Benedikt Eckhardt | "Countless Inscriptions" and the History of Private Associations in the Roman Empire

This is an Archive of a Past Event

The history of private associations in the Roman Empire can rely on thousands of inscriptions and papyri: a substantial corpus of evidence that should theoretically allow us to trace the development of this particular type of institution with some degree of precision. And yet few attempts have been made to do so. There is widespread scepticism regarding the very possibility of isolating defining trends of the Roman period, especially when such attempts come with assumptions about cause-and-effect relationships. Data scarcity is a central concern here, because crucial pieces of the puzzle are unique or have very few parallels. This paper reflects on the combination of quantitative and qualitative arguments used in my recent reconstruction of the history of associations under Rome: when do we have "enough evidence" to make an argument, and how can we turn relatively small datasets into reliable indicators of institutional change?


 About the Speaker

Dr Benedikt Eckhardt is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Edinburgh. His main research interests in recent years have been the Hellenistic Southern Levant (Ethnos und Herrschaft, 2013) and the history of private associations in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (Romanisierung und Verbrüderung, 2021).