Beyond its military duties, the Roman camp or headquarters – understood as the commander in chief’s base, whether that was the military compound itself, the winter quarters or a city – functioned in the Roman period as an administrative hub and political centre. For this reason, it also acted as a space for interaction with the local authorities.

This was the stage where diplomatic missions, heralds and legati were received. The camp was also the base for bilateral meetings between dignitaries of different political entities and the commander in chief. In turn, it was configured as a centre which dispatched representatives of the Roman provincial authority to cities and kingdoms within its own provinces and even from other regions. In this way, the various actors consistently came together in one Roman headquarters, which was itinerant because of its military facet, so they could interact in a more immediate way. In parallel, the agreements reached in this camp environment were circumscribed by the objective and subjective conditions of the war context.

The scholarship on Christian origins is vast and wide. As Joshua Garroway says, ‘There has never been a definitive model for depicting the emergence of Christianity, no perfect description to capture what happened.’ It has not been the aim of this book to prove Garroway wrong by providing just such a perfect description, but instead to lay the groundwork for plausible socioreligious overlap between the Corinthians and Paul that might have started the ball rolling towards the development of this group. Paula Fredriksen – one of the more recent scholars to attempt a reconstruction of the early success of Paul among Gentiles – correctly says,

While I agree that Paul never saw himself as leaving his native Judaism and also saw himself as part of the larger Greek and Roman worlds in which he acted, I believe that Fredricksen does not adequately account for Paul’s success with gentiles. She attributes it to surprising luck and to focusing exclusively on a group of gentiles who already had a deep affinity for Jewish practices and

A bright but sinister thread runs through the history of the Roman conquestof the Iberian Peninsula like a Wagnerian leitmotif: it is the glitter of gold, by which the conquerors never felt quite satiated – gold in booty, gold in bribes or gold in diplomatic gifts to buy peace or to recognise the conqueror’s supremacy. The purpose of this chapter is to study the forms assumed by this transfer of gold, and in general of precious metals, during the conquest of the western peninsula: its causes, its modalities and the consequences it had both for the indigenous societies and for the Romans.

Booty

The Romans had many ways of obtaining the gold and precious metals in general that they so coveted; the spoils of war were the simplest and most direct way of doing so. Livy gives detailed references to the booty obtained in the provinces of Hispania Citerior and Ulterior in the years 197–167 bc, and the figures for this booty have been the subject of study on various occasions. Although the data relating to Hispania Ulterior are less abundant than those relating to Hispania Citerior, a rereading of Livy’s text nevertheless allows us to draw conclusions that indicate the amount of wealth obtained from the province over a period of some thirty years.

The objective of this study revolves around the description and analysis of the theme of diplomatic gifts as they figure in Deuteronomistic History. The six biblical books that compose that history (Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings) encompass, from a theological perspective, a broad sweep of history. They open with the story of the arrival of the Hebrew host, having fled Egypt and led by Joshua, to take possession of the land of Israel and close with the story of the release of Jeconiah, the King of Judah exiled to Babylon, thanks to the Babylonian king Amel-Marduk. Deuteronomistic History is rooted in different literary sources; it underwent a long, complex process of composition before it reached its definitive form among the scribes of Jerusalem between the mid-fifth and the early fourth centuries bc during the final stages of the Persian period (458–333 bc).

The giving of diplomatic gifts, understood as offerings imbued with political significance, enters a scheme of gift and counter-gift, widely studied since the seminal work by Mauss, and has generated abundant debate and scientific literature. Mauss himself postulated that Celtic communities had functioned as ‘potlatch’ societies, in the image of indigenous societies of North-western America, with a gift exchange that reached paroxysmal levels – ‘prestations totales à type agonistique’, from the example related by Posidonius of suicide in exchange for gold, silver or amphorae of wine – and that structured them hierarchically. Hubert argued along these same lines, finding support both in the texts of the insular literature of the early Middle Ages and also in the anthropological work on the American ‘potlatch’, to maintain that among Celts, the gift was characterised by entailing a counterpart, by having to be proportional to the status of the recipient or even greater, by the sanction that it would involve an obligation, andby generating a bond of dependence.

In Chapters One and Two, I demonstrated a clear pattern in ancient Mediterranean (including Corinthian) religious practice of interacting with small groups of gods – chords of gods – that were connected by local or regional traditions (mythologies, histories, genealogies and cultic activity). This pattern did not just extend to a wide range of geographical locations, but it also encompassed various modes of religiosity, a range of sacred settings (sanctuaries, temples, groves, civic institutions, voluntary associations and domestic settings) and extended periods of time (from the pre-classical era through to late antiquity). First-century Corinthians would have experienced and lived this pattern of religious practice, so we would have every reason to expect Paul’s language about his god(s) to be received by the Corinthians within the categories of this social milieu. In Chapter Three, we looked at the variety of ways in which pneuma could have been understood by ancients, depending on their level of education and social location, and we investigated pneuma in Paul to see how his usage might have been understood by the heterogeneous assembly of Corinthians. We now turn to Paul’s writings to discover whether his presentation of his three divine figures fits within the general pattern we saw in Chapters One and Two.

Regardless of time or place, offering gifts is a highly codified practice. In Ancient Greece, as in any chronocultural context, one did not offer anything to anyone without a defined function. As a general rule, a diplomatic gift means a gift given by a state to the delegate of another state during an official visit. It has a political dimension, and a highly symbolic value. It expresses satisfaction with the attitude of the counterpart, but it is also looking to the future, aiming to consolidate a link and promote goodwill. It is offered to an individual, but one functioning as a delegate of his state, and is supposed to foster a good relationship between individuals, and above all between their states. Diplomatic gifts are not a universal practice; because of their individual nature, they are undoubtedly more common between monarchs. In the Greek world, offering gifts to a foreigner who had been granted hospitality was a practice which is evidenced very early in literature, and notably in the Odyssey. From that time on, indeed, there was even a specific Greek term, xénia, to mean such ‘hospitality gifts’. Could such gifts have a properly diplomatic role, however? Did such a practice inaugurate a model that was followed later in the Classical city, moreover, when the political framework had profoundly changed?

After reviewing the uses of hospitality gifts as attested in Homeric epic, this chapter will show that they did not survive as such in diplomatic relations between Greek cities in Classical times, but that Greeks still had to deal with diplomatic gifts in their relations with kingdoms outside the world of the cities: the Thracian Odrysian Kingdom, the Kingdom of Macedonia, and above all the Persian Empire. It will be the major concern here to explain the reactions of Greek ambassadors and their cities to such cultural differences.

Among scholars of the classics, the phenomenon of worship and cultic activity involving small but defined groups of gods will not come as a surprise. As noted earlier, the title of this book comes from Robert Parker, who wrote, ‘Greeks typically prayed not to individual gods but to “chords of gods”’, and the same could be said of Romans, too. But Parker was only quoting the midnineteenth-century German scholar F. G. Welcker, who was cited by L. Preller in 1846. So classicists have long recognised that worship of small groups of gods constituted a common and fundamental feature of various forms of Greek and Roman religious practice in different contexts from the classical period through to late antiquity. Scholars of the New Testament might understand Greek and Roman religion differently. Stephen Mitchell puts it well:

This chapter will focus on the phenomenon of worship of or interaction with small (and not so small) groups of gods across the ancient Mediterranean, with examples from a wide range of geographical locations, time periods and social

It is generally agreed that the anthropological basis of research into gifts in Antiquity is constructed upon comparisons with modern and contemporary ethnology. This chapter will not focus on the possibilities and problems posed by handling sources that are so disparate or the generalisation of models in this subject, since they have already been discussed by anthropology itself and by ancient history. It will instead offer a comparative study along those lines, but without attempting to establish closed parallels, find universal laws or apply restrictive concepts, but rather, will provide certain reflections on transversal problems. The focus will specifically be on diplomatic gifts – the exchange of goods in contexts of political negotiation – in two historical settings which have until now never been considered together: the western expansion of the Roman Republic, where the question has been raised recently with some vigour, and the beginning of Spanish colonialism in Chile in the sixteenth century.

The final decades of the third century bc and the early ones of the next witnessedturbulent political and diplomatic activity in Greece and its vicinity. The already dynamic and tumultuous competitive relationship between the Hellenistic kings was escalated by the entrance of a new participant: Rome. This world was shaping up to be heterogeneous and, above all, multipolar. Poleis, confederations, large (and small) kingdoms, Romans and ‘barbarians’ (Galatians, Thracians, Illyrians, Bastarnae) constituted the pieces on a complex chequerboard in which competing interests often clashed and in which various languages had to coexist and overlap. While the kings continued to play a fundamental role in ‘international politics’, they were obliged to depend on other smaller entities, such as leagues and cities, which tried to secure their own agenda in the midst of the struggle between giants. In this context, diplomatic practice and the mechanisms associated with it played an essential role.

As this monograph explores, diplomatic gifts were a common resource in contexts of interaction in the ancient Mediterranean. Through a series of cases drawn from around continental Greece in the early second century bc, this work will examine the reaction aroused in the recipient by the (supposed) intentionality of the giver and how this perception could have conditioned the acceptance or, above all, the rejection of the gift offered.

Since Roman Corinth in Paul’s time was a part of the larger Roman world – colonised and ruled by Rome but culturally mixed and still very much steeped in its Greek traditions – we can expect to find a continuity with the chord of gods pattern I sketched in the previous chapter, and indeed we do. In Paul’s Corinth, we have a landscape of Greek religious practice dating back to the classical period or beyond, updated and transformed for the first century, combined with Roman religious practice established over the previous hundred or so years of Roman colonisation. Although there were many options for worship and interaction in densely populated Corinth and the surrounding area (Isthmia and Cenchreae), the nature of these options did not simply mean one could worship many individual gods at their sanctuaries. In many, if not most, cases, sanctuaries housed several gods together, even if the sanctuary was known by the name of one god, just as happened across the Mediterranean world. Much as I did in the previous chapter, I will give some representative examples of the pattern of worship of small groups of gods, but this time only in the Corinthian region. This worship of small groups of gods in Corinth very clearly fits the notion of social practice that grounds this study.

As an orientation to the ancient city of Corinth, please see the maps in Figures 2.1 and 2.2.

The Acrocorinthian Aphrodite

The Acrocorinth, high above the main settlement, housed the important sanctuary of Aphrodite, the patron goddess of Corinth. Figure 2.3 shows the view from the Acrocorinth looking north (present day), and Figure 2.4 provides a map of the ancient Acrocorinth. Unfortunately, little remains of the sanctuary of Aphrodite, so no detailed maps or reconstructions of the sanctuary are available.

Standing outside the North African context, the Romans did not perceive the political importance of the Numidian monarchs until 213 bc, when Livy reports the commission of an embassy of the Scipio brothers to Syphax, king of the Masaesylian Numidians.1 Engulfed in the clamour of the Second Punic War in Hispania, the generals planned to destabilise the enemy by rocking the political chessboard and proposing an alliance to the king (cum eo amicitiam societatemque facerent). Publius and Gnaeus hoped this manoeuvre would provide a robust counterweight to Carthaginian regional superiority.

The Scipionic delegation constitutes the first known contact between Rome and the Numidians (rex tres a Numidis legatos in Hispaniam misit ad accipiendam fidem). Livy claims that Syphax not only willingly accepted an alliance, but also persuaded one of the three centurions who led the delegation to agree to remain in his kingdom to train his soldiers in infantry tactics. The instruction of Quintus Statorius, the officer appointed to train the Africans, seems to have been among the conditions of the alliance, as Livy acknowledges (ut pro bonis ac fidelibus sociis facerent), but it is also arguably an offering made in the form of service. This may have been the first Roman diplomatic gift to a Numidian sovereign, a practice that would become common throughout the third and second centuries BC.

In 197 BC, victorious over Philip V at Cynoscephalae and outraged by Aetolian pretensions, the proconsul T. Quinctius Flamininus decided to concede the Macedonian ambassadors a fortnight’s truce and proposed holding a meeting with the king. According to Polybius, his Greek interlocutors saw in this indulgence towards the vanquished the fruit of corruption: Philip must have bought Flamininus through the ambassadors, which was demonstrated by the cordiality with which he treated them. Polybius explains the origin of these rumours in the following way:

This book is about imagining the earliest moments of what later becomes Christianity. But it is not a general theory of Christian origins. Instead, its scope is quite a bit more circumscribed, both temporally and geographically. I treat only Paul’s initial interaction with the Corinthians, positing what I hope is a reasonable culturally grounded scenario for how the movement might have grown among Corinthian gentiles after Paul’s first encounter with them. While many scholars over the years have focused on Paul’s appeal to gentiles, few have considered socio-religious practice as a major factor in the growth of the movement, instead opting for more theological factors: promise of personal salvation through faith and not works, miracle-working, or Christ’s atoning death, for example. The assertion that undergirds this book is that, for Paul’s movement to grow, its purported uniqueness – theological or otherwise – was not the factor that made it compelling, if such uniqueness even existed. Instead, its cultural familiarity, especially with regard to social practice, was the driving force in creating and growing the movement. While the particular social practice on which I am focusing is likely only one among several social factors, I will argue that the culturally pervasive pattern of worship of small groups of gods provides the familiarity necessary for the Corinthian gentiles to join the movement. What follows in this introduction and the rest of the book is that educated guess that I mentioned in the Preface and Acknowledgements.