View source for Collegia in Ancient Rome


=Discussion=

Ed Mayo:

"As a formal model of organisation, mutual aid is clearly an ancient way of
getting things done. Arguably, it predates the modern formal private and
charitable sectors by perhaps a thousand years. Some of the earliest records
of mutuality are from the Roman Empire. One of the practices was a variety of
groups of artisans organised into ‘collegia’: formal membership associations. One
authority, in the late Empire years, was St. Augustine of Hippo, the Algerian and
Roman philosopher. He looked to set the ground rules for how mutual trade and
exchange should operate, through the concept of a ‘just price’.

The term collegia (the root of the modern word ‘college’ of course) translates from
Latin as ‘joined together’. Across the Roman Empire, collegia might be arts troupes
or they might be groups of silverworkers, rag dealers or woodsmen. Some were
burial societies, supporting members at a time of financial cost as well as religious
and cultural significance. We know of associations from inscriptions, papyri and the
writings of contemporaries in the Hellenistic period from the fifth century BCE. But
the terms used, the members involved and the purposes set were extraordinarily
varied – the number of different associations listed over the period stands at 2,500
on some counts and that is only the ones we know of today.8 Included would have
been religious confraternities, chapters of priests, sodalities, Judean synagogai and,
on some characterisations, the earliest Christian associations.

We can paint an evocative picture of collegia through the example of one case
study, a stone’s throw from the walls of Rome, the statutes of which are preserved
in inscriptions. The Collegium of Aesculapius and Hygia was founded in around
153 AD by a wealthy  Roman woman  named Salvia Marcellina.10  She endowed a
building on the Appian Way, to commemorate her late husband and this served as 
a dining club for its members, and a burial society. With member subscriptions and
an endowment, the college lent money to its members, using the interest to pay its
expenses. The college itself was limited to sixty members. It admitted new members
only when it needed to replace those who had died. As a member, you were guaranteed a burial, including all of the costs associated with a smooth passage to the
after life - funeral rites at home, burials outside of the city, with a procession from
one to the other.
The college had a President, the officers were curatores, or ‘caretakers’ and the
body of regular members was termed the populus, ‘the people’.11 Just as later cooperatives and mutuals would come to be known in many countries as ‘societies’,
we can sense that the ways in which collegia like this were set up were intended
to echo a view on how the wider world should be structured. The  Collegium of
Aesculapius and Hygia and its ilk were self organising associations, concerned with
equity among members but not necessarily or typically egalitarian – whether they
were formed for banquets by groups of aristocrats or indeed burials by groups of
slaves.12 The sceptical views of Pliny the Younger in his letters might have held for
many. As he put it, nothing could possibly be more “distressingly inequitable” than
unflinching equality for all.13 Just as seats in the theatres in Rome were organised by
rank (in Augustan times), so the collegia, whether based on trades or cults, whether
with members of military veterans or diners and drinkers, tended to operate with
levels of status and rank. Some boasted an elaborate array of punishments for transgressions.14
Beyond this, it is hard to generalise about the nature of the collegia. The nineteenth century German scholar Theodor Mommsen focused on collegia as burial
societies, asserting that they were one of the few civil society organisations allowed
to operate in Roman cities under the Emperors. In truth, first, burials were never
universal across collegia and second, the relationship with the state was never so
simple. Yes, there were crackdowns at times on civil organisation; Julius Caesar
issued the Lex Iulia, which appears to have included a prohibition on voluntary
associations. Yet there was a loophole in the same law for those that were formally
approved, longstanding or set up in the name of public service. Jonathan Scott Perry
cautions that the evidence from inscribed documents is that Roman associations
were widespread and unrestricted in practice.

Perry goes on to say in his '''book, The Roman Collegia''', that even with the benefit of
one hundred and sixty years of added academic research since Mommsen published
his work, “I despair of ever understanding the collegia in their full complexity, given
the nature of our evidence and the frustratingly inadequate information that even
several hundred texts can furnish”."

(https://edmayo.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/a-short-history-of-cooperation-and-mutuality_ed-mayo-web_english_0.pdf)


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