The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Part 12

xxxii. 651), the rescript in 1405 evidently provided some more interesting details, but is too incomplete to be at all clear. The recipient had been appointed to a liturgy, the nature of which depends on the restoration of the critical l. 6 : perhaps it was a municipal office of some kind, as in C. P. R. 20 and 1642 ; but the date of the rescript (A. D. 200) is apparently a year or two earlier than the establishment of senates in Egypt (cf. 1406. int.). He seems to have proposed to cede his property to the Imperial fiscus public treasury instead of performing the duty ; but his proposition was declined by the Emperors, who awarded the property to his nominator and made this person responsible for the liturgy, at the same time guaranteeing the recipient of the rescript against loss of status and corporal punishment.

The application to the strategus which follows throws some new light on the methods of appointing collectors of money-taxes in villages. In the second century they were usually chosen by lot by the epistrategus a high-ranking administrative official in Roman Egypt from lists supplied to the strategus by the comarchs village heads or other village officials nominating two persons for each vacancy ; cf. Martin, Épistratèges, iii sqq., Wilcken, Grundz. 347–8. Here, however, the use of the term ἀντωνομάσθαι to be nominated as a successor (l. 17) and the absence of a title after the name of the nominator indicate that he was himself a πράκτωρ tax collector, so that the procedure was somewhat similar to that exemplified in 1642 (A. D. 289), where an agoranomus a market inspector or magistrate by the command of the praefect governor of Egypt nominates his successor, and P. Flor. 2. vii (W. Chrest. 401 ; A. D. 265), where comarchs nominate their successors and the strategus appoints. The writer denied the justice of the selection, and was prepared to abandon his property to his nominator. The papyrus breaks off at the point where he was proceeding to make a declaration about his πόρος financial means/property qualification (l. 26, note), probably in order to show that it was below the required amount. So far as can be judged, both the renunciation mentioned in the rescript and that referred to in the application concerned the whole property, not merely two-thirds, as supposed by Mitteis. It is noteworthy that in P. Ryl. 75, which is also concerned with ἐκστάσεις resignations of property, though not for the purpose of avoiding public burdens, the whole πόρος seems to have been ceded, and we are less confident than Wilcken or Jouguet that Mitteis’s explanation of the phrase ἀντὶ τοῦ νενομισμένου τρίτου instead of the customary third in C. P. R. 20. i. 18 is correct ; but owing to the incompleteness of 1405 it seems impossible to extract from it a definite solution of the problem ; cf. ll. 6–7, n.