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In Ancient Greece, they were four ways by which one can acquire a priesthood: by election, by lot, by inheritance or by sale. Ignored in continental Greece, the practice of selling a priesthood by auction to the highest bidder became widespread in the Aegean islands and Anatolia between the 4th century BC and the 3rd century AD. The practice naturally came to replace some older habits of assigning the priesthoods in Anatolian cities and sanctuaries. These variations could indeed take the form of the replacement of a system by another (e.g. from election to sale), but also could combine different systems (e.g. sale and lot) or adapt the modalities of priestly assignation (hereditary sales). By taking into evidence priestly contracts and civic decrees from Hellenistic Caria (Hyllarima, Mylasa, Heraclea, Sinuri), the paper aims to draw attention on some cases where civic groups or priestly elite decided to change the existing way of attributing priestly offices.
By highlighting the contexts in which these changes took place, the motivations that lead to implement these changes, and the purposes which lay behind such shifts, the paper argues that these variations in attributing the priesthoods in fact reflect the social, political, and religious frameworks of the functioning and management of sanctuaries in Anatolia, in which the sale of priesthoods takes its roots. Conversely, through the insights from the cities of Anatolia, the talk also aims to highlight on a broader level some possible explanations for the flourishing development of the sale of priesthood in Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor.
