Earmarking and Greek Epigraphy

An earmark is often the end result of a long process of negotiation. Even then, the process can continue as earmarks are met with counter-earmarks. Relations of domination and subordination are articulated and rearticulated. “The earmarking of money is thus a social process: money is attached to a variety of social relations rather than to individuals.”Footnote ²³ A large number of Greek epigraphic documents bear witness to this very process. To choose from countless examples, we may consider a debate that took place in the context of an Athenian cultic association of the third century.Footnote ²⁴ In a decree, the association published new rules for the source and use of its patron goddess’ money: rents from sacred land were thenceforth earmarked exclusively for sacrifices. In the background, we can glimpse a dispute, which had concerned the differentiation of money. The question had been, “Was income from sacred land ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’?” It had also been unclear whether members (orgeones) were entitled to borrow money from the goddess for worldly ends.Footnote ²⁵ Methodologically, we must be aware that such an inscription records the outcome of the dispute, while the process by which it was resolved tends to be obscured. Another difficulty is discovering a social process when earmarking appears in the context of imperial domination. The orgeones of an Athenian cultic association met on egalitarian terms. Was earmarking any less of a process in Hellenistic Asia Minor, with its vast disparities of power between kings and cities? The case of Antigonos and the cities of Teos and Lebedos suggests it was not. The ill-fated attempt of the Macedonian to execute the synoicism of Teos and Lebedos involved a negotiation over the constitution of a public grain fund. Lebedos had earlier requested of Antigonos that 1,400 gold staters “be set aside from the revenues (ἐξαιρεῖσθαι ἀπὸ τῶν προσόδων)” for a complicated grain scheme. In other words, certain revenues were to be reserved for the provision of the new city’s grain supply. Antigonos did not act on the initial request of Lebedos, but when Teos later petitioned for an even larger amount, he rejected the idea. Any exigent import of grain, Antigonos argued, ought to come from his own “tribute-bearing (phorologoumenê)” land, effectively claiming a royal monopoly. Yet in the end, the cities prevailed over the king: Antigonos agreed to earmark the 1,400 gold staters, per the original request of Lebedos.Footnote ²⁶

Private Property and Sale

In 2007, an extraordinarily rich document for the Attalid earmarking process was published, a double-sided inscription from the modern village of Taşkuyucak, west of Lydian Daldis (D2). The inscription was discovered in the Keçi Dağ mountain range, north of Lake Koloe/Gygaia, near a pass that connects the plain of Sardis to the road to Thyateira and the upper Kaikos Valley. After 188, this was a vital link between the old Attalid core and what had been the primary Seleukid administrative center in cis-Tauric Asia Minor. The site of the town (katoikia) and fortress of Apollonioucharax must have been nearby since the inscription shows the town’s ambassadors appealing to Eumenes II in the wake of the destructive conflict with the Galatians (168–166). Soldiers as well as civilians lived in this town. The soldiers, largely Mysian, were not necessarily professional, as evidenced by a partial conscription alluded to in the text. This inscription shares many similarities with the Korragos Decree, from its script to its postwar setting.Footnote ²⁹ Once again, Eumenes II aimed to ameliorate the devastation of war with a variety of fiscal privileges and outright gifts. Side B appears to be a petition of Apollonioucharax. Side A appears to be the response of Eumenes II to the requests. The text reads in Peter Thonemann’s translation and edition (my modifications in underlined italics):Footnote ³⁰

Here, a document speaks to the crucial issue of the source of an earmark. The earmark’s source was property purchased by the king. By purchase and redemption of private property from third parties, the Attalids funded the public goods that earned them loyalty at home and accolades abroad. It bears emphasizing that this was an unusual pattern of kingly behavior, but one detectable in the dynasty already with Philetairos, who acquired real estate in Thespiai in the 270s. Lands which the dynast purchased and designated as sacred fed the cult of the Muses, provided for the festival of the Philetaireia, and maintained the supply of oil for a local gymnasium.Footnote ³³ Another episode involves the visit of Attalos I to Sikyon in 198. The city had lost control of land sacred to Apollo, evidently being held as private property. Attalos purchased it – for a steep price, notes Polybius – and restored to the Sikyonians their sacred lands.Footnote ³⁴ That the Attalids built their redistributive system by routinely transacting with private partners is now further underscored by the inscription from Taşkuyucak.

In postwar Apollonioucharax, the breakdown of order was again complete. With some soldiers homeless and others deserting, both social stability and state control were in doubt. Again, Eumenes’ goal was to reconstitute a community, this one rural and in certain ways non-Greek. For his generosity, the king demanded an easy conscription in yet tougher times. Eumenes provided the settlers with land allotments, building materials, and masons. He instructed his official to find and survey the land, transfer out other populations, distribute construction materials, and bring in know-how. He also provided support for the ancient Anatolian cult of Zeus Stratios (“the army leader”), first, by expanding an unparalleled grant of territorial immunity (asylia) to a sanctuary outside the control of a Greek polis.Footnote ³⁵ Second, he employed a pair of earmarks: taxes in arrears, both cash and kind, were remitted for a period of three years so that the priest Bacchios might furnish a golden wreath.Footnote ³⁶ To fund the worship of Zeus and sacrifices on his own behalf, the king earmarked revenues that he redeemed from the nearby village of Sibloe, perhaps the place once attached to an indigenous sanctuary known from a fourth-century Aramaic inscription from Kenger (Side B lines 11–19).Footnote ³⁷

Financially, Apollonioucharax was in over its head. Apparently, the town had sold the usufruct of the village of Sibloe to an individual named Meleager for cash. The town retained the right of redemption, but could not come up with the money. The ambassadors seem to have asked the king to unwind this old transaction. It is helpful to think of the new transaction of Eumenes with Meleager as the unwinding of the old one because it allows us to make sense of the odd number on the stone: 448 drachmas and 1.5 obols. Thonemann finds the price too low for an entire village’s revenues and so postulates a missing numeral in the vacat.Footnote ³⁸ However, this assumes that the price recorded in the inscription was the original price paid by Meleager. Peter Herrmann and Hasan Malay, working from the stone itself, note, “It looks as if the amount had been added later in a space left blank.”Footnote ³⁹ This does not fit well with the model of interpretation put forward by Thonemann, which sees here a contract quoted verbatim (“about which it is written” περὶ ἧς γέγρα|πται). Perhaps, we should consider the lowball price as the result of Eumenes’ “settling up” with Meleager. In fact, settling is exactly what the act of diorthôsis (“setting to right”) implies – the “sticker price” was not necessarily the final price.Footnote ⁴⁰

Quoted in the moral register of setting to right, the 448 drachmas and 1.5 obols may have sounded like a just price, given the circumstances. An implicit contrast is then drawn with Eumenes’ own conveyance of Sibloe back into the patrimony of Zeus Stratios. Trenchantly, that transaction is described as “without price (ἄνευ τιμῆς).” For the king who forgoes a sale, earmarking becomes an arena for the display of a particularly economic royal virtue. That we are told that the final transfer of the village to the cult was a specifically priceless conveyance is an indication of what is at stake when it comes to earmarking. One must describe these transactions, and description is a gambit of ideological risks and rewards. Without a price, Eumenes and Apollonioucharax meet at a point, as it were, above and beyond the market.Footnote ⁴¹ In the end, neither party assumes the dreaded role of buyer. Yet what of Meleager, the original buyer? We can only guess at how he really fared in all this. If he had not as yet collected the usufruct of the village and marketed it, the whole business would have at best approximated an interest-free loan to Apollonioucharax for whatever period of time had elapsed since the original sale. If he had collected anything at all, this was profit, maybe even a windfall, if on account of the tumult of war the revenues of Sibloe were unlikely to equal 448 drachmas and 1.5 obols any time soon. We should note that the inscription makes clear that some partial collection of taxes has already taken place: the remission of arrears explicitly excludes those taxes that are already in the hands of tax farmers (Side B Lines 7–9).

It is impossible to know what became of Meleager. However, to focus on one of the key relationships in earmarking – the king and his private business partner – it is necessary to speculate. One can compare the Lycian dynast Ptolemaios, who transferred land to another katoikia town, the Kardakon Kome near Telmessos, but did not receive the money promised from the community in return. In a letter of 181, Eumenes II freed the Kardakoi from their debt, even if, he added, they happened to have the money on hand (SEG XIX 867; D3, lines 7–10). Just as in the case of Meleager and Apollonioucharax, the fate of the Lycian creditor Ptolemaios or his heirs is effaced. Presumably, Eumenes settled up with them, too. In both cases, we can infer that private third parties transacted with the king over the fate of subject communities. The inscription from Taşkuyucak shows the Attalid king purchasing private property in order to provide a source of revenue for an earmark. Indeed, it is one more piece of evidence to belie the old scholarly notion that only two forms of land tenure existed in Hellenistic Asia Minor: royal/nonprivate land and the territory (chora) of the polis, on which private property existed alongside public.Footnote ⁴² In fact, private property has a distinctly high profile in earmarking.

However, the full significance of Eumenes’ purchase becomes clear only when we can see it as part of a reciprocal exchange with the community of Apollonioucharax. With the diorthôsis, the king brought to an ethical conclusion a transaction that had not gone according to the original participants’ plan. We should note that Eumenes does nothing to perpetuate the relationship with Meleager. He does not ask the land-distributor Lykinos to find a different village for Meleager. It seems that Meleager just walks away with the money that he receives from the royal treasury. By contrast, the earmarking arrangement construes the relationship between king and community as fixed and everlasting. The earmarking of revenues for sacrifice takes the form of a purpose clause that contains the almost atemporal verb ὑπάρχειν in the subjunctive.Footnote ⁴³ The agreement is open-ended and eternal. One does not dare imagine a time when the revenue stream will not provide for sacrifices.Footnote ⁴⁴ Eumenes promises that the village of Sibloe will remain perpetually earmarked. And while Apollonioucharax and its priest may avoid negotiating any further with Meleager, they are involved in an exchange with Eumenes. They are now responsible for the cost of revenue collection in the village. In turn, they will perform sacrifices to Zeus Stratios on the king’s behalf.

The inscription from Taşkuyucak may also illuminate the transactions echoed in a very fragmentary text found in Pergamon itself, long known but poorly understood (RC 48; D4). A lamentable four discrete fragments of it survive. It is a letter of Eumenes II to the Aeolian polis of Temnos, a city of the old kingdom. The Attalids likely had an especially good knowledge of local institutions in Temnos. The city had even exchanged political rights (isopoliteia) with Pergamon in predynastic days, which makes it all the more intriguing to find in Temnos those same dynamics of earmarking that proliferated in the new territories.Footnote ⁴⁵ Bradford Welles could not interpret any further what he termed “certain subsidies” of Eumenes II for Temnos, but he saw in this inscription the same “financial policy” as that instantiated in the Korragos Decree.Footnote ⁴⁶ In other words, the Temnos letter was another important building block in the early twentieth-century theory of Attalid penetration into civic finance.

The crucial passages are in Fragment D. Welles’ text here, however, must be used with caution, as he himself admitted. Though the script is “fine and even,” the right margin of Fragment D, the measure by which he determined line length elsewhere, is irregular. Francis Piejko, who has published several major restorations of Fragment D, provides slightly different line numbers.Footnote ⁴⁷ According to the text of Welles, the opening lines of Fragment D tell us: (1) land had been purchased (πε]πραμένης χ[ώρας); (2) a 1/10 tax (dekate) on agricultural produce was at issue (μ]έρη τῆς δεκ[άτης); and (3) funds are being earmarked for the city’s administration (εἰς τὴν διο]ίκησιν τῆ̣[ς π]όλεως καὶ̣ […). Welles asks an important question: “Does this mean that crown land had been sold to the city, from which a part of the revenue would be available for the city’s running expenses?”Footnote ⁴⁸

The model of Apollonioucharax and Sibloe, Eumenes II and Meleager, suggests a different interpretation. In the case of Temnos too, a third party – a private property owner – is likely lurking. Again, earmarking entails recourse to the purchase of private property. The reasoning behind this supposition is both methodological and philological. First, Welles takes as his starting point the old conception of land tenure in Hellenistic Asia Minor as a two-tiered system consisting of royal land and polis territory, with no place for private property of any form beyond the chora of the poleis. This view is now untenable. Eumenes is the buyer, not the seller. We can note that the king divides up his purchase into “parts” (μέρος [D 14]; μέρη [D3]).Footnote ⁴⁹ Further, the postulated earmark will feed Temnos “every year” (κατ᾽ ἑνια[υτὸν [D15 and 16]). While Piejko’s bold restorations are unsustainable, they suggest a general framework for interpretation. He has restored, first, the remission of two parts of the dekate and, second, an earmark for the purpose of “sacred things” (hiera) and “the administration of the city (dioikesis tes poleos),” the source of which will be the revenues from a stoa that the king undertakes to build.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet this restoration does not solve the problem posed by Welles of the purchased land. In the remainder of Fragment D, nothing is said of a stoa, but in fact everything concerns the fiscal status of land. Mention of a place called the Bomitis, of an official land survey (katametresis), and of the notification of an official named Pyrrhos regarding the act of “taking over” (paralêpsis) land follows a series of illegible fiscal prescriptions.Footnote ⁵¹ The land at issue may have once been part of a gift estate granted in early Hellenistic times, or it may have fallen more recently into private hands through public borrowing and default. The point is that Eumenes must purchase this land in the process of constructing an earmark for Temnos. Once set in motion, the mechanics of earmarking trigger a sale.

Brokering the Earmark

Though earmarks at times required the Attalids to take on the risks of transacting with private third parties, the community’s input was also crucial. Other documents depict the civic elites who served as ambassadors to the court and its regional outposts brokering earmarks. Local leaders used their embassies to negotiate the terms of earmarks and therefore the impact of Attalid power on their cities. By nature, earmarks are ad hoc solutions to local problems. With information scarce, local people represented their own problems to the Attalid state, and in the end, local people gained even more agency by helping execute the earmark. As coauthors of these line items, the Pergamene chancery and local elites, quite simply, needed each other.

The role of a man named Apollonios in the creation of an earmark for Ionian Metropolis is on display in an inscription that records his city’s appreciation for his deeds (I.Metropolis 1; D5). Metropolis was a minor city of the Kayster Valley, easily overshadowed by Ephesus. Little of its Hellenistic remains have come to light, but strong ties to imperial Pergamon are evidenced by an altar of Attalos II, a dedication to Queen Apollonis, a private association’s use of the regnal year in a dating formula, and the local onomasticon – Apollonios’ father was named Attalos.Footnote ⁵² A decree for Apollonios on one side of the stone dates itself to 144/3, the fifteenth year of the reign of Attalos II. Metropolis praises Apollonios for a life full of service, listing his good deeds, while all along emphasizing that his stature outstripped humble Metropolis. Insofar as Apollonios spent time in other cities, the fair reputation he earned abroad redounded to the benefit of Metropolis. Back home, citizens could count on him in a pinch to travel away again on embassies “to kings and others” (Side B lines 12–13). Owing to his characteristic perseverance and sacrifice of private advantage to public, the embassies accomplished the city’s aims.

What follows then are three positive outcomes of embassies. These are presented in a narrative passage that is closed by one final sentence before the formal expression of motivation: “(and) in all other respects he consistently engages in politics (πολιτευόμενος διατελεῖ) incorruptibly and eagerly” (Side B line 27). The three positive outcomes are as follows. First, in land disputes with neighbors, likely with Colophon, Smyrna, or Ephesus, or with some combination of such adversaries, Apollonios saw to it that the city suffered no loss. Here, editors Boris Dreyer and Helmut Engelmann, as well as Christopher Jones, who has challenged many of their interpretations, hypothesize an embassy not to the king but to the Attalid governor in Ephesus.Footnote ⁵³ We do know that such an official (strategos) was responsible for the Kaystrian plain.Footnote ⁵⁴ Next, a dispute with a mysterious group of tax farmers drew Apollonios into a formal arbitration (diakrisis) (Side B line 23). Who presided? We are not told, though we know that the Attalids settled a fiscal dispute between Parion and Priapos.Footnote ⁵⁵ The tax farmers had in some way altered the fiscal status of Metropolis with respect to the “Kaystrian harbor (limen Kaïstrianos)” (Side B line 20).

The result of the embassy seems to have been a return to the status quo: Metropolis received its tax privilege back. Yet perhaps the city gained even more in the bargain. It is curious that the third and final good deed of Apollonios is not set off like the other two with an introductory clause. For the story about the land dispute: κατά τε τὰς γινομένας πρὸς τοὺς παρακειμένους ὑπὲρ χώρας ἀμφιζβητήσεις (“concerning the disputes that had risen with the other parties over land”; Side B line 14). For the story about the harbor taxes: ὑπὲρ τῶν ἐφευρισκομένων ἡμεῖν τελῶν (“over the taxes that had been invented for us”; Side B line 19). However, for the third case, we have only a pair of conjunctive particles: δὲ καὶ (Side B line 24). Here, Apollonios obtained (ἐξεπορίσατο in Side B lines 23–24) from the Attalid king an earmark of 500 drachmas for oil for the youth of the gymnasium (neoi) and 500 drachmas for lessons for freeborn youth each year (καθ’ ἕκαστον ἐνιαυτὸν) (Side B line 25). In other words, Apollonios facilitated Attalid participation in the year-by-year financial planning of Metropolis. When did he secure the earmark? Jones does not treat the issue directly, but he counts at least two embassies. “Since the text praises Apollonios just above for his embassies to ‘the kings and to the others’ (12), both issues, that of the land and that of the tax-farmers, must have required recourse either to one of the kings or to an official.”Footnote ⁵⁶ And what of that other issue, who will pay for oil for the gymnasium and for the education of the freeborn youth? The text holds out the possibility that Apollonios used the same embassy to obtain both the old fiscal regime for the Kaystrian harbor and the two annual pledges of 500 drachmas. This is why we lack a new introductory clause after the story of the tax-farming dispute concludes. The process of repealing the harbor taxes may have resulted in a new earmark.Footnote ⁵⁷ Certainly, Apollonios used an identical channel of communication in each case.

The Metropolis inscription points to the active participation of local notables like Apollonios in the process of cobbling together earmarks. Thus, alternative reconstructions, in which minimal interaction precedes an earmark, are to be rejected.Footnote ⁵⁸ On that model, cities simply petition for benefactions, and kings reply. Or kings seem to parachute into local contexts, rearrange cities’ budgets, and leave. Earmarks, however, require intermediation and, therefore, the devolution of agency. In the Attalid kingdom, earmarking required subjects to participate in their own governance. The interactive character of earmarking was also showcased in an incident that took place in Apameia in the mid-160s, a city which then once again found itself at the center of a conflict, the aforementioned war with the Galatians. Kephisodoros son of Ariston was a leading citizen of Apameia and perhaps also a courtier.Footnote ⁵⁹ For Apameia, he clearly played an important role in public finance. One of his descendants may have served as the city’s financial administrator in the first half of the first century BCE.Footnote ⁶⁰ For Pergamon, Kephisodoros was a key supporter stationed in one of the kingdom’s lynchpin cities. A decree of Apameia honors him for erecting statues of the royal family during his tenure as gymnasiarch, while also maneuvering to set conditions on an earmark (D6 lines 1–16):

The document shows the Attalid king magnanimously rewarding a city’s loyalty with a cash subsidy, but also relinquishing a certain amount of control over the shape of an earmark. It highlights the degree to which earmarking devolves agency. Initially, Eumenes II had promised Apameia 3,000 drachmas as a reward for providing grain and other assistance to Attalid troops operating nearby during the recent war.Footnote ⁶¹ Kephisodoros, however, then modified the king’s gift in two different ways. First, he added more money to the original grant, a top-up dedication vowed on behalf of the king. Second, surprisingly, he attached conditions to the gift: Apameia would receive the money provided that a gathering of ephebes and other youths of the gymnasium took place each year at the festival of the Hermaia and the Heraklea. This event may also have been the legally prescribed occasion for the public proclamation of his own honors.Footnote ⁶² We can safely assume that the money promised, the start-up capital for a foundation, was earmarked to pay for these festivals. Yet the grammar of a provisory clause is unusual for an earmarking arrangement. The typical construction is: apo + genitive (source); then eis + accusative (purpose). On the other hand, ἐφ’ ᾦ ἔσται (“on the condition that …”) may be proper to the language of dedications. One can compare a late second-century Delphic manumission that vows a slave to Apollo, according to the convention, “on the condition that the slave be free (ἐφ’ ὧιτε ἐλεύθερον εἶμεν)” (SGDI II 2086 line 7). While its grammar may be unusual, by introducing the contingency of the young men’s synod, the decree of Apameia for Kephisodoros exposes what may have been a commonplace: a local agent succeeded in altering the terms of an Attalid earmark. For the king, the dedication of his money to a divinity always provided a measure of security against repurposing. However, it was invariably the local councils and assemblies that enshrined foundations in law and encased subventions in the procedures and rituals of civic finance. For Attalid subjects, earmarking provided numerous opportunities to exercise their own agency.

The anecdote raises a series of important if ultimately unanswerable questions. Do the citizens receive the king’s 3,000 drachmas with strings attached? In other words, did Kephisodoros, who tacked on his own contribution to the king’s gift, change the earmarking arrangement? In short, who is the author of the earmark? As the local gymnasiarch, Kephisodoros had converted his own honors into honors for the royal family in the form of a statue group (lines 10–11). So he plainly conducted his local affairs against the backdrop of the kingdom at large. His interests were certainly not at odds with those of the Attalids nor, however, were the two identical. By making an annual assembly of the gymnasium a condition, he may have guaranteed himself perennial public honors that were not available at all in any other forum. This means that Eumenes was not solely responsible for the Apameia earmark, manipulating Kephisodoros and using his stature in his community to legitimate an intrusive intervention in civic affairs. Rather, Kephisodoros’ piggy-backing of his contribution on top of the king’s gift speaks to the frequent division of agency in earmarking.

This last-minute rider to a royal writ reminds us how much local agency is unleashed in the earmarking process. On the one hand, the implementation is left to those on the ground, which entails tasks of coercion and the monitoring of the arrangement. As we have noted, the settlers of Apollonioucharax and the priests of Zeus Stratios received from the Attalids not just the right but also the responsibility to collect revenue from the village of Sibloe. In the very complaint of those settlers that other dependent villages had not been returned to them in the manner Eumenes II authorized, we may have an admission of failure in the implementation of an earlier earmark (D2, Side B lines 20–21). On the other hand, the creation of earmarking arrangements implicates multiple agencies from the start because earmarks are tailored to highly local circumstances. Infamously, this is what is called “pork-barrel spending” in the United States. There is no one-size-fits-all earmark. Kephisodoros occupied a privileged niche in the social hierarchy of the kingdom. He was therefore in a position to frame the needs of his city before the king, to be part of the conversation that ends with an earmark.

Certain documents give the impression that the king’s only role was to provide money. The royal treasury (to basilikon) dispensed the capital for a foundation of the city’s choosing, or made annual payments to a slush fund bearing the opaque name “for the administration (dioikesis) of the city” (D1 line 11). Left unexpressed, the source of the money can appear inconsequential. How the money is invested and differentiated between the various organs of civic finance and their attendant ideological categories, even the particular type of money, which currency, is on this account the city’s prerogative alone. The Attalids do not actively participate in the social process of earmarking, or so it appears. A notable example is a decree of Teos that describes the establishment of a foundation for the support of an actors’ guild, the koinon of Dionysian technitai, the powerful, inter-city association that would eventually spar with Teos over festival revenues, prompting an Attalid mediation (SEG II 580; D7).Footnote ⁶³ Its date is placed variously after 188 or at the end of the third century, late in the reign of Attalos I.Footnote ⁶⁴ This text is most often cited as surefire evidence for Attalid intervention in city finance in the form of a fund, “for the administration (dioikesis) of the city” (lines 17–18).Footnote ⁶⁵ Attalid money, which is earmarked for the general administration of the city, grants Teos financial flexibility and security. To create the actors’ foundation, citizens combined 3,000 drachmas of royal dioikesis funds with 3,000 drachmas of city money. Interestingly, this latter amount was twice re-earmarked: it is filched from the grain fund, which was formerly known as the fortification fund! The combination of Attalid and civic monies is facilitated by the merging of the civic and royal financial calendars: on taking up their office, the city’s treasurers receive 3,000 drachmas as the first installment of the year’s royal dioikesis funds. The royal role here seems to begin and end with disbursement. The process by which the city arranges to provide for purchase of property to support the actors is complex, laid out in detail, and, as far as we can see, free of royal participation. The king, it seems, grants a certain number of subventions per year, and the citizens of Teos do with the money what they will.

J. D. Sosin argues that the Attalid kings played a similarly passive role in the establishment of four endowments at Delphi in 159/8.Footnote ⁶⁶ Delphi lay far outside the Attalid kingdom but promised the Pergamenes a Panhellenic stage and the opportunity to politick with the Aetolians. Moreover, the city of Delphi was also a polis, with the requisite institutions to make the most of Attalid gifts so modest that Polybios may have singled them out for condemnation. The polis of Delphi stretched Attalid money into years of pageantry, cult, and public education. To summarize events, in a period of months, the city sent four embassies to Pergamon, which resulted in two gifts containing a total of four endowments. First, the co-regent Attalos II gave 21,000 attic-weight drachmas, labeled “Alexanders,” three talents of which were earmarked for teachers’ salaries, the education of Delphi’s citizen youth, and the remaining half talent for the celebration of a new festival in honor of the king and dynasty called the Attaleia.Footnote ⁶⁷ One inscription describes the stringent terms on which the funds would be managed, splashing local rules about sacred and public money, guarantors and defaulters, across the base of an equestrian statue for Attalos II on which the text was inscribed (Syll.³ 672). A few months later, the dying Eumenes II endowed a grain fund (three and a half talents) and another new festival, the Eumeneia (one talent). A second inscription records that Eumenes II also paid in those “Alexander” drachmas (Syll.³ 671).

Together, the two gifts amounted to an injection of eight talents of “Alexanders” into a monetary system dominated by other, regional currencies. The so-called Alexanders, by contrast, were an international currency. These tetradrachms, whether or not they bore the face of the Macedonian conqueror, had been minted on the old Attic standard, meaning they now commanded a premium in long-distance trade.Footnote ⁶⁸ For Sosin, this fact unlocks the dynamic that produced these earmarking arrangements. Because the Delphic elite planned to borrow the Alexanders at a lower cost than the price of that premium currency on the open market, they stood to gain the most from the arrangement, and on his account, would have plowed the coins back into international transactions. Sosin astutely demonstrates what certain Delphic citizens stood to gain. However, while this dogged pursuit of cui bono demystifies the claims of the ὅπως clause of the decree for Attalos II, which construes the whole affair as a royal plot to earmark interest “for all time” for the maintenance of sacrifices, the king’s own honors, and the teachers’ salaries, it papers over much of the complexity of the transaction.

Sosin describes the Delphic elite as “crony capitalists,” casting the Attalids as partners to a simple “gift exchange,” cash for honors. He writes, “Though these texts are inevitably studied as specimens of royal gifts, there is no reason to think that the idea to establish the endowments or the restrictions under which they were to operate came from Attalos or Eumenes. Both pairs of endowments were established only after Delphi sent embassies to the kings in support of the idea. Kings provided money. Rich Delphians provided initiative and ingenuity.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The question of origin and invention here seems misplaced. Again, Attalid earmarks matched local wants and needs with the floating resources of a redistributive system. It took four embassies to produce the four earmarks contained within these two diplomatic acts. The rhetoric of Delphi’s decree was, in short: the city asked, and it received (Syll.³ 672 lines 6–7). Beneath the rhetoric, however, the back-and-forth of the emissaries reflects painstaking negotiations. If not those details of the final arrangement subject to strictly local politics, then the basic shape of the earmark was bargained out. Cash or kind? We know that the Attalids skillfully deployed grain from surplus tribute in this economy of gifts. If cash, which currency? The Attalids traversed many different monetary systems and concocted their own. We can also consider the gifts’ amounts and delivery schedules; for royal honors, if a statue, its location; if a festival, its place on the religious calendar. All this and more was up for negotiation.

Institutions and Earmarking

The image of Delphi’s rules and regulations scrawled like a caption beneath the statue of Attalos II on horseback is jarring. High and low politics are combined. The king seems to get mired in the city’s red tape. One lesson to be drawn from the juxtaposition is that earmarking afforded the two parties an opportunity to gain familiarity with each other’s financial institutions. The more Attalid officials and civic elites shared information, the greater the prospects for fiscal and indeed ideological integration. Yet with power so unevenly distributed inside the kingdom, it must be demonstrated, not assumed, that subjects of the nascent Attalid empire offered kings a candid look at their finances and, conversely, that kings cultivated an interest in local institutions. Inscriptions brought to light in recent years provide two key pieces of evidence in this regard. The first is a dossier from Kyme in Aeolis, like Temnos, a city long in the Pergamene orbit (SEG L 1195).Footnote ⁷⁰ The dossier emerges from an episode in the reign of Philetairos (either 280–278 or ca. 270), but it gives us a striking impression of an aspect of Attalid political culture that endured into the second century.Footnote ⁷¹ It consists of three documents: the decision of the beleaguered city of Kyme to send ambassadors to Philetairos urgently requesting military equipment, the dynast’s positive response, and a decree of Kyme on the administration and safeguarding of Philetairos’ gift, which also outlines his honors. Initially, the city had sent an embassy to Philetairos to negotiate the provision of a large number of shields for the protection (phylake) and security (asphaleia) of its citizens.Footnote ⁷² Philetairos obliged, confessing that while the competent Pergamene workshops had closed, he happened to have the shields on hand and would provide them as a gift.Footnote ⁷³ We know that Hellenistic Kyme was particularly exercised by monarchical and oligarchical threats to its democracy.Footnote ⁷⁴ Remarkably, we learn that the dynast who armed the citizens of Kyme also became a citizen of the Aeolian polis (line 30). Even further, the name of this super-citizen was etched into each of 600 shields alongside the name of one of the twelve tribes of Kyme. In separate musters, the phylarch (tribal leader) would have distributed shields bearing his particular tribal insignia – and the name of Philetairos.Footnote ⁷⁵ The city’s proposal of an earmark, the circuit that connects centers of arms production at Pergamon and the customs houses of Kyme, appears in the first document:

While Philetairos chose not to execute an earmark designed to match his manufacturing resources with Kyme’s coastal ones, the encounter provides a model of interaction. Rather, in the end, Philetairos chose to trade shields for honors – not money. Yet the original proposal of Kyme forecasts a transfer of information. Kyme was prepared to buy the shields, but hoped to negotiate a good price by pleading for the “customary cost” (κατισταμένω ἀναλώματος; lines 7–8).Footnote ⁷⁶ The city could not offer payment upon delivery, but promised future payment by earmarking taxes on grain in transit. To reassure Philetairos of creditworthiness, Kyme disclosed a great deal of information about its finances: still yet to be collected, the tax on grain in transit was already earmarked for a number of other purposes, but Philetairos, too, would get his money. In order to lay out the plan, the city’s ambassadors delivered to Philetairos a document called a grapha, a written account of Kyme’s fiscal outlook, perhaps including the master document known as “the decree passed in the prytany of Lysanias.” Philetairos, then, received a detailed map of Kyme’s finances. In exchange for the shields, the city had laid bare its institutions, the present state of its finances, and its projected revenues. The earmarking process continually fed the Attalids valuable information, which inevitably informed rational taxation and redistribution.Footnote ⁷⁷

Kyme and Pergamon were old friends and once peers. Kyme even counted the dynast Philetairos among its own citizens. In such a city, the Attalids could hardly hope to revamp institutions to better fit their fiscal system or cultural preferences.Footnote ⁷⁸ On the other hand, in the rural eastern territories awarded at Apameia, opportunities arose to tailor civic institutions. This was especially true at the moment when a new polis was born, when an Anatolian town was refounded with Greek institutions. Another new epigraphical dossier, this one from Toriaion in Phrygia Paroreios, depicts the Attalids gathering data on civic institutions, engineering them to complement their own, and founding public life on earmarking (SEG XLVII 1745; D8; Fig. 1.1). Under the Seleukid regime, Toriaion had been a katoikia, another multiethnic military town, the kind which occupied a rung just below the polis in the settlement hierarchy of the kingdom. Probably in the 180s, Eumenes II granted Toriaion the status and institutions of a polis in a process documented in the dossier of three royal letters. In the first epistle, the king addresses himself to settlers (katoikountes), in the second and third, he speaks to the freshly minted council (boule) and people (demos) of Toriaion. While it is nearly impossible to judge the pace of acculturation, the political transformation was decisive and momentous.Footnote ⁷⁹ Desperate to solidify their sovereignty in the vast new territory, the Attalids turned Toriaion into an administrative hub.Footnote ⁸⁰ They also ceded to it the ultimate ideological defense weapon, the title of polis, but not before predicating polis identity on paying taxes.

Figure 1.1 View of the Ilgın Plain, vicinity of ancient Toriaion, with Nodalar Höyük in the middle ground.

(© Yalburt Yaylas? Archaeological Landscape Research Project)

In the inscription, Eumenes gives the Toriaeitai permission to organize themselves, along with τοῖς μεθ’ ὑμῶν συνοικ̣οῦσιν ἐν̣χωρίοις (“those of the indigenous cohabiting with them”), into a single polity (politeuma), and to use their own laws (idioi nomoi) (line 28).Footnote ⁸¹ On the shelves of city archives around the Hellenistic world, royal orders (prostagmata and diagrammata) shared space with city laws. It seems to have been a common practice, even a standard practice in the Attalid kingdom, to send city laws up to the king for validation.Footnote ⁸² However, Eumenes presents Toriaion with an interesting choice. He demands that if Toriaion wishes to use its own laws, the city submit them for review, lest any of them conflict with “their” interests – or “his” interests, depending on whether one accepts the restoration of ‹ἡ›μῖν for ὑμῖν in line 30.Footnote ⁸³ On the other hand, if the city wishes, Eumenes offers to coordinate even more. He promises to send the budding polis the full package: ready-made laws, a council, magistracies, civic tribes, and an oil fund for the neoi of the gymnasium.Footnote ⁸⁴ This was no empty gesture. The Attalids vied for more than the elimination of legal contradictions smoldering in city archives. They urged the adoption of democratic institutions that were compatible with their own monarchical political economy, framing the choice for Toriaion. They set bounds around the field of legal production. The goal was to achieve the level of institutional homogeneity and interoperability necessary to implement an earmark.

In fact, an earmark did emerge from these negotiations along with Toriaion’s new institutions. Eumenes and the delegation led by a man with the Celtic name Brennos agreed to designate certain taxes collected in Toriaion for the purchase of oil for the new city’s ephebic class. In the second letter, the gymnasium of the polis of Toriaion gained royal support for its provision of oil.Footnote ⁸⁵ For the time being (κα̣τ̣ὰ̣ τ̣ὸ παρὸν) – and here the political horizon is hazy – the revenue from the agoranomia, a certain market tax or fee, was earmarked for the oil. Eumenes ordered a financial official called the hemiolios to use his discretion in substituting a different set of revenues. While the nature of these revenues is imperfectly understood, they are clearly taxes on land, as the use of the term dekate (tithe; lines 41–47) implies. Of the third and final letter we have only the first few lines, but they mention another embassy. It would seem that the contingent and provisional terms of the earmarking arrangement laid out in the second letter had generated this second embassy and a third royal letter. As the new citizens of the new polis of Toriaion bargained out the shape of their institutions, they were also arguing with Eumenes over earmarks. The king traded benefaction for tax collection. The Attalids were not intervening in polis affairs so much as embedding their authority inside local institutions from their very inception.

Each of these anecdotes describes a recursive relationship between the process of arranging an earmark and the process of crafting institutions for the polis or the katoikia. Ambassadors met with kings to negotiate fiscal privileges, and when they returned home, they reshaped local institutions of public finance in ways that reflected new realities of domination. Or civic leaders aimed to shape local institutions in ways that maximized the likelihood of securing fiscal privileges from new rulers. The exchange of information and personnel between imperial centers and peripheries probably picked up in western Asia Minor during the stormy 180s, as both new hegemons, Pergamon and Rhodes, struggled to find a footing. Not only was sovereignty still shaky, but the Romans had left behind a quagmire of fiscal quarrels and territorial disputes.Footnote ⁸⁶ Polybius writes:

Indeed, the Romans ruled on such issues in only a limited number of cases. For example, the cities of Chios, Smyrna, and Erythrai were all successful in petitions for pieces of taxable territory (21.45.6). Once the Romans left, Rhodes and Pergamon must have decided the lion’s share of cases. Unfortunately, we lack a well-documented case from north of the Maeander. Strabo merely alludes to a dispute between Parion and Priapus, settled by the Attalids (13.1.4). However, we can look to the Rhodian sphere to fill in the picture. The career of Pamphilos of Apollonia Salbake in Caria shows us how bargaining over taxes with the new regimes went hand-in-hand with the development and adaptation of local institutions of public finance. The decree in his honor reads (lines 1–27):Footnote ⁸⁷

The formulaic nature of the language of praise notwithstanding, it is clear that Pamphilos had an extraordinary impact on his city. With everything at stake, he had represented Apollonia’s interests before Manlius Vulso and the Romans conferencing at Apameia in the summer of 188. When his city was assigned to Rhodes, he hastened to the island to defend its interests. Among these, Jean and Louis Robert suspected, were the revenues of certain sacred villages in the vicinity of Caria’s Mount Salbake, a plausible conjecture, but one that depends on taking the ambassadors’ antagonists as indigenous Carians (enchorioi).Footnote ⁸⁸ Christof Schuler, by contrast, has argued that the enchorioi are in fact “native” Rhodians hostile to the interests of Apollonia.Footnote ⁸⁹ At present, it does not seem that Pamphilos played the culture card in order to secure his goal. What is important for our purposes is that at some point the energetic ambassador returned home to find the city’s revenues (demosiai prosodoi) in disarray and public monies gone missing. His technocratic solution, delivered in a lexicon more papyrological than epigraphical, was to overhaul public finance at Apollonia with a new founding document.Footnote ⁹⁰ His decree (psephisma) appears to have functioned like a budget, preventing future shortfalls, in part, one assumes, by taking account of the recently formalized fiscal relationship with Rhodes.Footnote ⁹¹

Interaction with one of Asia Minor’s new hegemons may have spurred Pamphilos to reform. New institutions arrived in Hellenistic cities through different means. In this political ecosystem, cities constantly looked around at each other, which meant institutional change could occur through outright imitation.Footnote ⁹² When Teos and Lebedos needed a new set of laws for their synoikism, though, it was a king who urged them to take over the law code of a peer-polity, Kos (RC 3 lines 57–61). Sometimes, fear of nonconformity sparked a change. When the citizens of second-century Beroia noticed that “in the cities that have gymnasia and have established an oil fund,” there were also gymnasiarchal laws, they considered it only fitting (καλῶς ἔχει) that they pass those laws too (SEG XLIII 381 lines 6–8). Human mobility also played a role: when people moved about, they took institutions with them. Therefore, the many embassies of Pamphilos no doubt influenced his reform, for we find widespread centralization of public finance in precisely this period.Footnote ⁹³ Perhaps his experience negotiating fiscal arrangements abroad had even conditioned what he considered “messily kept (μὴ ὀρθῶς)” books at home (line 19). If we accept that these sorts of interactions could affect a city’s choice of institutions, it is not difficult to conceptualize earmarking as an arrangement between ruler and subject that is the outcome of a social bargain struck in the name of a subject community by men such as Apollonios of Metropolis, Kephisodoros of Apameia, Brennos of Toriaion, and Pamphilos of Apollonia Salbake. In other words, part of brokering the arrangements was matching royal resources – not only cash, but the means of coercion – with civic resources – not only manpower, but institutions like public banks and the sacred repositories of temples.

On the Attalid side of the Maeander, the kings continued to deepen their familiarity with local civic institutions in order to use them as conduits and safeguards for their money, as well as tools for investment. Earmarking could not work otherwise. Beneath the bombast of self-advertisement lie humdrum details of institutional coordination. For example, in the winter of 167/6, the Ionian koinon, with the Milesians taking the lead, passed a decree that conferred a series of honors on Eumenes, including a gold statue, proclaiming him the common benefactor of the Greeks (euergetes ton hellenon). Ionian ambassadors, including Eirenias of Miletus, intercepted the king on Delos and presented him with the decree. While that decree does not survive, two other documents may contain portions of its contents. One is the king’s letter of reply to the Ionians (RC 52); the other is a fragmentary decree of Miletus found at Didyma (I.Didyma 488). In his letter, Eumenes writes:

At first glance, this looks like paternalism: the Ionians play no role in earmarking revenues for their own festival. The king magnanimously assumes the cost of one of several days’ festivities during the Panionia, and his subjects agree to rename the day in his honor, rendering him cult.Footnote ⁹⁴ They propose a gift of a gilded statue, but he commutes their gold into charis – the intangible currency of gift exchange – and then orders them to erect his portrait in his sacred precinct in Miletus. It would appear that the king alone decides the source of this earmark and, moreover, that he determines without input from the Ionians just how much revenue will be appropriate. “This project,” writes Welles, “as far as the evidence of the letter goes, originated with Eumenes. It was not proposed in the [original] decree.”Footnote ⁹⁵ As usual, we can only guess at the origin of the earmark. Yet our question is not one of first impetus. Rather, we want to discover the dynamic that produces the earmarking arrangement in its final form.

Welles points us in the right direction by suggesting that the earmarking arrangement anticipated in RC 52 may very well have resembled the one we know from a fragmentary Milesian decree from sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma (I.Didyma 488). In fact, the first editor of both documents, Theodor Wiegand, believed that the two inscriptions reflect the same portfolio of honors.Footnote ⁹⁶ What remains of the fragmentary decree from Didyma is concerned with the financing of activities associated with the celebration of Eumenes’ birthday, rather than the king’s name day during the Panionia. Yet the institutional underpinnings of both royal galas were likely comparable. I.Didyma 488 mentions two foundations, one at the beginning of the fragment, the “revenues from the gift funds” ἀπὸ [τῶν πρ]οσό[δων|τῶν ἐκ τῶν δεδωρ]ημένων χρημάτων (lines 2–3), and, later, the “revenues from the maritime loans” ἀπὸ τῶν ὀφειλομένων ἐμπορικῶν|δ]ανείων (lines 24–25). The revenues of the first are earmarked for the festivities of the king’s birthday: sacrifices and feasting, a parade of ephebes in full armor, “and everything else according to the stephanephorikos nomos (wreath-wearing law) and the diagraphe (ordinance) of the priesthood” (lines 13–15). The revenues of the second fund, which are 30 talents of retiring maritime loans, are linked to a grain fund. That fund is to provide for a public grain distribution on Eumenes’ birthday. Each Milesian receives six hemiekteia of grain in an event that packages together citizenship, commensality, and fealty to Pergamon.

For Welles and Wiegand, the first foundation is certainly royal, while the second is also likely to be so, as it is under the control of two officials “appointed for the construction of the gymnasium”), one of whom is the same person – Eirenias of RC 52 with his Attalid connections. I.Didyma 488 may not be conclusive evidence for direct Attalid involvement with the Milesian grain fund, but it illuminates precisely what the statement of Eumenes in RC 52 occludes. An earmarking arrangement of enormous ideological import for the king, aiming as it does to implant the king’s name in civic memory, rests squarely on Milesian institutions. Eumenes’ gift of “sufficient revenues” presupposes Milesian cooperation. The king provides the seed money, while the city grows its own subsidy. This earmarking arrangement needs the public bank of Miletus and its personnel (lines 26, 31); local grain commissioners, who manage the fund in such a way that sufficient grain is produced (lines 17–18); and the legal guardrails provided by the stephanephorikos nomos and the diagraphe of the priesthood. Also aiding its chances of success are the procedural sanctions that Miletus institutes to protect against its dissolution or the repurposing of the funds (lines 46–49) – and even the facility of the Didymaion, which as the repository of the decree, lends it an aura of the permanent and sacred. Earmarking allowed the Attalids to profit handsomely from the elaborate organizational resources of the Hellenistic polis.