Gavin Blasdel, University of Groningen
During the Roman period at Athens, the Areopagos became much more epigraphically visible than ever before thanks to its enhanced political and judicial powers, seemingly acquired at the expense of the boule and the demos. For over a century, the standard interpretation has been that this ancient, prestigious council was effectively the “ruling body” of the Roman era city (Keil 1920; Graindor 1927). In this way, the institutional development of Athens was in line with the supposed transformations taking place throughout the Greek east, whereby city councils became the preserve of wealthy elites through a process of aristocratization or oligarchization. These councilors, it is argued, formed a veritable “bouleutic class” equivalent to a Roman-style ordo decurionum that enjoyed special honors and privileges and dominated civic politics (Jones 1940; Quass 1993). In the case of the Areopagos, many scholars have suggested that its members drew inspiration from or even consciously modeled the body upon the Senate at Rome, perhaps encouraged by the Romans themselves who favored and identified with the venerable Athenian institution (Geagan 1974; Rigsby 2010). To date, only a handful of scholars have critiqued this image, mostly from the perspective of the council’s judicial competence, which De Bruyn (1995) and Fournier (2010) have argued did not smother but rather complemented those of the boule and the demos.
Drawing upon recent scholarship that has called into question the impact of Roman influence on hierarchization processes in Roman Asia Minor and the concept of a “bouleutic class” more generally (Heller 2009, 2013; Brélaz 2021), this paper pushes back against claims that the Areopagos became an ordo through a critical reevaluation of the epigraphical evidence. It first establishes that the size of the council was never capped at one hundred or lower (SEG 29.150) and that adlectio, a staple of Roman-style council recruitment, is only attested as an emergency tool in the extraordinary circumstances of the Antonine plague (SEG 29.127). It then demonstrates that alleged changes in titulature, such as the use of the individualizing plural οἱ Ἀρεοπαγῖται instead of the collective ἡ βουλὴ ἡ ἐξ Ἀρείου πάγου or the adoption of the superlative descriptors κρατίστη and σεμνοτάτη as honorific epithets (supposedly mirroring the splendidissimus ordo applied to local councils in the Latin west), did not occur on an official civic level but only sporadically in privately erected inscriptions. Finally, the paper utilizes archon lists and ephebic catalogues with overlapping names to argue that most archons, particularly the thesmothetai, were not Roman citizens even in the mid-second century CE and were around fifty years old on average, rather unlike a Roman ordo, which typically admitted men of the highest social standing at age thirty or even younger. Ultimately, the paper argues that there was a growing sense of self-importance and exclusivity amongst at least some Areopagites during the second century CE (cf. the concept of “ordo-making,” van Nijf 1997), but that the Areopagos at no point developed into a bona fide aristocratic ruling class that ran roughshod over the demos.