Sophia Aneziri is invited by the Collège de France assembly at the suggestion of Prof. Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge.
Foundations have been around for centuries. They are based on the donation-transfer of movable or immovable property, and the use of this income to finance an objective defined by the donor. The protection of assets is an integral part of foundations. They must be left intact so that the objective can be pursued over time (ideally forever).
Internationally, interest in the phenomenon of foundations over time is evident. In 2020, Borgolte published an 800-page work entitled "World History as a History of Foundations", which examines religious foundations from Mesopotamia and Pharaonic Egypt through the medieval West to the monasteries of India and China. The political context of foundations is highlighted in a collective work entitled "Stiftungen zwischen Politik und Wirtschaft. Geschichte und Gegenwart im Dialog", published in 2015 and edited by S. von Reden. Here, the foundations of modern and contemporary times are also considered, and a dialogue is established between past and present.
The foundations of Greek antiquity are the material on which this lecture series will be based. Although they are a diachronic phenomenon, foundations can only be fully understood in the political, social, economic and cultural context of their time, and at the same time, they help considerably to understand this context. They will be examined, where methodology permits, over the long term, from the earliest evidence of the 4th century BC to the Roman era, but with particular emphasis on Hellenistic cases and their historical context
What makes ancient Greek foundations so special, and which to date has not been highlighted and analyzed in the bibliography on the subject, is the ease with which they move, at all levels, between the private and the public, the individual and the community, spanning the interests and concerns of both parties, and firmly establishing the researcher in a process of questioning and, eventually, deconstructing commonly accepted categories and divisions. Since, by definition and in their individual manifestations, at the legal and administrative level, but also in terms of the objectives they pursue and the expectations they induce, foundations form a domain in which the individual and the collectivity meet and dialogue in a dynamic and systematic way, they confirm that, in the ancient Greek world, the treatment of the public and the private as two distinct domains does not constitute a methodologically secure starting point for reflection.
The four lectures in this series will address the vocabulary and terminology of these phenomena, as well as their legal, economic and administrative characteristics, the objectives pursued by donors, and the effects induced on community cohesion and other aspects of collective life. As a tool whose fundamental characteristic is duration in time, ancient Greek foundations will be considered as a place where the individual and the community are, at all levels (institutional, social, economic), absolutely interconnected, and where they interact in the elaboration of their history and memory.
