Annuario della Scuola Archeologica di Atene e delle Missioni Italiane in Oriente, Supplemento 7. Spending on the gods. Economy, financial resources and management in the sanctuaries in Greece

Description

[...] The idea was born in the context of a thematic panel on the economy of sanctuaries in Greece, conceived by me on the occasion of the XIX International Convention of Classical Archeology held in Bonn and Köln in 2018, with the overall title Archeology and Economy in the Ancient World. The panel saw the joint presence of epigraphists, historians and archaeologists, whose interventions, exclusively related to the Greek world and Macedonia, ranged from the geometric age to the imperial age. Most of the contributions presented and discussed there are thoroughly published here. The title of the volume, in English given the heterogeneous origin of the authors and the clear predominance
of English on the other languages ​​of contributions, is articulated around nouns such as economy, finance, revenue, administration. Terms familiar to us (think of the denomination of the Ministry of Economy and Finance or the establishment of Degree Courses such as Economic and Financial Sciences), which, in our daily perception, are a more or less conscious outcome of the affirmation on a scale almost global of post-industrial societies starting from the final decades of the XNUMXth century. The ideas of economics as "a complex of resources (land, raw materials, natural energies, plants, money, production capacity) and activities aimed at their use", of finance as "means (assets, income, credit)" including goods in kind, personal services and money, of administration as “activity directed to the management of a patrimony, of a good or complex of goods” do not find exact correspondence in the ancient Greek lexicon, which offers terms similar to them but not completely superimposable. Think of the decidedly narrower semantic context of the term οἰκονομία, in its original meaning of οἶκον νέμειν "celui qui administre une maison, un patrimoine" (in this sense already in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon), whereas, in modern Greek, the term returns to have a meaning very similar to economy / economy / économie.

Introduction
Annalisa LoMonaco