It is not hard to see how competition and rivalry, as well as co-opera-
tion, played important roles within ancient social systems. Competition
for pre-eminence among wealthy elites was matched by competition among
the potential recipients of such benefactions. The constituent groups of
thepoliswere in many ways competitors with one another in their attempts
to maintain contacts with and receive ongoing support from important
persons within social networks. Beneficiaries also had something to gain
from publicly advertising, through the medium of honorary inscriptions,
their connections: namely, the advantage that such connections accrued,
in their competition for prestige within the civic context. In setting up an
honorary inscription, for example, an association or guild was not only
honouring its benefactor but also making a claim regarding its own place
within society, reaffirming in a very concrete way its ties within the net-
works of the polis(cf. Woolf 1996, 29; Harland 1999).
Yet co-operation was also essential to the system. Individual inhabitants
of the lower social strata—such as a purple-dyer alone, for instance—were
not very likely to gain the attention and benefaction of a wealthy imperial
or civic official. But by co-operating together in the form of an association,
united purple-dyers could ensure the possibility of such relations within the
social networks of the polisand empire. On a broader scale, too, apart from
its own intramural competitions, the sense of civic pride and identity,
belonging to the polisas such, meant that its inhabitants as a whole co-oper-
ated together in broader-scale competitions and rivalries with other cities
(cf. Dio, Or.38–39).
Associations and the Civic Framework
Now that we have a framework within which to discuss the polisin Roman
times, we can provide some concrete examples of the working of this sys-
tem of benefaction and the nature of social relations within it. I have cho-
sen to use as a starting point for this discussion the epigraphic evidence for
small social-religious groups or associations in Roman Asia (for abbrevia-
tions for primary sources in this section, see G.H.R. Horsley and Lee 1994),
not only because it happens to be the area with which I am most familiar
(cf. Harland 1996, 1999, 2000), but for two other reasons as well. First,
associations play a key role in common scholarly scenarios of civic and reli-
gious decline; second, many of these groups represent the lower strata of
society which many scholars of the decline-theories think were the far-
thest removed from civic identity and participation. Therefore, if an inves-
tigation of the actual evidence for these groups shows signs of continuing
attachments to the civic community and its institutions and structures,
The Declining Polis? 39