Law Money and Politics

Grants of royal land are often only captured in the historical record at the moment when the king grants the land to a lucky elite. It is therefore considerably more common to find documentation of the movement of land from the Seleucid kings into the hands of the elite or family members (e.g., the Aristodikides dossier [RC 10-12] and the Laodike dossier [RC 18-20]) than to find documentation of what happened to those estates afterward.

Anti-fiscal revolts in the Julio-Claudian period helped shape the Roman forms of governance recognizable today. To date, scholarship has focused on the levels and nature of the tax burden, and the acts of predation carried out by Rome’s agents in the field (Bang 2012, 2013; Corbier 1988; Dyson 1971, 1975; France 2009; Hopkins 1980; Hurlet 2017; Jones 1974). Despite the frequency of debt and tax burdens being cited as causes of unrest and revolt in the primary sources (cases under review: Str. 17.1.53- 29BCE Thebaïd Revolt; Cass. Dio 54.36.2- 10BCE Dalmatian Revolt; Cass.

The Athenian “Grain Tax Law” of 374/3 BCE regulates those who seek to collect the in kind 1/12th (8.33%) tax upon the annual wheat and barley production on Lemnos, Imbros and Skyros (Stroud 1998). The law’s author, Agyrrhios, permits individuals (ὁ πρίαμενος) and syndicates (συμμορία), composed of precisely six members, to bid. Individual buyers must agree to supply at least one portion (μερίς) comprised of 500 medimnoi of grain at the ratio of 1: 4, wheat to barley. Symmories contract for a minimum of six merides.

In the archaic Cretan inscription known as the Spensithios decree (SEG XXVII 631, c. 500 BCE), the poinikastas of Datala is tasked with “writing and remembering public things, both divine and human, for the city” (πόλι τὰ δαμόσια τά τε θιήια καὶ τἀνθρώπινα ποινικάζ̣εν τε καὶ μναμονεύϝην).

Did Euripides visit the court of the Macedonian king Archelaos sometime around 408? In a persuasive article, Scott Scullion emphatically denied the possibility. Citing Aristophanes’ Frogs’ reticence on the event as evidence against its historicity, he observes: “It would seem incredible that Aristophanes could have resisted the splendid comic opportunities thus offered him, and unaccountable why he should have done so” (Scullion,S. 2003, 393).

This paper argues for an economic and imperial approach to the Athenian temples built on confiscated land during the fifth century BCE. For nearly a century, the Athenians regularly confiscated land from communities around the eastern Mediterranean. Afterwards, they often reserved a portion of the land as sacred property to subsidize a temple. In the generation after the conquest of Lemnos c.