Liturgy (ancient Greece)

Honorific decree of the deme of Aixone, commemorating the choregoi Auteas and Philoxenides 312/313 BC. Epigraphical Museum of Athens.

The liturgy (Greek: λειτουργία or λῃτουργία, leitourgia, from λαός / Laos, "the people" and the root ἔργο / ergon, "work" [1]) was in ancient Greece a public service established by the city-state whereby its richest members (whether citizens or resident aliens), more or less voluntarily, financed the State with their personal wealth.[2] It took its legitimacy from the idea that "personal wealth is possessed only through delegation from the city".[3] The liturgical system dates back to the early days of Athenian democracy, and included the constitutional duty of trierarchy, which gradually fell into disuse by the end of the 4th century BC,[4] eclipsed by the development of euergetism in the Hellenistic period. However, a similar system was in force during the Roman empire.

  1. ^ Peter Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, Klincksieck, Paris, 1999 (updated edition) (ISBN 2-252-03277-4) s.v. λαός.
  2. ^ This was not the Greek state's only source of revenue. In classical Athens the mineral rights to the silver mines at Laureion were reserved to the state while the mining was contracted out as concessions to private entrepreneurs, European Economic History, vol 1, eds. W.I Davidson and J.E. Harper, p. 136. Latterly Athens also derived an income from her empire in the form of tribute, but in this she was atypical.
  3. ^ Michael Austin, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Économies et sociétés en Grèce ancienne, Armand Colin, 2007, p. 347. See Socrates's rich Critobulus in Economics (II, 6) Xenophon: "Remissness in respect of any of these charges will be visited upon you by the good citizens of Athens no less strictly than if they caught you stealing their own property."
  4. ^ Christ 1990, p. 148