Cost, value and wealth redistribution: micro- and macro-economy in Early Byzantine evergetism

‘Public’ evergetism – an act performed by a public authority as part of its function – and ‘private’ patronage – an act performed by a member of the upper class as a private citizen – are the two opposite poles of a complex phenomenon that has become a classic subject in analyzing late antique and early Byzantine society. Such a complex phenomenon is obviously open to many different and complementary approaches. The most practiced one – solely on the basis of the nature of available sources, both archaeological and extra-archaeological – was, until now, the reading of the highest rung on a hypothetical interpretative ladder, looking at the significance of public/private evergetism as an instrument used by higher social classes to manage social relationships. A second approach has a more recent history, being grounded in the archaeology of the Roman world, but not so diffused in the archaeology of the late-antique and early Byzantine Mediterranean, could be defined as a ‘logistic’ one, and it mainly focuses on the direct economic implications of the building processes of architectural artefacts that are the most-visible concrete product of any public or private act of patronage. The third approach is quite new in the scholarly literature on the temporospatial context we are interested in here. It could be defined as an ‘energetic’ one – or even a ‘thermodynamic’ one – since it is essentially linked to the possibility of reading the whole evergetic process (from its conception to the practical achievement) in terms of the capacity to focus a workforce, coming from a specific catchment area, the extent of which depends more or less on the donor’s social rank, on a specific artefact-.