Magistratures éponymes et système collégial dans les cités grecques aux époques classique et hellénistique

Abstract

It is generally assumed that the eponymous magistrates of Greek cities held a singular office of a fundamentally non-collegial nature. Various scholars have noted, however, that certain cities seem to have granted this function to veritable «eponymous colleges». This article reviews all potential attestations of such colleges and the institutional problems they pose. In fact, it appears that such eponymous colleges are far rarer than one might assume. The material is often ambiguous or unusable, as is the case for manumission records, private texts with highly variable phrasing, and even the decrees can be difficult to interpret. Ultimately it emerges that councils of two eponymous magistrates were merely exceptional institutional solutions to temporary problems. Furthermore, alleged eponymous colleges of this kind occur primarily on the Greek mainland. In most cases, only one member of the college was actually granted eponymy, as is the case in many cities of Central Greece, for instance at Thasos or Eretria. At least in the Hellenistic period, some Thessalian cities seem also to have conferred the privilege of eponomy not on the tagoi, the most important magistrates of these cities, but on a single priest of Asclepius. Overall, one must note the great variety of solutions adopted by the cities in the matter of eponymy: the model of a single eponymous magistrate, who was responsible for the important religious functions, was by no means universal. After all, documents could be dated without necessarily
employing the name of a single eponymous magistrate, for instance by giving the names of the magistrates who were of significance in the city and/or in the process of decision-making. Eponymy and dating do not necessarily have to go hand in hand.