Many scholars adopt an economic explanation to account for the proliferation of euergetism in the cities of the early and high Roman Empire. In outline, the argument runs like this: the imperial government, greedy for taxes, left the provincial cities few revenues of their own. Hence, provincial civic governments suffered an endemic shortage of cash and were by and large unable to finance the necessary urban infrastructure and public amenities for their communities. Members of the local elite stepped in, however, to pay for the required amenities out of their own pocket. Thus elite public benefactions were crucial to the long-term economic survival of the cities of the Roman world. This explanation of public benefactions in fact forms part of most textbook descriptions of euergetism. It gives, however, a distorted picture of the nature and functioning of elite public generosity in the Roman world. In this chapter and the following one I shall argue that none of the elements that make up the economic explanation stands up to close scrutiny.

I start with the observation that even if we base our estimate of the elite's average annual expenditure on munificence on a collection including some of the largest individual gifts on record it still amounts to no more than a small percentage of aggregate annual elite income. This might still be a sizeable sum, but it does not square with the traditional picture of euergetism as a dominant force in the urban economy.