is not best characterized as a market, in which autonomous individuals
choose products. The paganism of the public cults, i.e., most of what a con-
temporary would recognize as religion, worked in an altogether different
fashion. A different economic metaphor is required. I suggest—no great nov-
elty—that of the exchange.
The ancients would have had no difficulty understanding the metaphor
of exchange. Certainly, it would not have scandalized them; for the cult of
the gods, whether undertaken publicly by the state or in private votive reli-
gion, was in fact and in essence an exchange. Its aim was reciprocity, as
encapsulated in the simple Roman formula, do ut des: “I, the mortal, give,
so that you, the immortal, might give in return.” The standard medium of
exchange, the human currency for divine favours done or anticipated, was
animal sacrifice; in addition, temples, statues, humans, and all the appa-
ratus of public worship played their part as tangible items of value. In this
exchange, however, the players were humans and their communities, on one
side, and the gods, on the other—not, as in Stark’s model, religious firms
and their clients. The operations of that ancient exchange, moreover, are not
susceptible to academic analysis (except as a purely human social and men-
tal construct), since it is predicated on the actuality of the gods as real
market players. For most Christian contemporaries, incidentally, the
exchange was real enough: it was simply a corrupt and corrupting market
that trafficked with demons.
There was, though, at work in the empire’s religion an exchange more
amenable to social scientific analysis. It has long been recognized that
much of what drove public paganism was the competition of the city elites
for prestige—in a word, philotimia(love of honour). Prestige was acquired
by conspicuous activity in the religious sector, especially by large-scale
endowments (e.g., building and dedicating a temple or funding a festi-
val). In this way, an exchange of material wealth into social status and
thence into political power was realized. Central to these activities, and
very much geared to their timocratic goals, was the elite’s participation in
the cults as principal functionaries, i.e., as priests performing sacrifice. At
the heart of the entire apparatus, ideologically and locatively, as head of the
religion of the empire’s ruling city state was the Biggest Priest of them all,
the Pontifex Maximus, the emperor himself—so pre-eminent a figure, in
fact, that he was himself the object of veneration in the imperial cults, in
which regional and civic aristocrats vied for the honour of holding his
priesthood (Price 1984).
This vast empire-wide enterprise, in which piety was harnessed to phi-
lanthropy for the production of timocratic capital, is termed euergetism
nora
(Nora)
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