Download PDF | The Customs Law of Asia (Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents), by M. Cottier , M. H. Crawford, C. V. Crowther, J. L. Ferrary, Oxford University Press 2008.
396 Pages
Preface
The stone bearing the inscription that embodies the Customs Law of Asia—a stone ‘covered in writing—just like a newspaper’, as the workman reported it to Professor Dieter Knibbe—was found at Ephesus in August 1976, and has become known as the ‘Monumentum Ephesenum’ (‘the Monument from Ephesus’). The use of this inauthentic Latin title has justifiably been criticized by M. Wo¨rrle (1999),1 though it will do for the physical object. The text of the ‘newspaper’ reported measures concerned with the customs dues of the Roman province of Asia from 75 bc to ad 62, and, on the basis of the wording of l. 7,2 it has been assigned various Latin designations,3 equivalent to ‘Asian harbour law’4 or ‘law of the Asian harbour toll’5 and referred to in English as a ‘customs law’, the title that has been adopted for this book. After discussions at colloquia in Vienna, Munich, and Cologne, a preliminary notice of the inscription was published in EA 8 (1986) 19-32, followed in 1989 by full publication by H. Engelmann and D. Knibbe as EA 14 (1989), with introduction, maiuscule and minuscule texts, German translation, commentary, and fourteen plates, including photographs of stone and squeeze.
The introduction to the present volume is much indebted to that of the editio princeps. The work produced a rich crop of published responses, as the editors foresaw, many of them emendations of the text proposed by the editors or of their interpretations, others exploiting the text to gain new insights into the geography and government of the province of Asia, of the Roman tax system, or of the Roman Empire at large. Besides these publications (for which see the Bibliography), work has also gone on in seminars, notably in Paris. The inscription was an obvious subject for study at the Oxford University Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, and on 1–2 October 1999, under the auspices of the Centre, a colloquium was organized at Christ Church, by A. K. Bowman, M. H. Crawford, and B. M. Levick. Six scholars presented sections of the text of the inscription, with commentary, and six offered papers on the Customs Law itself, its context and implications, five of which have been revised for the present publication (that of R. P. Duncan-Jones was published separately in Latomus 65 (2006) 3-16).
The contributors to the colloquium are listed in the contents page of this volume; the division of the text by lines for that meeting has been retained in the present publication and is as follows: M. Cottier, ll.1-26, §§1-9; M. H. Crawford, ll. 27-53, §§10-21; J.-L. Ferrary, ll. 53-81, §§22-33; O. Salomies, ll. 81-107, §§34-45; M. Wo¨rrle (in absentia), ll. 108-34, §§46-57; B. Levick, ll. 135-55, §§58-63. In addition to these participants, a number of other scholars were present and made valuable contributions to the discussion and to the points of agreement that were reached: E. Famerie, M. T. Griffin, C. J. Howgego, C. Katsari, A. W. Lintott, B. C. McGing, G. D. Merola, F. G. B. Millar, S. R. F. Price, N. Purcell, and G. Williamson. D. Knibbe, though unable to attend the colloquium, contributed his Latin version of the document, which he has since published,6 and has provided support throughout. Professor Bowman has not made a formal contribution to the volume, but he not only engineered the original colloquium but has facilitated the work with help and advice at every stage. It is also a pleasure to recognize the input and encouragement of the Joint Editor of the Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents series, Dr A. E. Cooley .
Needless to say, a large quantity of paperwork and mutually incompatible floppy disks was generated. C. V. Crowther has shouldered the translation of disks from one mode into another, and the transmission of information between members of an international group over a period of time has been extraordinarily smoothly achieved by Ms M. Sasanow of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, to whom we are greatly indebted. A particular debt of gratitude is also owed by B. Levick to the IT Managers at St Hilda’s College, Ms A. Wilson and Mr E. Glynn. The colloquium was greatly helped by the generosity of the O¨sterreichisches Archa¨ologisches Institut, which sent us the latex squeeze of the inscription well before the meeting, and allowed us to keep it afterwards for two further months. With the permission of the Institut, C. V. Crowther was able to make a digital image of the inscription, so making the testimony of the squeeze available to students at the Institut and the Centre and elsewhere, as well as to readers of this volume.
At the end of the Colloquium it was agreed that M. Cottier should draw up a fresh text of the document, based on the work of the colloquium, and that M. H. Crawford should provide a translation and that the revised texts should then be submitted to the original contributors for their comment and for the addition of the Commentary. The final work would be submitted to all the contributors and any irreducible differences of view noted in their place. A further meeting of those involved in the establishment of the text was hosted by C. V. Crowther and M. Sasanow at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents on 1-2 June 2002. The purpose of the present publication is to take account of the work that has been done on the text and interpretation since the foundation was laid by Engelmann and Knibbe, taking advantage of re-readings of the squeeze and the stone, and to make an inscription that is of first-rate importance to students of the Roman Empire readily available to English-speaking students. The paragraphing adopted by the original editors has been subject to scrutiny, but although the views of the present editors differ from theirs at several points, as the Commentary indicates, we have retained the original numeration to avoid confusion, but have made the line number the main basis for reference.
In the summer of 2000, M. Cottier and C. V. Crowther, the former with the help of a grant from the Oxford University Craven Committee, the latter with support from the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and Wolfson College, revisited, photographed, and took a new set of paper squeezes of the Monumentum in its place in the Ephesus Archaeological Museum in Selc¸uk; this work on the stone provided the basis of the final text by Cottier and Crowther made available to the contributors for further discussion, and, with the digitized latex squeeze, it is also the basis of the photographic illustrations in this volume.7 Individual passages were twice further checked by M. H. Crawford and J. M. Reynolds. The text and Commentary were scrutinized throughout in 2005 by M. H. Crawford and these final changes reviewed and entered by C. V. Crowther and B. Levick. Since then C. V. Crowther has monitored all the adjustments that have been made to text, translations, and essays, managed the disposition of the Greek, Latin, and English versions on the page, compiled the Plates, drawn up the Greek index, and with B. Levick taken charge of the work in its final stages. B. Levick has compiled the indexes of Persons, Places and Peoples, and the General Index.
The Map has been drawn by S. Mitchell. M. H. Crawford acknowledges an additional debt to the late P. A. Brunt for his advice, particularly in details of the translations. Details of the history of the Monumentum, its dimensions and lettering, will be found in the introduction to the text. The editors are indebted to the Turkish Ministry of Culture and the Directorate of the Ephesus Archaeological Museum for facilitating the close reexamination of the stone, and to the valuable advice and assistance of Gina Coulthard and Yaprak Eran and Gu¨lgu¨n Kazan of, respectively, the London and Ankara offices of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, in obtaining the necessary permissions. For the final version we owe helpful suggestions as to presentation, notably in the Introduction, to the Oxford University Press reader. We are also greatly indebted to Hilary O’Shea, Kathleen Fearn, and Dorothy McCarthy of OUP, who have seen the work through to publication.
Introduction
The inscription edited, translated, and discussed in the present volume is of immense historical value. It was set up in Ephesus, the principal city of the Roman province of Asia, in ad 62, and presents a series of regulations governing the administration and exaction of the customs dues in the province. It is a key document for our understanding of a crucial element of the administration of the Roman Empire, the collection of taxes in all forms, which was vital for the survival of the Empire from beginning to end.
The document as a whole comprises information spread over an extended period of time and its signiWcance can be viewed against two separate time scales. On the one hand, it embodies regulations on the administration of customs dues in the province of Asia that date back to the earliest years of the Roman province, and beyond, to the time of the Attalid kingdom; consequently, it throws important light on the period of the transition from hellenistic kingdom to Roman province. On the other hand, the regulations were subject to a series of modiWcations over time, and the inscription presents these in the deWnitive form that they had reached by ad 62. The text was composed at a time during the Principate of Nero when the Emperor and members of the Senate had already, in ad 58, been concerned with the working of the tax system and the failings that had been brought to their attention by popular complaints against publicani (tax-collectors) and the advantage that they were taking of obscurity in existing regulations to make excessive, even illegal, demands. The document invites us to consider how, if at all, the publication of the customs law of Asia in ad 62, when three special commissioners were in charge of the Aerarium Saturni (the public treasury), is related to the discussions and subsequent reform of 58, as related by the historian Tacitus (Ann. 13. 50–1). A clause towards the end of the document (l. 147) also raises the issue, noticed by Tacitus in his Claudian narrative in ad 53 (Ann. 12. 60), of procuratorial jurisdiction and its encroachment on the prerogatives of senatorial oYcials. As an aggregate of regulations developed over time, the Customs Law is the most substantial and signiWcant of a corpus of surviving documents (listed on pp. 11–12 below) that oVer information both about imperial and local customs dues and their development in the Late Republic and the Empire, and about the relations between the publicani who exacted the taxes and Roman oYcials and the Aerarium Saturni. The composite and aggregated character of the document raises the question of the nature of this ‘law’ (as it refers to itself) and its authorship; this issue is explored later in the introduction (pp. 5–8 below). The document is full of detailed insights. From its opening lines we learn about the ways in which information stored in the archives at Rome was retrieved and communicated, in Latin or in an authorized translation, to enquirers. In the main body of the text, the variety and scope of the regulations, ranging from the size of customs houses to rates of duty on diVerent items, oVer sharp insights into two disparate perspectives on the tax system, that of the Roman authorities and that of the subjects of the Empire. The Wrst perspective is reXected, for example, in Roman concern for the smooth working of the system of taxation through the employment of publicani,whose obligations—the take-up of their contracts, provision of sureties, and the timing of payments—are carefully regulated, and for the integrity of military arrangements—for the free passage of war materials, soldiers, and their equipment. As to the second point of view, restrictions on the conduct of publicani, mentioned long after the original establishment of the system, may well be responses to complaints from subjects; indeed, the existence of the entire document may be seen in that light. That is not all. The document speciWes methods of payment and penalties for evasion, illuminating the practical working of the Roman tax-system, and it lists places where customs dues are to be paid, requiring the involvement of local authorities when the publicanus is not available. This evidence, with its geographical terminology, provides the opportunity to clarify the political geography of the province of Asia and, critically, its transition from hellenistic kingdom to Roman 2 Introduction province, as well as the later development of the province of Cilicia. It also throws indirect light on politics at Rome, not only those of the early period of Nero’s reign, but also in the aftermath of Sulla’s Dictatorship, which, it has sometimes been argued, saw a vindictive attack on the order of knights in the shape of the abolition of the right of companies of publicani to farm the taxes of Asia.1 Finally, there is a wealth of information to be gained on other matters: most prominently, the rates of tax and exemptions, and their motivation, details of the relationship between customs-dues and other forms of taxation, and, more generally, the intrusive economic imperialism of the Roman state, and the concessions that could be wrung from it. Historians of law, economics, and the ancient world in general, then, should all Wnd much material of interest in the critical and commented text of the Customs Law of Asia and the essays that follow it in the present volume. That is not to say that all the old problems that are touched on, or the new ones raised, have been resolved. The inscribed text of the law is both complex and, at times, intractable. The present edition is the product of close scrutiny of the inscription and discussions of its content that have dwelt on important questions raised in and since the editio princeps. These are treated in detail in the Commentary and essays. In preparation for the close engagement with the text oVered in those sections, in the pages that follow the preliminary and over-arching issues of the proper title of the document, of its legal character, and of its internal chronology will be considered. It will be convenient if discussion of the character of the lex is preceded by a summary of its contents.2 The document opens by telling us that on 9 July, ad 62, records in the oYce of the curators of public records in the Basilica Julia at Rome were copied so that they might be translated, and eventually inscribed on a stone set up in the city of Ephesus, the principal port of the province of Asia and, with Pergamum, one of its two leading cities.3 These items constituted the law for the dues on imports and exports into and out of the province of Asia by land and sea. The consuls of 75 bc, C. Octavius and C. Aurelius Cotta, are the earliest magistrates who are referred to, as leasing out the collection of the tax (ll. 73 and 75, §§31 and 33), in the text; they were working on the basis of existing regulations (see below, on the legal basis of the lex). The regulations concern the siting of customs posts, the items subject to tax and the rate to be imposed, the timing of the publicanus’ taking up of his lease and the security he must provide. The Wrst magistrates whose modiWcations are listed in the text (l. 84, §37), are the consuls of 72 bc and censors of 70 bc, L. Gellius and Cn. Lentulus. The regulations of the previous paragraphs are undated. Some of them refer to King Attalus III of Pergamum, whose death in 133 bc and bequest of his kingdom to Rome led to the establishment of the system embodied in the law. They even refer, as in ll. 67–9, §28, to the adaptation and use of buildings and to the employment of slaves that had belonged to the royal house.4 No more modiWcations are listed until 17 bc, when there is a heavy crop (ll. 88–103, §§39–43). A gap during the period of civil war and revolution is not to be wondered at: consuls were preoccupied by domestic politics. But by 17 bc, the year of the Secular Games and ten years after the normal disposition of the provinces had been established,5 Augustus had his house in order, and it was only to be expected that there would be tidying up and Wnalizing of details. That there was already concern over the conduct of publicani is shown by the fact that in 19 bc a strong-minded consul, C. Sentius Saturninus, won praise for rigour in exposing their acts of fraudulence, penalizing their greed, and recovering public funds for the Aerarium.6 It is noteworthy too that the next modiWcations followed in 12 bc (ll. 103–9, §§44–5) and again in 7 bc (ll. 109–12, §§46–7) and 2 bc (ll. 113–15, §§48–9): the intervals of Wve years coincide with the period of time allowed for a publicanus’ tenure of the lease: the regulations would be modiWed when the leases were sold, whether at the instance of the publicani or that of the magistrates (perhaps after representations from tax-payers).7 But this regularity is not maintained and, not surprisingly, the need for modiWcations seems to have lessened with time; the last consuls whose names may be restored are those of 37. There were two other interventions before those of the curators of the public revenues re-established by Nero in 62 (ll. 138–43, §§60–1). One of the last intelligible lines (147) seems to envisage disputes between the publicanus and (presumably) travellers subject to his demands being heard before the imperial procurator, a possibility that had been made legitimate by Claudius in 53 but which may have ended when Nero came to power.8 The document is not a lex in the sense of a statute introduced in the form of a question which, aiming at answering one problem or a set of related problems, was formulated by a magistrate in a given year, debated (or not) and voted by one of the Roman assemblies on a speciWed date, then published in a slightly revised form before Wnally being placed in the archives. But it is nonetheless a lex because this Latin term and concept was also used to encompass diVerent types of documents, notably sets of regulations devised by the censors and other magistrates when farming out the collection of state revenues and the construction of public buildings, or when selling or leasing public property.9 This second deWnition aptly describes our text. So the lex portorii Asiae presents itself as the result of an accumulation and aggregation of decisions taken and issued at diVerent periods of time by diVerent magistrates.10 Its compositional history is therefore close to that of such documents as, for instance: . at Rome, the edict of the urban praetor by which this magistrate promulgated a catalogue of actions open to litigants during his annual tenure of oYce—a catalogue that was largely based on legal formulae selected by previous praetors, with sometimes a few personal additions made by the current holder of the position, and that became Wxed by the time of Hadrian; . in the context of a municipium or a colony, texts such as the Tabula Heracleensis, an assemblage of clauses drawn from diVerent statutes and regulations that seems generally more applicable to the city of Rome but appears nonetheless to have been extended to Heraclea; or the lex libitinaria from Puteoli, which regulated the funerary profession in that Roman colony;12 . at the provincial level, the governor’s edict certainly presented similar characteristics with, in particular, the repetition of regulations followed by predecessors of the magistrate, sometimes supplemented by commands (mandata) delivered to him by the Senate or the emperor and covering speciWc issues;13 . perhaps also the Gnomon of the Idios Logos, ‘the code of regulations that the deiWed Augustus established for the administration of the Special Account and of additions made to it from time to time either by the emperors or the senate or the various prefects or idiologi (oYcials in charge of the special account in which were collected revenues other than taxes) . . .’.14 Technically the lex can be described as a lex locationis, a private or public leasing contract.15 But we can place it more precisely in the category of regulations imposed by the censors, leges censoriae, since, as we know from Roman public law, to sell or to lease at auction and to establish the terms for contracting out public properties and revenues of the Roman state were traditionally the duties of the censors.16 However, if we look at the list of magistrates responsible for the amendments made to our text (from l. 72, §31 to the end of the document), we discover that, with the possible exception of ll. 84–8, §§ 37–8,17 all the additional clauses are due either to consuls or to the three Neronian curators. How are we to explain the complete absence of censors in our text and can we still apply the designation lex censoria to it? We know that during the Wrst century bc there were gaps in the appointment of censors, notably before 70 bc and after Caesar’s coup of 49, and that from the reign of Augustus either the emperor undertook this magistracy himself or it was entrusted to individuals chosen directly by him; the last censors regularly elected by an assembly of the Roman People were those of 22 bc. Under Domitian the title of censor made its appearance in the imperial titulature and, although his successors avoided taking it, they nevertheless continued to assume the censor’s duties and powers.18 A series of documents conWrms that in the Wrst century bc other magistrates—praetors, aediles, quaestors, and notably the consuls—undertook the farming out of taxes, state revenues, and properties as well as all sorts of public procurements. Thus, the consuls of 80 bc auctioned to the highest bidder the contract for the upkeep of the temple of Castor;19 those of 75 not only made the contracts for temple maintenance but were also charged by the senate to farm out the right to collect the Sicilian tithes and, Wnally, as we learn from our text, also granted the concession for the collection of the Asian customs dues.20 In 19 bc it was the consul C. Sentius Saturninus who took steps against the exactions of the publicans,21 and it would be easy to Wnd other examples. From all this one might infer that consuls and other magistrates replaced the censors only during the periods of interruption known for this magistracy, as a form of palliative measure. The information provided by our lex, however, rather gives the impression that in the last years of the Republic Wnancial responsibilities traditionally linked with the censorship progressively fell into the hands of the consuls, thus leaving the censors free to concentrate on their main activity, the organization and running of the census—an activity which by that time, with the territorial and subsequent demographic increase of the Roman state, may well have occupied the greatest part of their mandate. Can we still speak of a lex censoria in this context? We believe that it remains possible to answer such a question in the aYrmative. First, it is a designation that can still be found in our text, in which an amendment of 17 bc refers to the ØıÅØŒe , i.e. the lex censoria (l. 98, §41). Secondly, it is important to note that a document such as our lex has a strongly marked tralatician character, which means that this set of regulations has been passed on from one magistrate in charge of the farming out of the customs dues to another without modiWcation made to the structure of the text itself beyond possible amendments that the magistrate responsible could choose to add or not. This tralatician character is attested by the repeated use at the end of several additional clauses of formulae such as a ºØa ŒÆa e ðÆPeÞ (‘the rest according to the (same) lex’, ll. 105 and 139, §§ 44 and 60) and, more complete, a ºØa ŒÆa e ÆPe Œ ı ı (‘the rest according to the same lex every year’, ll. 108–9, §45; 112, §47; 126, §55; 128, §56; 133, §57; 135, §58 and 143, §61). This traditionalist aspect, which reXects the conservative Roman mind, may also have been manifest in the persistent use of a designation which as time went by tended to become obsolete. The question of the internal chronology of the document is a diYcult problem which has given rise to a brisk debate among scholars. If we examine the structure of the text, we can note that it is composed, besides its praescriptum (ll. 1–7), of two parts: a series of clauses which forms the regulation itself (ll. 7–72, §§1–30), followed by a succession of amendments due to the diVerent magistrates in charge of farming out the customs dues of the province of Asia, from the consuls of 75 bc to the curators of ad 62. If the second part does not cause any real trouble, such is not the case with the Wrst. One can summarize the debate by distinguishing two main theories. First of all, that of the edd. pr. and G. D. Merola,22 who suggest a drafting in three stages going back in its origin to the Sempronian law on the leasing out by the censors of the uectigalia of the province of Asia (lex Sempronia de censoria locatione uectigalium prouinciae Asiae) of C. Gracchus (123 or 122 bc). According to them, this lex, which transferred the responsibility for the sale of all the Asian tax contracts from the hands of the governor of the province to those of the censors in Rome, was applied for the Wrst time by the newly elected censors in 120 bc. From 120 to 75 bc the set of regulations was regularly amended, leading the consuls of 75 bc, L. Octavius and C. Aurelius Cotta, to publish a new lex portorii Asiae which probably only restated existing rights and duties—oVering, as it were, an update of the document. During the Claudian era the quaestor of the aerarium, T. Domitius Decidianus, produced his pascua perpetua, a compilation of regulations concerning tax-farming. Finally, the work of the Neronian curators consisted of updating the text of 75 bc on the basis of the work of Decidianus and including all the consular amendments produced between 72 bc and ad 37 or 42 together with the additions made by the curators themselves. This chronology for the text has been contested by C. Nicolet, who Wnds it surprising that the curators of ad 62 did not expressly recognize their debt to the consuls of 75 bc, the presumed authors of a new set of customs regulations for the province of Asia. He therefore suggests another scenario to explain the genesis of the lex.23 We know that among the diVerent tasks assigned to the consuls of 75 bc by the people and the senate was the farming out in Rome of the Sicilian minor tithes. In that case they faithfully respected the clauses of a previous lex locationis, the lex Hieronica, imposed by King Hiero of Syracuse.24 There is therefore a strong presumption that in the case of our customs regulation the consuls did exactly the same, by using and updating the lex Sempronia of Gaius Gracchus.25 Following another path, S. Mitchell (below, pp. 198–201) reaches the same conclusion, adding however the possibility that the Wrst version of ourlex may go back to the origins of the province itself and be the work of M’. Aquilius, the Wrst proconsul of Asia between 129 and 126 bc. G. D. Merola has suggested an extremely satisfying solution to this problem.26 According to her, there is no diYculty in admitting that the date suggested for the Wrst version of the law (i.e. 75 bc) could be correct. If it is true that the curators of ad 62 did not clearly attribute the previous regulations to the consuls of 75 bc, one should also notice that there is similarly no speciWc reference in the text to the lex Sempronia. In this sense, it is quite possible to propose, as the edd. pr. do, that the consuls of 75 bc published a new lex portorii Asiae, but that this was based in large part on the previous regulations. A series of indications tends to conWrm this last hypothesis. First, the clauses which can be attributed to the consuls of 75 bc (ll. 72–84, §§31–6) are on formal grounds clearly distinguished from the amendments of other consuls. In each case the Wrst clause due to a new consular pair is introduced by the formula › EÆ › EÆ oÆØ æ ŁÅŒÆ, ‘the consuls so-and-so have added’. This is completely diVerent from the wording of the two Wrst clauses in which the consuls of 75 are mentioned. In these two cases (ll. 72–4 and 74–8, §§31–3) the text reminds us that the two amendments are in accordance with the procedure that they have followed for their farming out of the customs tax. Although their names do not reappear afterwards, we are entitled to attribute to them responsibility for the three other clauses (ll. 78–81, 81–3 and 83–4, §§34–6) which precede those of their colleagues of 72. But again a singularity should be noted: the last two amendments attributable to the consular pair of 75 (ll. 81–3 and 83–4, §§35–6) do not concern speciWcally the province of Asia, but are applicable to any provincial customs district; a borrowing from a more general set of customs regulations seems therefore patent. Such a borrowing could only have been made by the consuls of 75 during a general revision of the leasing conditions of the Asian customs dues. Lines 72 to 84 of our text should, therefore, be clauses added by the consuls of 75 to the original text of a former lex, going back to the lex Sempronia of 123/122 or to the work of M’. Aquilius between 129 and 126. What the consuls of 75 undertook was, as indicated above, only a superWcial revision, consisting of adding a series of amendments to a document probably adopted as it stood. It is one of the principal characteristics of this text that the revision of this set of regulations was achieved by addition of new clauses without correction or suppression of the old ones. As work on the inscription has proceeded, solutions to a number of problems of text and interpretation have been proposed, but not necessarily agreed, and they will certainly be discussed further. The potential contribution of the document to historical knowledge is clear, but it remains to a large extent enigmatic.
This is not simply because of the state of the text; partly it has to do with the fact that the problems that the text raises, of political geography, military, political, social, and economic history, and law, intermesh with each other. In this connection and to put the present regulations in another context, readers may Wnd it convenient to have a list of other documents from Asia Minor which are concerned with (partly local) customs dues, some of them treated by contributors to this volume: 1. Ephesus, Ionia. Trajanic republication of three SCC of the triumviral period concerning exemptions from customs dues and involving teachers, sophists, and physicians. Knibbe 1981; Bringmann 1983; H. Pleket, SEG 31, 952. Taken by Bringmann and Pleket as part of an archival dossier established by Ephesian Museum members in the period when their privileges were being Wnalized. See Rathbone below, p. 272, n. 60. 2. Caunus,Caria.Hadrianic textinscribedin atleast three columns on the exterior wall of the fountain house. Customs duties at Caunus, as mitigated by a benefaction of 66,000 denarii, which the inscription celebrates.Bean1954,97–105, no.38;SEG14,639; Pleket1958; Ve´lissaropoulos 1980, 223–31 (translation and discussion); Purpura 1985; Brandt 1987; France 1999, 103–5. See Rowe below, pp. 245–6, Rathbone below, p. 272, n. 60. New fragments brought to light in the course of the complete anastylosis of the whole building undertaken by Turkish archaeologists in 1969 have rendered previous editions obsolete: Mellink 1970, 170; Mellink 1972, 180–1; O¨ gu¨n 1978, 423; I¸sik 1994, xiii.
A new edition of the whole text, including the additional fragments, has now been published in C.Marek’s Corpus of Kaunos (I.Kaunos 35),which appeared too late to be taken fully into account in the present volume. 3. Myra, Lycia. From the theatre. Regulation of customs questions involving the city of Myra and the koinon of Lycia by an unknown Roman authority of the second century ad. Wo¨rrle 1975, 286–300; Brandt 1987; Schwarz 2001a (cf. Lehmler and Wo¨rrle 2002, 562, n. 60); Marek, I.Kaunos pp. 200–15. 4. Calynda, Lycia. Eight fragments from the mid-second century ad concerning a dispute between Calynda and Caunus, and involving I (B, l. 13). Balland 1981, 260–6, no. 86; Marek, I.Kaunos, pp. 75–8 [Test. 174]. 5. Termessus, Pisidia. The lex Antonia de Termessibus, ll. 31–6, 68(?) bc. Authorization for the city to levy customs dues at its discretion, provided that Roman publicani are exempt. Crawford, RS 1, 331–40, no. 19, with bibliography. Many of the questions raised by the text of the lex are dealt with in the Commentary and the essays.
For S. Mitchell the geographical content of the document is inextricably bound up with the question of the date of the earliest phases of the lex; M. Corbier’s paper on the Roman end of the lex is very much concerned with the changes of ad 44, 58, and 62, as well as with the content of the Praescriptum, methods and timing of leasing and problems of posting, while D. Rathbone’s, dealing with the policies that lay behind the issuing of the lex in 62 (with conclusions comparatively favourable to Nero), makes a direct connection between Nero’s edict of 58 designed to counter the immoderate demands of the publicani and including the publication of the regulations of each tax leased out, and the appearance of the lex in Ephesus; G. D. Rowe’s essay deals precisely with the dissemination of such enactments. Finally, the paper of O. van Nijf sets the lex in a wider context. He assigns the agents a dissonant position in provincial society, in which their self-regard was out of kilter with the dislike felt by tax-payers for their oppressors. It will be clear that, although each contributor is aware of his or her colleagues’ views, we cannot agree on each and every point, even on textual matters.
There are consequently diVerences of view between the editors of the text and between the authors of the individual essays; on the text, we have attempted to reconcile the diVerences by negotiation; diVerences between the essays have been allowed to stand for the most part, with the reader’s attention drawn to them when they are particularly signiWcant. In the Commentary, when scholars have concurred on a related point, their remarks have been sent to a single site. Work on the inscription will go on long after the publication of this volume. As Professor Knibbe has remarked,27 no matter how many times the comb is passed through the animal’s fur, there will always be something remaining to be caught. There are also other large animals to be pursued: in 1999 an 87-line inscription was found at Andriake in Lycia. It belongs to the same period as our inscription and provides further evidence for the customs law of the Lycian koinon.28 The inscription was presented by Bay Burak Takmer at the Wrst Greek-Turkish Epigraphic Colloquium, held at Athens in January 2005; he has been working on the document for his doctoral thesis. When this work is published it will certainly supplement, and may modify, what follows.
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