Performing Power in the Late Bronze Age

The most recent fascicle of Hesperia has been particular distracting over the last few weeks. The quality of articles and strong presence by relatively junior scholars reminds me of the continued vitality in the study of ancient Greece (and is a good tonic to seemingly unending litany of negative stories about the state of Classics).

It was particularly fun to read Dimitri Nakassis’s article on evidence for feasting in the Mycenaean Linear B tables.  Over the several decades, scholars of Mycenaean Greece have focused significant attention on feasts and feasting as a key element in the construction of authority in that society. These feasts were often large and elaborate events, and, according to Nakassis’ review of scholarship (this is far from my area of specialization!), these social and religious events existed across different contexts in Mycenaean society providing a degree of horizontal and vertical ritual integration. The best known feasts centered on the impressive palaces like at Pylos, but we have good evidence that they also occurred in the provinces and among individuals. As Nakassis summarizes, there is significant evidence for these various types of feasts, the contributors, and their contributions in the Linear B tablets from Pylos and elsewhere. While I am sure that it’s more complex than what I can understand, it appears that these feasts made manifest (and reinforced) through their ritualized character the social, economic, and potentially political organization of Mycenaean society. The baked hard Linear B tablets preserve a record of donors, donations, and relationships that structured these important ritual events.

While a significant chunk of the article unpacks several complex issues surrounding the provisioning of the feast, the more interesting argument to me comes as Nakassis argues that the same individual appears as both king and a private person in the Linear B tables. A single individual then, donated both in his person as king and in his person as a private individual. Nakssis has argued that this seems to indicate a differentiation between there personae of political authority and his identity as a private individual. Apparently both personae had access to independent sources of wealth and could deploy this wealth in a feasting environment to manipulate the social and political outcomes.  This, of course, finds nice parallels with differentiation between personal wealth and the imperial fisc in Roman times. Personal wealth became an avenue for patronage outside the administrative functions of the state suggesting that even Roman imperial authority has roots in the personal as much as the political.

The contributions of various other members of the elite to these feasts demonstrates a degree of aristocratic competition that the Mycenaean king participates in as a private individual (as well as in his official capacity). If the feast remains a place where both institutional authority of the Mycenaean king and the elite authority of private individuals become manifest, these events have interesting parallels with the construction of Christian authority in Late Antiquity. As I have blogged about numerous times, Christian ritual and architecture promoted the institutional authority of the clergy. At the same time, patronage of the church often came from non-ecclesiastical sources. In other words, elites from outside the expanding ecclesiastical hierarchy vied for positions to promote the authority of the new institution. As Nakassis observed: “Participants in the feast were not passive recipients of elite propaganda… but instead actively contributed to the processes in various ways… Even mere participation in a feast by individuals in the lower orders is an active choice that is subject to subtle manipulation, as James Scott’s study of peasant resistance vividly illustrates.” (p. 24).