed weight of bronze” (136). Traditio referred to the physical transfer or delivery of property that was res non mancipi, or those things that were excluded from the category of res mancipi (145). See [nn. 13] and [14], above.
Nexum, or debt-bondage, as an early and extreme form of contract per aes et libram, thus implies (ironically, given the absence of “pleasure” here) that the “legal ‘lien’ springs from things as much as from men” (48).If the nexum, as I claimed above, constitutes the initial ideological fallout of an economy in the process of becoming disembedded, the concomitant idea of “social bonds” may be visible in the frequent language of “binding” that appears in the prescriptive and epistolary material on social relations.
[45] See Cicero's use of the word devinciunter in Off. 1.56 (quoted above). Note, too, Cic. Fam. 15.11.2, in which Cicero discusses his indebtedness to Gaius Marcellus for both his private favors and public services to the Republic, and refers to such debt as a binding vinculum. Cicero refers to M. Aemilius as “bound by favors” (meis beneficiis devinctus) to him (Fam. 13.27.2).
That is, the contractual nature of debt-bondage and the libidinal bonds between persons, whether in a patronal relationship or in a more elite relation of amidtia between those of high status, may reflect the two directions into which the archaic economy, as Bourdieu would have it, “split in two.”[46] Significantly, when Cicero recommends Trebatius to Caesar, he writes that he “hands him over to you from my hand to yours, as they say” (hominem tibi ita trado de manu (ut aiunt) in manum tuam istam, Fam. 7.5.3). As Shackleton Bailey (1977, ad loc.) suggests, the phrase de manu … in manum “may derive from grasping by the hand in token of acquired ownership.” That is, it may signify mandpatio, or the “taking in the hand” of certain res.
Indeed, as a condition in which a debtor “pays off” his obligation through labor over time, the nexum may even be said to express in disembedded form the element of temporal delay that serves to mystify the economic aspect of gift exchange.