Evan Vance (McGill University) Public Lecture

Evan Vance (McGill University) will deliver a public lecture, "Cults and Culpability: Sacred Wealth and the Development of Public Oversight in Archaic Greece," on Thursday, February 6, at 6 p.m. in Library Room LB-322. All are invited.

Abstract:

The Archaic period (c. 700–480 BCE) was an essential time during which many defining features of communal life in the Greek city-state (polis) emerged. However, the paucity of contemporary documentary evidence makes it challenging to understand how these key changes unfolded.

In this talk, I draw on Archaic inscriptions to trace how managing sacred wealth — that is, resources belonging to cults — provided the mechanism through which many communities clarified their expectations around public accountability. I suggest that concerns about accountability provided an incentive to freeze wealth in less-expendable forms (‘de-monetization’) and argue that this may explain the apparently minimal public economy of the Greek city-state in the Classical and Hellenistic periods as well.