Rome achieved an unprecedented conquest in Europe, Africa, and Asia, but the cultural, linguistic, material and institutional integration it facilitated is just as impressive. In 1905, Francis Haverfield named this process “Romanization” (Webster, p.1), viewing it as a top-down process of Rome diffusing culture among the provinces. However, recent work by classicists such as Greg Woolf and Jane Webster challenged this idea, instead looking at Romanization as a bidirectional layering process: sometimes Rome also absorbed certain elements from newly conquered territories, and in the provinces themselves Roman identity usually was selectively layered on top of local identity and institutions which persisted.
This research direction has extensively focused on elite culture, specifically how provincial elites strove to achieve humanitas (Woolf, p. 55). However, while we can tell a lot about the Romanization of elites because of written records, we know much less about how it affected regular people and even lower class elites. So when we want to learn about how Romanization worked on a wider scale, instead we have to look at either common material culture, or at the Roman institutions that non-elites interacted with. The goal of this paper is to show that collegia, voluntary associations based around shared occupation, cult, or neighborhood, were a fundamental institutional mechanism through which Romanization spread at the sub-elite level. They often hybridized with pre-existing local associations, and embedded long-term structural incentives even when the goals of the organizations changed. In the next section, we will look at the fundamental characteristics of collegia: where were they spread, what was the internal structure, why were they popular among regular people. While collegia were highly concentrated in the Roman West, as Verboven’s work shows, we will instead focus on how collegia merged with Roman East organizations, specifically drawing from Eckhardt’s study of Phrygia. Finally, we will look at one of the most important long-term effects of the collegia: how Christianity followed the collegia template, how this model embedded long-term incentives on the organizational structure of the religion, and how this motivated the separation of church and state in the future of the West.
Before we start, we need to clarify some key terminology. Throughout this paper, we will often interpolate between institutions and organizations. We will follow the Douglass North definition of institutions as “the rules of the game” (North, pp. 1-3): the legal frameworks, status hierarchies, and normative expectations that structure social interaction. Organizations are the “players”: the concrete groups, such as collegia, thiasoi and ekklesia, that operate within those institutional constraints (North, pp. 1-3). This is an important distinction to make, as the Roman collegium was an organization not an institution, but its significance for Romanization lay in the fact that it interacted with, reproduced, and transmitted Roman institutions, as we will see in the following section.
To understand how collegia functioned as vectors of Romanization, we must begin with asking the question of whether we could describe collegia as “Roman” in the first place. After all, voluntary organizations are ubiquitous: since the start of written history, people with shared occupations or interests have united, whether philosophers in ancient Greece (e.g. Plato’s Academia) or devotees of Isis in Egypt. What made collegia special was the embedded institutional incentives as a result of their relationship with the Roman state. In order to scale a private organization in Roman society, you would need to have certain legal privileges, such as the ability to hold joint assets, buy properties etc., which provided guarantees for trust that went beyond personal bonds. This legal relationship to the state also affected the internal structure of collegia: their governance structure and even rituals and inscriptions mirrored Roman civic institutions. By the 2nd century AD, collegia were a central piece of the model of what constituted a Roman city, and as they brought Roman civic structure on a smaller scale to the lesser elites and the common people, we can view the privately-founded collegia as agents of Romanization (Verboven, p. 15).
The internal organization of collegia mirrored the ranks of a Roman municipal government. The alba, or the lists of members, followed1 the same order as the hierarchy of a municipal alba decurionum: the patrons were at the top, then the elected officers (magistri, quaestores), then the regular members, with freedmen sitting below freeborn. Moreover, being a collegiatus (member of a collegium) provided benefits beyond just internal prestige, “they were an integral part of social life in the cities: they participated in processions, set up honorary inscriptions and indulged in electoral propaganda” (Verboven p. 2). This is key to the appeal of joining a collegium, as for instance freedmen could not run for cursus honorum, so alternative paths providing honors that could advance their careers were in high demand (which was one of the key reasons for creating the Seviri Augustales) (Mouritsen, p. 251). The potential upside was significant enough that in the collegia centonariorum (equivalent to guilds of textile workers), sometimes non-practitioners would also join because membership entailed “better sociability, investment possibilities” and “exemptions from compulsory services and other benefits”, specifically liturgies (Liu, p. 61). So collegia served as a tool of digging deeper into society, and entangling middle and lower class people in the pursuit of Roman honors 2, which elites were obsessed with.
So was status-seeking the only reason collegia were modeled on Roman civic institutions? Although this angle is crucial for understanding why collegia were successful at “Romanization”, there is another reason why they converged to this structure. Cicero writes how in 58 BC (Pro Sestio 34), during his tribuneship Publius Clodius Pulcher used collegia compitalicia (neighborhood associations of low-class people) to curry political power (Liu, p. 40). According to Suetonius (Divus Iulius 42.3.), to remove this political trap, during his dictatorship Julius Caesar banned all the collegia except those that had been established in antiquity (Liu, p. 40). Right after the Civil War, Augustus continued Caesar’s policy on collegia, but after he solidified power, he established the ius coeundi, an imperial license that denoted collegia “as a separate entity, comparable to a municipium or populus, rather than as a number of individuals” (Liu, p. 106). This forced every voluntary association in the empire to either seek official imperial legal recognition, or be forced to operate outside of the law with possible persecution. And there were very strong incentives to seek such legal recognition, as according to Justinian’s Digest (3.4.1.1), this gave organizations the right to hold common property (res communes), a common treasury (arca communis), and the ability to act through a legal representative (actor sive syndicum). However, crucially, according to Justinian’s records, all such organizations had to be operated ad exemplum rei publicae, literally "on the model of the state". This is a good example of how “Romanization” was not always a top-down coercive mechanism: the institution of ius coeundi and the benefits it provided incentivized most voluntary organizations to mirror the Roman model.
Finally, besides the internal hierarchy and the interactions with legal organs, those organizations embedded multiple Roman traditions, and connected members across the empire. In a contemporary sense, the collegia were not secular organizations. They often had patron deities, maintained shrines, held special banquets on days sacred to their patron. Furthermore, the main primary source we have on collegia are inscriptions, which often detail the names of the members, who were the officers, and special dedications to patrons3, clearly following standard Roman epigraphic styles. Also, in crafts collegia, when skilled workers moved to other parts of the empire for work, the local collegia were a good resource for them to find a job (Liu, pp. 209-210).
Because of these benefits, the collegium model spread rapidly across the empire. In the western provinces, where no prior voluntary associations existed at high density, the Roman model was fully adopted from scratch (Verboven, pp. 1). However, there was a more complex process of Romanization of already existing organizations in the Greek East, where there was already existing highly developed associational culture.
Long before the Roman conquest, in Hellenistic Greece there were dense networks of voluntary associations such as synodoi (Eckhardt, p. 148) and thiasoi (Kloppenborg, p. 19). Unlike Rome, they were mostly focused on the worship of deities (Kloppenborg, p. 230), and rarely around a specific profession (Eckhardt, pp. 148-150). Nevertheless, these organizations had their own internal hierarchies, divine patrons and ritual traditions, so from a social function they were extremely similar to the Roman collegia (Kloppenborg, p. 230). While Verboven showed that the collegia in the West were clearly spread by the Romans in their full polished form, and they were a powerful agent of Romanization, at first glance it seems like the Greek East already had existing functional organizations that were not a result of Roman influence. So was it simply the case that those organizations remained unchanged when Rome conquered Hellenistic Greece? Did people in Rome just call them collegia because they were functionally the same, but causally not a product of Romanization?
However, when we track the history of those Greek organizations, we can see that Rome clearly shifted the landscape. As we mentioned, the Greek synodoi and thiasoi were primarily dedicated to religious purposes, and organizations based around jobs were very rare during the Hellenistic period (Eckhardt, p. 152). By the imperial era however, professional organizations had become ubiquitous and had shifted the functions of the synodoi and thiasoi. Just in Hierapolis in Phrygia, there were roughly 20 professional associations based on inscriptions that archaeologists have discovered (Eckhardt, p. 152). The honorifics in those inscriptions reveal a clear shift too, “that not a single inscription is concerned simply with honouring a benefactor of the association; instead, all honoured persons represent the Roman order in one way or another”, usually military commanders (Eckhardt, p. 153). An organization of fullers (textile workers) in Akmoneia (again in Phrygia) honored through inscriptions the Roman military prefect Lucius Egnatius Quartus who founded the city (Eckhardt, p. 153). Similarly, textile workers in Hierapolis erected nearly identical inscriptions for Claudius Zotikos Boas, first strategos and archiereus, while the organizations have not received any benefactions from him themselves (Eckhardt, p. 153). This is critical, as it shows that the inscriptions were not to honor benefactors, but instead to gain legitimacy in the Roman order, by crafting relationships with important public representatives.
As local governors could always easily dissolve those associations, they sought to be integrated as much as possible to the Roman civic order (Eckhardt, p. 157). They adopted the Roman civic model structure: they could be divided into ordines, with “an internal ordo decurionum distinguished from the populus”, and management boards (proedria) that acted independently (Eckhardt, p. 154-155). This shows that through their mimicry of accepted norms and institutions, Greek organizations “naturalised and legitimated the basic postulates of a Roman social order” (Eckhardt, pp. 154-155). They also started to celebrate Roman festivals: funerary endowments in Hierapolis refer to typical dates of collegial festivals such as the feast of the Kalends or the Rosalia (Eckhardt, p. 155).
Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell call this phenomenon institutional isomorphism4, where different types of organizations converge under the same constraints (Eckhardt, p. 157). It is specifically a category called coercive isomorphism, where Greek organizations respond to the coercive pressure of the state (ius coeundi) through adapting to a compliant model. Mimetic pressure operated alongside it: facing an illegible new order, associations copied the most legitimate model available. Greek associations observed Roman civic order, and aimed to reproduce it on a smaller scale, aiming to be an exemplum rei publicae, a model of the Roman order with its organizational ambitions and values (Eckhardt, p. 157).
Phrygia is an insightful case study for neo-institutional economics. Under constraints of ius coeundi, the players (private Greek associations) actively started to engage with the Roman order, shifting its organizational structure and even traditions to secure legibility. This created a shift in the private nature of Greek synodoi, which while remaining private started to become quasi-public because of state incentives. So is it a universal claim that Romanization shifted private organizations to become more public? We have a complex counterexample to this proposition, where Rome did indeed make a private organization part of the Roman order, but the private origins persisted and affected the fundamental structure of the organization for millennia to come.
The early Christian ekklesia (named after an assembly of citizens in Ancient Greece) were structurally similar to Roman collegia. They collected membership dues, shared common meals, had a well-stratified hierarchy of officers (episkopoi, diakonoi), provided burial services for members, and obviously were a cult of a divine patron (Kloppenborg, pp. 19-35). According to Kloppenborg, Christians operated under the legal shell of collegia funeraticia (burial association) which enjoyed a more permissive legal status under Roman law (Kloppenborg, pp. 230-240). If this was the case, Augustus’s framework for voluntary association had unintentionally provided institutional shelter for Christianity, which later emperors would aim to suppress. In his Letters to Trajan, Pliny the Younger viewed the Christians as a political association, and his ban of associations affected their eligibility to gather at a regular time to eat set meals (Letters 10.96-97). The same ius coeundi that made collegia instruments of Roman institutional control also made the collegial form available as a template for groups whose ultimate purposes diverged radically from those the state intended.
Early Christianity was fundamentally different from a collegium: members understood it as a universal community that transcended ethnicity, occupation and civic limits. However, it is an important case study of Romanization, as even though Christianity was a movement orthogonal to the existing social order, it embedded itself in a Roman organizational template when it needed to gain practical advantages. The collegium model was so widespread among private voluntary associations that even groups with radically different identities and against the Roman religious and social norms adopted it.
These structural decisions may have mattered far beyond antiquity. Once Christianity solidified this structure of ekklesia, it remained largely unchanged in the millennia to come. The Phrygian synodoi and thiasoi converged closely with civic institutions turning into quasi-public actors. However, Christianity adopted the collegial form while keeping a well-defined boundary between the church and the state, as the foremost allegiance of the church always lay with the transcendental. When Christianity became legalized under Constantine and turned into the official religion under Theodosius, the church already had a network of episkopoi modeled on, but firmly separate from the Roman civic order. The diocese did not combine with the city (Kloppenborg, pp. 20-30). The institutional separation between the Church and the State that would become a pillar of Western Civilization had at least one of its roots in the fact that Rome created a model of private associations with strong legal and social incentives, that the early Christians decided to adopt while retaining the private, self-governing character of the voluntary association from which it emerged. The full argument would run through the medieval church — the Investiture Controversy is where most historians locate the decisive break — but the organizational raw material was collegial.
The collegia are a good counterexample to Haverfield’s top-down imposition model of Romanization. To control sub-elite citizens of the empire, Rome did not destroy all pre-existing organizations, but rather curated a set of incentives and embedded them in the legal and civic order. From a neo-institutional perspective, we can understand this process as one of institutional isomorphism: the ius coeundi framework created a pressure in which any voluntary association seeking legal standing and common property had to adopt the Roman organizational model as the “price of participation”. Organizations observed and adopted the Roman model to navigate the imposed constraints and uncertainty. This did not erase the pre-existing traditions, but realigned so that they fit inside the Roman template of associations by adopting their hierarchical structure, epigraphic traditions, rituals etc.
Verboven has demonstrated that in the western provinces, collegia spread the Roman civic model wholesale, thus creating institutional pathways for social mobility that enabled non-elites to pursue Roman honors and status categories. In the Greek East, voluntary associations existed long before the Roman conquest, the process was more complex but just as important. Eckhardt's study of Phrygian organizations shows that professional associations, which were rarely attested prior to the Roman period, spread rapidly under Roman rule, adopted Roman structure and honorific tradition through what DiMaggio and Powell call coercive and mimetic isomorphism, and sought integration into the civic order. Finally, in the case of early Christianity, the collegia template proved so robust that even a movement defined by its rejection of Roman religious norms organized itself according to the same institutional logic. Even when all of Europe became Christian, and the Church became a highly complex organization, it did not abandon its private, self-governing character it inherited from the collegia structure the early Christians adopted — a form that arguably shaped Western political development for centuries.
What does this tell us about Romanization? It suggests that one of the most durable dimensions of Roman cultural influence may have been institutional rather than substantive. Even when people in the former provinces stopped speaking Latin, no longer worshiped Jupiter, and did not consider themselves to be “Roman”, they still continued to be affected by Roman institutions that persisted. The study of collegia shows us that for the millions of sub-elite inhabitants of the empire, "becoming Roman” was often less a transformation of identity than an adoption of institutional form, a framework within which very different social, religious, and economic lives could be conducted. And this framework would continue to influence European institutional life for centuries to come.
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