Open Sesame? The Vegetable Oil Industry from the Ptolemies to the Romans

The papyri of Graeco-Roman Egypt present us with invaluable opportunities to study institutional change in the ancient world. Traditionally, a dirigiste and interventionist Ptolemaic state is contrasted with a policy of privatization and laissez faire under the Romans (Rathbone 2000). This paper explores these dynamics through the vital vegetable oil industry (sesame, castor, olive, and radish), as the so-called ‘oil monopoly’ introduced by the early Ptolemies represents the most extreme example of state intervention known for the Graeco-Roman period (Bingen 1978; Dogaer 2021). However, drawing on both Greek and Demotic sources, I will argue that institutional change in this sector does not conform to a model of privatization by the Romans. The idea of Ptolemaic ‘state monopolies’ in industry and trade goes back to the publication of the Papyrus Revenue Laws at the turn of the twentieth century and the great syntheses of Ptolemaic taxation written in the 1930s (Préaux 1939). The narrative of subsequent Roman privatization was popularized around the same time (Wallace 1938). However, for land, recent research has shown that private property rights were well-established in the Ptolemaic period already, and that Roman reform mainly affected the fiscal system (Manning 2003; Monson 2012). The study of institutional change in industry and trade is a natural complement to these studies and paints a more nuanced picture as well (cf. Benaissa 2016 on papyrus and aromata). As for the oil industry, regulations were indeed relaxed over time, and private possession of oil presses (and their taxation), as well as market transactions involving oil, are amply documented in the Roman era (Reiter 2004). However, a loosening of the ‘oil monopoly’ can already be observed in a handful of papyri dating to the late Ptolemaic period, which refer, e.g., to the ‘market price’ of oil crops or the sale of oil by cultivators to merchants. Moreover, oil continued to occupy a peculiar position in the fiscal system of Roman Egypt, even if oil sellers became subject to the general system of craft taxes. This is especially evident on a regional and local level. In some Fayum villages, exclusive local licenses awarded by the authorities continued to exist (Browne 1970). Moreover, temples like that of Soknopaiou Nesos may have been subject to enduring restrictions (Lippert 2007). In the Peri Thebas, ‘general dealers’ (pantopôlai) who sold oil had to pay an additional fee to the state (Wagner 1971). In addition, the Oases had different fiscal arrangements for oil altogether, both in the Ptolemaic and the early Roman period (Agut-Labordère 2019). Clearly, institutional change in the oil industry cannot be explained as a linear Roman liberalization of a Ptolemaic ‘state monopoly’.