Date Presented:
18 October
摘要:
This paper discusses the so-called Bakers’ Strike Edict from Ephesus (Ephesos 231 = IK 12.215 p. 27) in light of recent studies on 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. This paper argues that, in addition to Lavan’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’ 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’s and Lavan’s arguments by pointing to a lower register of community building visible in gubernatorial edicts. The governors’ concerns for and efforts to creating communal cohesion and their need to balance parallel and at times competing “common goods” not only adds another nuance to the grander community building project at the imperial level, but demonstrates further complications on how praesidial governors – and in particular proconsuls – can and would react to difficult issues at the local level.
