At some point in the fifth century ce, a series of honorific statues were erected in Stratonikeia, a major city in Caria, Asia Minor. The statues were set up to commemorate the benefactions that one Maximos did for the local community, primarily for the sake of the dispossessed (ἀκτέανοι). While the majority of the inscribed praises that accompanied the statues heaped conventionally generic praise on Maximos for his euergetism, one of the inscriptions gave a rather precise reason for the high esteem that the benefactor enjoyed in the city. When the poor (τῶν πενήτων) of Stratonikeia were hard-pressed to pay the tax of chrysargyron, Maximos stepped in three times and paid the tax on their behalf from his own resources.

The social dynamics reflected in these inscriptions seem emblematic of late antique economic and power relationships between the destitute and their benefactors, as well as the Christian ideology of patronage, earthly and divine, that I discuss below.

Historians must tread carefully when they deal with both modern and ancient slavery, for every time they brand the practice as an archaic form of domination, it reappears adapted to new ages. Although most of the modern world, since the nineteenth century, has strived to make the ownership of one human being by another illegal, slavery keeps returning in the most insidious ways. At the turn of the century, when modern societies claimed to have finally gotten rid of it, slavery began to resurface, masquerading as free labour all across the globe (and not just in the Global South), bringing the need to discuss and to enforce policies against ‘practices similar to slavery’ back to international forums. It is striking that while this notion of an ‘insidious return’ has recently appeared in studies on rural slavery in the ancient world, it seems not to have influenced ones focused on late Roman Gaul.