@conference {36369,
	title = {{\textquotedblleft}Obey{\textellipsis}for the Common Good{\textquotedblright}: Building a Sense of Community in the Bakers{\textquoteright} Strike Edict},
	booktitle = {Community and Communication in Classical Antiquity：第13届中日韩三国欧洲古代史学术研讨会，2024 年 10 月 17-20 日},
	year = {Forthcoming},
	address = {Fudan University, Shanghai},
	abstract = {This paper discusses the so-called Bakers{\textquoteright} Strike Edict from Ephesus\&nbsp; (Ephesos 231 = IK 12.215 p. 27) in light of recent studies on\&nbsp; the Roman imperial toolkit to build empire-wide communities. Clifford Ando and Myles Lavan argued that Roman emperors in the first two centuries CE were consciously blurring distinctions between Roman and non-Roman populations, so that there could be a shared sense of an empire-wide community among people in the provinces.\&nbsp;

This paper argues that, in addition to Lavan{\textquoteright}s observations, gubernatorial edicts also show concerns and measures that sought to communicate a sense of the communal at the local level. While the focus of discussion is on the edict responding to a bakers{\textquoteright} strike at Ephesus, several other examples from a corpus of gubernatorial edicts are also used in connection with this example.

This paper hopes to contribute to Ando{\textquoteright}s and Lavan{\textquoteright}s arguments by pointing to a lower register of community building visible in gubernatorial edicts. The governors{\textquoteright} concerns for and efforts to creating communal cohesion and their need to balance parallel and at times competing {\textquotedblleft}common goods{\textquotedblright} not only adds another nuance to the grander community building project at the imperial level, but demonstrates further complications on how praesidial governors {\textendash} and in particular proconsuls {\textendash} can and would react to difficult issues at the local level.},
	author = {Ching-Yuan Wu}
}
