1 scholars have traditionally opted for units of study comprising distinct cultural and political entities, such as ‘Classical Greek,’ ‘Hellenistic,’ or ‘Roman’ associations. Occasionally, though, Greek and Roman traditions for associating have been treated as an implicit case of Mediterranean institutional unity, constituting one overarching fenomeno associativo, ‘associational phenomenon’.2 Thus, particularly the older historiography of the subject reflects this basic premise of wider Greco-Roman institutional connectedness and compatibility, in that even though the two subjects are most often dealt with separately, they are assumed to add up to a mutually coherent framework for interpreting one or the other or both.

This chapter proposes to look in some detail at a few evocative cases, primarily from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, where associations or other groups, such as bands of worshippers, were especially concerned with purity or where they published inscribed rules of purity.1 Limited in number partly due to the vicissitudes of epigraphic preservation, partly due to the geographic and chronological specificities of this material – post-Classical Asia Minor and the Aegean – other factors may also explain their scarcity and warrant further investigation.

Private Associations in the Ancient Greek World investigates the rules and regulations produced by ancient private associations in an attempt to show why and how associations were creating a system of well-ordered groups within their communities. Regulations represent, in fact, an understudied aspect of ancient associative life: this book aims to fill this gap by approaching the well-known phenomenon of ancient associations from a new angle. It analyses the organisational structures, legislative mechanisms and features of associations, while at the same time investigating the potential models from – and interrelations with – the habits and strategies of political institutions. It also provides an assessment of the associations’ impact on the broader socio-cultural and physical environment and of their role in local societies, thanks to the establishment of such regulations. The book explores the ideology, values, ideas and aspects of identity embedded in the regulations as ways adopted by associations to create a specific profile to present to the outside world, as well as to members (both existing and future).

Following the overarching theme of associations’ regulations, the chapters of this book have provided the reader with different insights into a large variety of ancient associations that were embedded in as many local realities, in an attempt on the one hand to highlight similar patterns but on the other hand also to stress the vivacity and diversity of the fenomeno associativo, ‘associational phenomenon’: although common traits certainly emerge, one should in no way expect uniformity. The world of associations was in fact a complex one: this book has mainly explored associations active in the Greek-speaking world, but even in this ‘common cultural sphere’ one sees a great variety of different options at play, which mirror the character of their various societies. The ways in which associations operated were a result of the strategies adopted by them on the basis of the different challenges they encountered and the way in which they appear to us is also linked to the contingent production and preservation of the sources, which varied depending on location and time. It is therefore not surprising that the picture we have gained from late Hellenistic and early Roman Athens is a different one from that of contemporary Mantinea, for instance: in Athens, as we have seen in the discussion by Arnaoutoglou in Chapter 6, associations made full use of the polis’ general directions, trends and mechanisms in the regulation of members’ behaviour so as to enhance their profile and foster their autonomy, room of action or survival, by providing an image that matched the expectations of the public administration.

Despite the considerable number of private associations attested in the Peloponnese, epigraphic sources from this region only rarely allow us an insight into norms of the associations’ internal organisation. Beyond a regulation for the use of an hestiatorion, ‘banquet-hall’, and a chalkion (in this context the term probably refers to ‘bronze cooking utensils’ or the place where they were stored) on a metal tablet from Sicyon (sixth/fifth century BC), which is followed by a list of seventy-three male names,1 and an extremely fragmentary inscription from Mantinea,2 which refers to a nomos and to imposition of fines, texts of this type are not preserved. Some indirect light on private associations’ rules and regulations is further shed by a small number of honorific decrees originating in Peloponnesian towns. This chapter will focus on this category of texts from Mantinea.

The self-perpetuity of Greek private associations and the continuous performance of their collective activities presupposed the ability both to admit new members and to draw regular contributions (that is to say, material support) from the existing ones. The diffuse evidence on the rules that regulated these essential aspects of the associations’ internal functions has been thoroughly examined both in the pioneering works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in more recent studies.