2026
Peter Satterthwaite
Private Wealth and Public Finance in the Hellenistic Polis
This dissertation investigates the role that private wealth played in the public finances of Greek poleis during the early Hellenistic period, from the late fourth to mid-second centuries BCE. This work adopts a holistic approach, taking into consideration a wide variety of financial arrangements that city-states could use to mobilize the wealth of rich individuals. These include eisphorai, liturgies, public subscriptions, and various kinds of individual financial services (“euergetism”), which together range from obligatory taxes to contractual agreements to voluntary donations. Whereas traditional scholarship on Greek public finance tends to separate these into discrete categories, this dissertation moves away from rigid typologies and instead treats these financial arrangements as a spectrum of fund-raising strategies that were available to Hellenistic polis communities. This reframing of the problem puts the focus on the polis and emphasizes the ways in which the demos played an active part in determining how private wealth factored into public finances. By combining the public epigraphy of Hellenistic cities with archaeological, numismatic, and literary evidence, this research demonstrates that the demos enacted this role both through formal polis institutions and through informal social practices; the functioning of the former was often dependent on the latter. This dissertation offers a new perspective on Greek democracy in the Hellenistic period while also outlining a versatile new approach for studying the financial relationships between Greek poleis and rich individuals.
Maddalena Scarperi
Early Metapontum: Narratives and Practice
This work takes a postcolonial and multi-scalar approach to the study of textual sources and material evidence from the ancient (seventh- to second-century BCE) settlement of Metapontum (Basilicata, Italy). First, the assumption that Greek textual sources solely illuminate “Greek” perceptions and experiences is questioned. This work argues that while these texts were largely informed by the perspectives of Greek-speaking people, the discourses and stories they preserve also show some marginalized but extant traces of the ongoing processes of transculturation taking place in this coastal settlement. What hides behind the surface of these texts, then, is a social world where multilingualism, codeswitching, and the creative negotiation of cultural codes and social identities belonged to the daily experiences of those dwelling there, permanently or only temporarily. Second, this work shifts the focus of previous interpretations of the archaeological data from the chora of Metapontum from ethnicity to practices. Rather than making assumptions or deriving conclusions about the geographical origins and ethnic identity of the people who lived in these landscapes, the second part of the dissertation examines various sets of archaeological material from the chora and other sites in the region as evidence for sets of practices, sequences of actions, and their transfer across the communities in the region. Based on this analysis, it is argued that the ecological diversity of the region occasioned the emergence of a latticework of connections which facilitated a multidirectional, adaptive transfer of processual knowledge across communities. Far from environmentally determined, the ecological interdependence of these sites was subject to change based on shifting social, economic, and historical circumstances. Additionally, the skeletal evidence from the chora reveals that the organization of labor and the dietary practices there were different in certain respects from those at other regional sites. Finally, the bioarchaeological analysis of the remains from a single individual shows that this person went through some experiences which appear as the idiosyncratic consequences of widespread phenomena common among the community in the chora.
