Land-Leasing in Mylasa: Civic Resilience Through Public-Private Economic Collaboration

This paper focuses on the epigraphic dossier of land lease contracts from Mylasa as a case study revealing the financial know-how of a Hellenistic polis and the high level of collaboration between public institutions and private entrepreneurs in the administration of the sacred treasuries of the gods. Although a certain degree of conflict of interests must have existed on the account of the overlap between political and economic power in Mylasa, it appears that this risk was mitigated by public institutions by promoting competition and reciprocity between the members of the ruling class. By advertising social prestige and respectability as seminal requisites to access the advantages offered by the system, institutions tried to and, to a certain extent, managed to exert control on individual interests and let them contribute to the common purpose of preserving and increasing the city’s wealth and resilience.