View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository HOW THE APIONS BECAME WEALTHY: FINDING THE MONEY ON A LATE ANTIQUE ESTATE BY RYAN E. MCCONNELL DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Classical Philology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Maryline Parca, Chair Associate Professor James Dengate Professor James Keenan, Loyola University Chicago Associate Professor Kirk Sanders ABSTRACT The Flavii Apiones, owners of a large estate in Byzantine Egypt (fourth to seventh centuries), appear to become quite wealthy, yet the means by which they acquired that wealth is not always clear. Peter Sarris has argued that profit was derived from a category of land called the autourgia, mentioned only occasionally in the extant papyri. The autourgia, he asserts, generated the great bulk of the surplus, which could then be sold on the open market. In contrast to Sarris, Todd Hickey argues that the estate was autarkic, focusing his argument on viticulture, the agricultural sector most likely to have been exploited commercially. He finds that the Apion estate was barely self-sufficient in wine. On Hickey’s view, estate income was predominantly from lease revenue. Yet receipts and expenditures in the extant accounts documenting collections made by the estate on leased land often balance in grain and only show a small profit in cash. Given the extent of the Apions’ wealth and the affluence of their senatorial peers, Hickey concedes that “…the Apions would have needed significantly more wealth than their estate at Oxyrhynchus could possibly have generated. The source of such income remains to be discovered.”1 The main aim of this dissertation, then, is to examine and evaluate the potential sources of wealth the Apions could have exploited. It offers a critique of Sarris’ description of how the estates made their money, his framing of the relationship between the estate and the state as pitted against one another for control over the wealth-generating land of Egypt, and his view of the estate as large, expanding, and bipartite. In its place is posited a model that accords with Hickey’s picture of the estate as largely autarkic in its production, and with Jean Gascou’s model of Byzantine estates 1 Hickey 2012, 155. ii in which aristocratic elites and imperial authority negotiated and cooperated with one another. The argument made here suggests that the Apions acquired their wealth in large part by collecting taxes for the state through tax farming agreements. Such a view aligns with the most important aspect of Gascou’s model, that Byzantine estates performed a semi-public tax collection function.2 I argue that the tax farming apparatus employed by the Apion estate operated on two tiers. Through the lower tier they were able to draw money upwards from peasant cultivators and through the upper tier they could secure access to collection rights from the state. At the lower tier of the system, the estates additionally levied fees on collectors they employed. These fees extracted some of the wealth their collectors generated through market speculation when transmuting their small denomination collections into gold. Evidence supporting this model can be found in a number of extant papyri, and historical analogues can be found in classical Athens, Ptolemaic Egypt, Republican Rome, and Early Modern France. 2 Gascou 1985. iii For Mom, Dad, Timmy, Chris, and Heather, and all our families everywhere iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks are due first to my advisor, Maryline Parca, for introducing me to the discipline of papyrology, for her constant guidance and careful feedback, and for pointing me in interesting and productive directions through many drafts and revisions. I am also grateful to my committee members, in particular Jim Keenan, whose comments on early drafts greatly improved the final dissertation. Thanks to my professors at the University of Illinois, especially Antony Augoustakis, David Sansone, Ariana Traill, and Angeliki Tzanetou, who all shaped me as a reader and a thinker, and who spend so much time and effort making their graduate students good. Special mention has to go to committee member and professor Kirk Sanders, whose boundless enthusiasm and energy in everything he does will always inspire me. Thanks also to my friends Loula Strolonga, Dan Abosso, Amy Oh, Amy Norgard, Aine McVey, Sebastian Anderson, Jessie Wells, and most of all Ingrid Albrecht, who are owed my best memories of graduate school (and my twenties). Last and most important, thanks to my parents, Tim and Judy, and siblings, Timmy, Chris, and Heather, for their love and encouragement as far back as I can remember and farther. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 1 1.1 INTRODUCTION AND SURVEY OF SCHOLARSHIP ...................................................... 1 1.2 THE WEALTH OF THE APIONS ......................................................................................... 11 1.3 CENTRAL QUESTION ......................................................................................................... 12 1.4 SOURCES ............................................................................................................................... 14 CHAPTER 2 RECONSIDERING THE AUTOURGIA .............................................................. 16 2.1 IDENTIFYING AUTOURGIA IN THE PAPYRI ................................................................... 19 2.2 LABOR AND LEASING ARRANGEMENTS ....................................................................... 25 2.3 EXPANDING ESTATES ......................................................................................................... 31 2.4 PRODUCTION ON THE ESTATES .................................................................................... 36 2.5 RETHINKING THE PURPOSE OF THE AUTOURGIA ..................................................... 42 2.6 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 48 CHAPTER 3 BENEFITS FROM LOWER LEVEL COLLECTIONS .......................................... 49 3.1 THE ACCOUNTS OF THE PRONOETAI ............................................................................ 50 3.2 KANKELLOS AND METRON ARTABAS .............................................................................. 57 3.3 ADAERATIO ............................................................................................................................ 63 3.4 WHERE DOES THE EXTRA 15% COME FROM? ............................................................. 68 3.5 THE ARCHIVE OF PAPNOUTHIS AND DOROTHEOS ................................................. 70 3.6 SCALE ...................................................................................................................................... 75 3.7 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 79 CHAPTER 4 TAX COLLECTION ON TWO TIERS .................................................................. 81 4.1 TESTING THE MODEL ........................................................................................................ 85 4.2 THE SYSTEM OF COLLECTION ON THE LOWER TIER .............................................. 86 4.3 THE SYSTEM OF COLLECTION ON THE UPPER TIER ................................................ 90 4.4 A SUMMARY OF THE TWO TIERS WORKING IN CONCERT ................................. 101 4.5 IMPLICATIONS OF A TWO-TIERED RENT SYSTEM ................................................... 102 4.6 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................... 111 CHAPTER 5 APION TAX FARMING IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ............................ 114 5.1 CONSOLIDATION AND THE FORMATION OF COLLECTION SYNDICATES ..... 115 5.2 OPERATING ON MANY TIERS ........................................................................................ 122 5.3 SPECULATION AND TAX FARMING ............................................................................. 124 vi 5.4 STATE BUREAUCRACY AND TAX FARMING: PTOLEMAIC EGYPT ...................... 127 5.5 THE FRENCH TAX FARMING SYSTEM ......................................................................... 129 5.6 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................... 143 CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................................................... 146 6.1 THE AUTOURGIA ............................................................................................................... 147 6.2 COLLECTION ON TWO TIERS ....................................................................................... 148 6.3 COMPARISONS .................................................................................................................. 150 6.4 LIMITATIONS AND HAZARDS ....................................................................................... 150 APPENDIX A GLOSSARY OF TECHNICAL TERMS ............................................................. 152 APPENDIX B ESTATE