Gratitude: An Intellectual History

Two: Benefits and Good Offices

41 Two Benefits and Good Offices Romans were unique in antiquity. In no other society were the ruling classes so thoroughly bound together by beneficia and gratia, by gifts and reciprocal gratitude. In no other society did the unequal relationships between benefactors and their beneficiaries, patrons and their clients, play such a prominent role.1 Benefits hold society together, Seneca says, reflecting the Roman notion that humans are fundamentally dependent beings.2 Whether those involved “patronage” in the strictest sense or merely “benefactions,” they were everywhere. Most social relationships in Rome outside of family relations were molded by gifts, reception, and return gifts. It was a principle that Athenians, with their bias in favor of independence, autonomy, and freedom, would have barely understood.3 Romans were closer to Xenophon’s Persians who imposed civic sanctions on the ungrateful. Suetonius and Tacitus both refer to prosecutions against ungrateful clients and children.4 It is no surprise that Rome produced some of the most important writings on gratitude, writings that profoundly affected Western ethics, philosophy , political theory, and literature for nearly two millennia. “Patronage” refers to asymmetrical, permanent relationships between high-status patrons and lower-status clients, whose relationship is established and maintained by exchanges of services or objects. Being wealthier and better connected, patrons were able to meet the needs of their clients. Clients could not offer anything that patrons needed, but strove to satisfy their desires. Romans of lower classes sought necessities in the marketplace, but to obtain anything beyond necessaries required connection to someone with access to goods that were not available to most Romans. A patron owed 42 ⌣ gratitude his clients protection, advocacy in court, and sometimes gifts of money, and, just as importantly, these services and benefits from patron to client placed a debt of gratitude on the client, who was obligated to repay the patron with services of his own. Gratitude was not merely warm feeling toward the benefactor , but reciprocal service and benefaction. Benefits imposed a debt on the recipient that had to be discharged through a return of service or benefit. Patronage relationships could take many forms. Landlords were patrons to tenants, patricians to plebeians, and Rome itself stood in a relationship of patronage to its allies and territories. Patron relationships were founded on mutual trust, fides, and on reciprocal service, officia. Such relationships were often described as relations of friendship (amicitia), a term that in Rome covered not only intimate relations between equals but also a wide range of asymmetrical relations based on obligations of reciprocity. Patrons considered their clients to be their amici, and vice versa. According to the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, patronage was as old as Rome itself. Romulus divided the original Roman community between aristocrats and the plebs (eupatridas and demotikoi). The former were charged with the management of religious and political life while the plebs gave themselves to farming and trade. By giving particular tasks to the plebs, Romulus aimed “to prevent them from engaging in seditions, as happens in other cities when either the magistrates mistreat the lowly, or the common people and the needy envy those in authority.”5 To describe these classes by titles of authority seemed too domineering. To promote affection among different classes, he described the relationship with kin terminology. Aristocrats were not despots but father figures. Through the institution of patroneia that assigned “friendly offices to both parties,” Romulus ensured that “the connection between them [was] a bond of kindness befitting fellow citizens.”6 For Dionysius, it was not a one-sided system. Both patrons and clients had responsibilities toward one another. Clients assisted patrons in raising dowries for their daughters, ransomed patrons if they were taken prisoner in war, helped pay fines when patrons were liable, and shared the costs of magistracies that were won by their patrons. Patrons for their turn were responsible to explain the law to their clients, to care for them as fathers for children in financial and contractual matters, to defend them in court, and to “secure for them both in private and in public affairs all that tranquility of which they particularly stood in need.”7 The patronage system never existed in the form that Dionysius describes. He claims that patron-client relations and obligations were enforced by law, which was never the case. Dionysius, writing shortly after the ascent benefits and good offices ⌣ 43 of Augustus, outlines a highly sanitized...