3 - The icing on the cake?

Summary

According to the traditional view among ancient historians, the provincial cities of the Roman Empire suffered from an endemic shortage of public resources, brought about by a tax-greedy central government that left the cities few revenues of their own. Consequently, city governments were unable to finance much in the way of public amenities, and it was only the private money of elite citizens acting as public benefactors that prevented the permanent decline of the Empire's civic infrastructure. Euergetism, in short, was the motor of the civic economy. As we saw in the previous chapter, this latter part of the theory is evidently false. Overall elite expenditure on munificence was fairly modest and did not have much effect on the urban economy, most gifts were small-scale and the wide majority were non-utilitarian in nature, i.e. prestige projects and highly ideologically charged public events rather than direct contributions to the material or social welfare of the non-elite citizenry. Yet all of this again raises the question of the financial capabilities of civic governments. For if benefactors did not habitually finance the bulk of the civic infrastructure, even if they occasionally made substantial contributions, then it must have been the civic treasury that did so. From Pliny's letter to Trajan about the theatre at Nicaea in Bithynia, cited in the previous chapter, and from additional evidence it is clear that cities and private benefactors often acted together.