PNAW is a database of evidence for a particular kind of social networking between Greek city-states in the Ancient Greek world, known as proxeny (Greek: proxenia). It enables this material to be used to visualise the highly-fragmented political geography of the ancient world during the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, and to get a sense of how densely and intensely interconnected were the states which made it up.
Before its unification under a Roman emperor, the ancient Mediterranean world constituted the most fragmented state system in recorded history. More than a thousand distinct Greek city-states (poleis), and many other kinds of actor, such as dynasts, federations, and kings, made up a vibrant and dynamic ecosystem of self-governing states. The interactions of these states were mediated through a highly developed system of institutions. Proxeny is the best attested of these institutions, and was probably the most widely used. It enabled cities to maintain substantial and often widespread networks that connected them with other cities.
Proxeny was an institution of interstate relations in the ancient Greek world. A city-state granted proxeny to the citizen of another community, the status of being their proxenos within that individual's home city. The role of the proxenos was to facilitate interaction between the two political communities, most often by performing services of different kinds for visiting citizens of the first state (termed here the 'granting city'). These services could take various forms — including hospitality, introductions to magistrates, prominent men, or merchants, and help negotiating local legal institutions in the case of contractual disputes. Collectively these services helped to enable citizens of the granting community in question to overcome the political fragmentation of this world and function, whether as official representatives of their own city, or as merchants, tradesmen, or even as tourists, in other communities where they did not have the privileged status of citizen. Proxeny networks, therefore, reflect and allow us to trace patterns of political, economic, and social interactions between city states, and to trace the horizons of different political communities.
PNAW presents an overview of our evidence for these relationships of proxeny in the ancient world, including those recorded in the literary sources as well as the more than two thousand texts inscribed on stone. It accompanies the recent study of this institution published by Oxford University Press, Proxeny and Polis and its purpose is to make this material available in an accessible format which can be corrected and updated as new evidence is published. It makes use of GIS mapping to enable the evidence of links between different communities which this data presents to be explored in an intuitive way. In order to make the search function useable, results are presented in a condensed view with further information available in the form of mouseover dialogue boxes.
To illustrate the potential of the search and mapping functions of this database, here are some example searches:
Example searches:
PNAW collects data on attestations of proxeny in a range of different textual sources. One of its principal aims is to illuminate the important differences between the different types of evidence — literary texts and inscriptions on stone, but just as importantly, the different sorts of inscriptions — as this is crucial for interpreting the information each conveys. The important point is that, although we possess a historical record for proxeny which is, by the standards of Ancient History, extremely rich, comprising more than two thousand inscriptions, it is also highly patchy and variegated, the product of local and regional norms governing the production of public inscriptions.
The vast majority of surviving attestations to proxeny come in the form of texts inscribed on stone. The most common type of these is the proxeny decree, an inscribed version of the official decree passed by the authorities of a state (the 'granting community'), recognising an individual's services and naming him proxenos in recognition of them, usually with a series of other honours and privileges. The majority of these are inscribed on the orders of the community making the grant, as a way of emphasising the honour it was paying to the individual in particular. However, judging from the evidence we have, the number and proportion of the proxeny decrees made by a community which was then inscribed on stone seems to have varied enormously between poleis, and to have depended on a wide variety of factors.
For some cities in some periods, all or most decrees are likely to have been routinely inscribed (as, for example, at Delphi), but the norm seems to have been highly selective inscription (70% of the poleis attested in the database are represented by five or fewer texts). Where communities inscribe a larger number of proxeny decrees, the epigraphic medium for them seems to play a significant role. At Oropos and Delphi, where substantial numbers of individual decrees survive (and inscribing proxeny decrees seems to have been the norm rather than the exception, at least in certain periods), the majority of the decrees are inscribed not on purpose made, free-standing stone stelai, but on already existing stone surfaces, especially the bases of statues or monumental walls. Epigraphic medium also has an impact on rates of survival. The almost complete absence of proxeny decrees from Sicily and the West probably relates to the fact that the normal epigraphic medium for honorific decrees in this area, bronze tablets, are much less likely to survive because bronze tends to be melted down and reused rather than discarded.
One other type of epigraphic material deserves particular notice — inscribed lists of proxenoi. These texts come in the form of catalogues (collecting all proxenoi at a particular point) and chronological lists (proxenoi appointed within certain intervals of time). Although they mostly survive in a highly fragmentary state, they provide us with samples of proxeny networks which are less likely to be distorted by biases of selective inscription. For a discussion of the ways in which this material can illuminate patterns of proxeny networking, see Proxeny and Polis, Chapter 3.
To give a sense of how the specific epigraphic practice of inscribing proxeny decrees developed throughout the Mediterranean world over time, the following chart shows the number of communities attested inscribing proxeny decrees per 50-year period. In order to prevent the data being distorted by the particularly large numbers of decrees inscribed at Hellenistic Delos, Delphi, and Oropos (which collectively amount to more than half of the data), these have each been capped at 150 decrees per fifty-year period.
| Period | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Date range | 499–450 BC | 449–400 BC | 399–350 BC | 349–300 BC | 299–250 BC | 249–200 BC | 199–150 BC | 149–100 BC | 99–50 BC | 49–1 BC | 1–50 AD | 51–100 AD | 101–150 AD | 151–200 AD |
Relatively few attestations to relations of proxeny are made in the surviving literary sources. They tend only to be made where the relationship of proxeny is relevant in some way to the events or actors described. One of the most common contexts is rhetorical: foreign speakers on a number of occasions make reference to the fact that they are proxenos of the political community they are addressing.
PNAW is a database of references to concrete relations of proxeny, and does not, therefore, collect references which are clearly fictional or allegorical (for example, references made to proxeny in the plays of Euripides).
One of the most important pieces of information about a given attestation is the date of the proxeny in question (and the source attesting to it, where this differs). Dates are given in the format used by the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (see glossary of terms). Where the date assigned to a text in this database differs from the date assigned to it in the publication used to refer to it, the source of the date is given.
Inscriptions are often preserved in a fragmentary state, so that in some cases we cannot be certain whether the text in question granted proxenia. In order to recognise and assess the degree of likelihood that a particular piece of evidence attests to a relationship of proxeny, PNAW adopts a four-point probability scale:
For dating, PNAW follows the abbreviations used by the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN):
This project would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the University of Oxford, through the John Fell Fund, and the University of Birmingham, through the Research and Knowledge Transfer Fund.
Richard Buckner provided IT development for the database and interface, including the mapping function. Juliane Zachhuber has been responsible for inputting most of the data with great efficiency and care. Charles Crowther gave crucial support on the Oxford side, especially by providing web hosting through the website of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents. This project grew out of a suggestion by Stephen Lambert. The catalogue of proxenies presented by Christian Marek in Die Proxenie (Frankfurt am Main 1984) provided a crucial starting-point and checklist for compiling the data in PNAW.
This database makes use of the unique person identifiers of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names for proxenoi (where they exist). The mapping function of this database has been enabled using place URIs provided by Pleiades and co-ordinates collated by them principally from the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization and the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire (although for some political communities different co-ordinates have been substituted using satellite photographs). The map tiles used are those made available by the Ancient World Mapping Centre through Mapbox.
The data presented here is made available for sharing and reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (cc-by). Individual searches and the whole dataset can be downloaded in CSV format.
PNAW is released as a work in progress. Comments and suggestions for improvement on the database and interface are welcome. Even more welcome are corrections for the data contained as well as offprints and notifications of new attestations.
Project director: William Mack, Associate Professor in Ancient Greek History and Culture, University of Birmingham <w.mack (at) bham.ac.uk>