Ancient Greek clubs: Encyclopedia - Ancient Greek clubs

Ancient Greek clubs

The most comprehensive statement we possess as to the various kinds of clubs which might exist in a single Greek state appears in a law of Solon quoted incidentally in the Digest of Justinian I (47.22), which guaranteed the administrative independence of these associations provided they kept within the bounds of the law. Those mentioned (apart from demes and phratries, which were not clubs as here understood) include associations for religious purposes, for burial, for trade, for privateering, and for the enjoyment of common meals. Of these, the religious clubs had by far the most important. We have a great deal of information about them, chiefly from inscriptions; and we may take them as covering those for burial purposes and for common meals, for no doubt can exist that all such unions had originally a religious object of some kind. But we have to add to Solon's list the political phratries which we meet with in Athenian history, which do not seem to have always had a religious object, whatever their origin may have been. Let us clear the ground by considering these first.

In the period between the end of the Persian Wars in 448 BC and the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC we hear of hetairies within the two political parties, oligarchic and democratic; Themistocles allegedly (Plut. Anistides, 2) belonged to one, Pericles' supporters seem to have been thus organized (Plut. Per. 7 and 13), and Cimon had a hundred hetairoi devoted to him (Plut. Cim. 17). These associations served, like the collegia sodalicia at Rome (see below), for securing certain results at elections and in the law-courts (Thuc. viii. 54), and were not regarded as harmful or illegal. But the bitterness of party struggles in Greece during the Peloponnesian War changed them in many states into political engines dangerous to local constitutions, and especially to democratic institutions; Aristotle mentions (Politics, p. 1310 a) a secret oath taken by the members of oligarchic clubs, containing the promise, "I will be an enemy to the people, and will devise all the harm I can against them." At Athens in 413 BC the conspiracy against the democracy was engineered by means of these clubs, which existed not only there but in the other cities of the Delian League. (Thuc. viii. 48 and 54), and had now become secret conspiracies (crvpwi.zoo-icu) of a wholly unconstitutional kind. On this subject see Grote, Hist. of Greece, v. 360; AHJ Greenidge, Handbook of Greek Constitutional History, 208 foll.

Passing over the clubs for trade or plunder mentioned in Solon's law, of which we have no detailed knowledge, we come to the religious associations. These had several names, especially thiasi, eranoi and orgeones, and it is not possible to distinguish these from each other in historical times, though they may have had different origins. They had the common object of sacrifice to a particular deity; the thiasi and orgeones seem connected more especially with foreign deities whose rites were of an orgiastic character. Paul Foucart has written an excellent treatise on the organization of these societies (Les Associations religieuses chez les Grecs, Paris, 1873), which provides many of the following particulars. For the greater part of them the evidence consists of inscriptions from various parts of Greece, many of which Foucart published for the first time at the end of his book.

Strikingly, all these associations have the object of maintaining the worship of some foreign deity, i.e. of some deity apart from those admitted and guaranteed by the state, the divine inhabitants of the city, as one might call them. For all these the state made provision of priests, temples, sacrifices, etc.; but for all other deities these necessaries remained in the charge of private individuals associated for the purpose. The state, as we see from the law of Solon quoted above, made no difficulty about the introduction of foreign worships, provided they did not infringe the law and were not morally unwholesome, and regarded these associations as having all the rights of legal corporations. So we find the cult of deities such as Sabazius, Mater Magna (see Great mother of the gods) and Attis, Adonis, Isis, Serapis, Men Tyrannos, carried on in Greek states, and especially in seaports like the Peiraeus, Rhodes, Smyrna, without protest, but almost certainly without moral benefit to the worshippers. The famous passage in Demosthenes (de Corona, sect. 259 foll.) shows, however, that the initiation at an early age in the rites of Sabazius did not gain credit for Aeschines in the eyes of the "best men". Unsurprisingly, in accordance with the foreign character of the cults thus maintained, the members of the associations rarely hold citizenship by birth, but include women, freedmen, foreigners and even slaves. Thus in an inscription found by Sir Charles Thomas Newton at Cnidus, which contains a mutilated list of members of a thiasos, the list includes apparently only one Cnidian citizen out of twelve, four slaves, and probably seven foreigners. Hence we may conclude that these associations predominantly, whether for good or for evil, organized and encouraged the foreign population in the cities of Greece.

Notably, as we shall also find at Rome, these associations took on an organizational form in imitation of the constitution of the city itself. Each had its law, its assembly, its magistrates or officers (i.e. secretary, treasurer) as well as priests or priestesses, and its finance. The law regulated the conditions of admission, which involved an entrance fee and an examination as to character; the contributions, payable by the month, and the steps to be taken to enforce payment, e.g. exclusion in case of persistent neglect of this duty; the use to be made of the revenues, such as the building or maintenance of temple or club-house, and the cost of crowns or other honours voted by the assembly to its officers. This assembly, in accordance with the law, elected its officers once a year, and these, like those of the state itself, took an oath on entering office, and gave an account of their stewardship at the end of the year. For further details on these points of internal government see Foucart's work (pp. 20 foll.), chiefly derived from inscriptions of the orgeones engaged in the cult of the Mother of the Gods at the Peiraeus. The important question whether these religious associations functioned in any sense as benefit clubs, or relieved the sick and needy, Foucart answers emphatically in the negative.

As one might expect, the religious clubs increased rather than diminished in number and importance in the later periods of Greek history, and a large proportion of the inscriptions relating to them belong to the Macedonian and Roman empires. One of the most interesting, found in 1868, belongs to the 2nd century A.D. and reveals the worship of Men Tyrannos at Laurium (Foucart, pp. 119 foll.). This Phrygian deity was introduced into Attica by a Lycian slave, employed by a Roman in working the mines at Laurium. He founded the cult and the eranos which was to maintain it, and seems also to have drawn up the law regulating its ritual and government. This may help us to understand the way in which similar associations of an earlier age organised themselves.

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Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Ancient Greek clubs", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki