‘Sacred wealth’ as an economic category in ancient Greek thought and practice

Scholars of Greek history have long debated the bifurcation between sacred and public wealth in the Greek polis (e.g., Fouchard 1998; Jacquemin 1998; Macé 2012; Rousset 2013; Sassu 2014). However, our use of the term “sacred wealth” entails an under-examined conceptual leap. Philosophical writing may speak of sacred wealth as an abstract category, but epigraphic sources tend to conceive of wealth as sacred to a specific deity rather than sacred in a more general sense. This paper asks to what degree and under what circumstances sacred wealth functioned as a category in ancient Greek economic thought. It concludes that first, in ancient and modern scholarship alike sacred wealth is a heuristic category rather than a distinctive operational category, and second, the gulf between philosophical writings and legal evidence attests to the ability to conceptualize economic categories differently in different contexts.

The paper begins by examining “sacred laws” to substantiate the premise that in practice, resources were sacred to a god rather than sacred in an abstract sense. It then turns to two more detailed case studies, first the so-called Kallias decrees (IG I³ 52, A and B, 434/3 BCE) and second the new archival documents from Argos (early fourth century BCE, Kritzas 2022). The Kallias degrees reveal the limits of sacred wealth as an operational category: while the money could collectively be termed sacred (τὰ χρέματα τὰ hιερ|[ὰ], A.29-30), divine accounts remained individual (IG I³ 369). Likewise, in the case of the Argive archive, the treasury of Hera was combined with that of Athena but the two accounts were drawn on separately.

The next section of the paper contrasts the epigraphic evidence (pragmatic economic activity) with theoretical writing, where an abstract notion of sacred wealth does exist. As early as the sixth century, Solon critiques those who abuse sacred and public holdings (fr. 4, 12-13: οὔθ’ ἱερῶν κτεάνων οὔτέ τι δημοσίων/φειδόμενοι). An abstract notion of sacred wealth is also robust in Aristotle’s descriptions of and recommendations for public organization (e.g., Pol. 1267b.34-37, 1272a.17-22, 1320a.4-12). However, in Plato’s Laws, sacred wealth exists only as sacred to a god rather than as an indefinite category (e.g., 745d, 759e, 844e). While these laws likely represent a philosophical exercise rather than an operational legal system, they demonstrate the distinction between sacred wealth as a category and the specificity required in law.

The paper concludes by evaluating the implications of the apparent gulf between theoretical writing about sacred wealth and the reality of its management. The ability of ancient writers to “combine” treasuries mentally and speak of a category of sacred wealth in a way that did not exist in practice attests to an awareness that these treasuries shared a distinctive status and were not simply public wealth by another name. At the same time, borrowing from sacred treasuries may have been more palatable when it was conceived of as a 1:1 relationship between polis and deity rather than a broader relationship between the polis and the divine.