Dr Marcus Chin

I am an ancient historian whose work focuses on the social and cultural history of the Hellenistic and Roman eastern Mediterranean, and in particular of its civic communities. I am interested in the way localised polities intersected and interacted with the large, trans-local organisations of political and social power in the ancient world, and for this reason am closely concerned with epigraphic texts, and documentary evidence more broadly, while nurturing a burgeoning interest in numismatics. Having completed undergraduate and graduate degrees at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia (2014, 2016), I undertook a doctorate at Oxford from 2016 to 2021. While originally intending to compose a history of local memory-formation in the Roman east, I eventually completed a thesis examining the evolution of civic euergetism and honorific culture in western Asia Minor under the influence of early Roman domination and rule (2nd century BCE to 1st century CE); I will be working this up into a monograph over the following months. I have elsewhere published on euergetism as a language of political power, especially in relation to Attalid Pergamon. 

I joined Andrew Meadow’s project CHANGE in September, and will be marrying these research concerns with CHANGE’s broader ambition of composing regional economic histories in pre-Roman Anatolia, by looking at the rhetoric of money and fiduciarity in the polis: how money intersected with the development of civic institutions, notions of polis-hood, and the extent to which financial institutions laid foundations for the Roman period. The first step, to be undertaken over the next year, will involve quantifying and historicising the epigraphic habit (both Greek and non-Greek) of Asia Minor from the 7th to 1st centuries BCE, as a means of gauging the significance of the early Hellenistic period as a watershed moment in epigraphic practice, and the relationship of this practice to the development of the role of money as an instrument of civic political authority. This will build a base for later thematic studies of specific genres and institutions of monetary behaviour in the polis. A second focus of my role in the project will also be to look beyond cities, to consider the role of mid-range non-polis actors (beyond kings and imperial rulers), especially powerful landowners and dynasts, in shaping the long-term economic history of Anatolia, from the Lydians to the Romans. I have served elsewhere as a non-stipendiary lecturer in Roman history at Lady Margaret Hall (2020-2021).