6 - Giving for a return: generosity and legitimation

Summary

What did benefactors receive in return for their generosity? Ever since the first publication of the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss's famous Essai sur le don in 1923–4, it has been a commonplace of anthropological studies of the gift that giving is always for a return, that it, in fact, constitutes a form of exchange. This, however, places the ancient historian studying Greco-Roman public giving in a somewhat awkward position. For the main thesis of one of the most authoritative works ever published on the subject of euergetism is precisely that ancient benefactions did not require something in return. In his monumental study Le pain et le cirque, Paul Veyne is in fact strongly opposed to any social scientific explanation of euergetism (reciprocity, redistribution and so forth). Instead, Veyne argues that benefactions were chiefly a means for the elite to emphasise the social distance between themselves and their fellow citizens. According to Veyne, their generosity did not bring them any clear economic, social or political advantages. It was, in this sense, disinterested. Benefactors, Veyne argues, simply gave for the psychological satisfaction that could be derived from being generous, that is, for the pleasure of giving.

How to resolve the potential conflict of interpretations here? My view is that the anthropologists have the better of it. Veyne, I think, has many interesting, original and worthwhile things to say on euergetism, yet we should part company with him on the so-called disinterested nature of ancient munificence.