What’s in a name? Nomenclature and the translation of political power in Roman Corinth

The agonistic inscriptions of Roman Corinth have been almost entirely published in the magisterial volumes of Meritt 1931, West 1931, and Kent 1966 (one exception is noted by Wiseman 2015: 237n.211; the other–I 1973 4–we will publish in an expanded version of the twenty-minute paper we propose). Our paper asks a new question of this dossier: what can be gleaned from the epigraphy of the rising Corinthian elite as they construct hybrid political lineages? Analysis of the cursus honorum of prominent Corinthians in relation to the Isthmian and Caesarean Games reveals that local political offices (in particular those connected to literary competition) played a significant role in unifying local and imperial politics under common cultural values, facilitating social mobility in Corinth’s post-colonial elite.

Our work aims to fill, in part, a lacuna in previous scholarly literature on Roman Greece noted by Mazurek in her work on Roman Athens. That is, as Mazurek details (2021: 607-608; 621-622), Greece under Roman rule is often not considered from a specifically post-colonial perspective in the way other Roman provinces are, and this is especially true of cities in Roman Greece beyond Athens. Our proposed remedy to this situation uses the prosopographic methodology of previous literature (in particular Spawforth 1996 and Rizakis 2001), but with different objectives.

To preview our argumentation: by identifying common patterns in the epigraphic nomenclature used to refer to the officials presiding over the Games, we illustrate how the local titles named in the cursus honorum appropriated the logic underlying imperial systems of political inheritance based on patrilineal lines of Roman descent. In allowing Corinthians to append Roman identifiers to their names and titles, inscriptions enabled the post-colonial Corinthian elite to claim ownership of genealogies of Roman power which exceeded their new local context. More concretely, tracing the genealogy of those occupying the positions of agonothetes and isagogeus reveals that the post-colonial elite leveraged their patronage of public functions, their claims to Roman citizenship, their leadership in religious organizations, and their historical relations to prominent Roman politicians (primarily through prior conditions of enslavement) to create new hereditary bases for power in the Corinthian colony. Straddling the porous boundaries between Greek and Roman, citizen and non-citizen, and local politician and imperial administrator, those fulfilling the roles of agonothetes and isagogeus of Corinth left behind a material record of Corinth’s integration into a Roman Empire whose records of its own domestic politics were continually being rewritten.

In sum, our paper builds on the foundational scholarship of Bookidis (2003, 2005) and Millis (2011, 2017a, 2017b) on Corinth by examining continuity (and its absence) between the free Greek city and its Roman colonial successor. Rather than focusing, however, on religion or social dynamics as a locus of continuity (and its absence) per se, we foreground the people whose nomenclature allows us to begin to individualize such larger-than-life phenomena. This allows the understudied biographies of Corinth’s post-colonial elite to emerge, permitting glimpses of political self-determination and innovation despite the formidable challenges of prior enslavement and Roman imperial inertia.