A prevalent idea in scholarship on Athenian politics of the classical period is the assumption, based on figures like Pericles and Demosthenes, that political leadership depended on the ability to give good advice and communicate well with fellow citizens in the Council and Assembly. Without necessarily challenging this assumption, the present chapter focuses on a mechanism for attaining political leadership that has received less attention: gift-giving to both individual citizens and the entire community. Athenians with political ambitions built networks of followers (clients) through private gifts, but the phenomenon has not been fully appreciated because of the supposition that nothing comparable to the Roman patron/client relationship existed in the Greek polis. This chapter focuses on the case of Demosthenes.

Athens represents a special case in the history of Greek public benefactions. It is probably the polis that most resisted the emergence of civic euergetism, that is, the establishment of an organized exchange of benefactions for honors between polis and citizens. At the same time, no other classical polis contributed so much to the development of the practice and to its transformation into a defining institution of the Hellenistic age. This chapter examines these two sides of the history of Athenian euergetism in order to explain the widespread integration of citizens into an institution born before the classical period to regulate the relationship between poleis and foreigners. It deals with the reasons for the opposition to donations and honors for citizens, the factors that contributed to overcoming resistance to euergetism, and the elitist content of classical civic euergetism. Finally, it discusses some developments that counterbalanced this elitist component: the ‘democratization’ of euergetism through grants of honors to non-wealthy citizens, the organization of epidoseis, and other measures that served to prevent the rise of a class of great financial benefactors, along with the relaxation of this policy in the time of Lycurgus.

We know about the benefactors of Greek cities primarily from inscriptions that mark the honours given to them for their benefaction. But the act of benefaction, which is nothing other than the giving of a gift to a corporate body, existed independently of the honour, and this chapter seeks to turn attention to why it was that institutions needed benefactors, and the different needs of institutions of different sizes. Corporate bodies had a number of ways, including direct and indirect taxation and requiring contributions, to meet their financial and other needs, but the smaller the corporate body, the more important it was for it to cultivate benefactors. The particular need felt by Athenian demes can be seen to be reflected in the indications in the epigraphic record that they were precocious in developing ways of encouraging benefaction. But how a group relates in size to other groups is important in determining the attitudes that potential benefactors take to it, so that relative as well as absolute size matters.