PUBLIC DOCUMENTS: THE CORN DOLE IN OXYRHYNCHUS, AND KINDRED DOCUMENTS

2892–2940. Corn Dole Archive

This group of documents reveals that a corn dole was distributed in Oxyrhynchus in the reigns of Claudius II and Aurelian and adds significantly to the otherwise not very extensive evidence for the existence of corn doles in the cities of Egypt in the third century. In the authoritative work on the Roman corn dole the Egyptian evidence was not considered and, though a definite statement about the third century was not made, it was implied that nowhere in the empire were there corn doles comparable with the Roman one until the time of Diocletian (D. van Berchem, Les distributions de blé et d’argent à la plèbe romaine sous l’empire, p. 102). The new evidence, however, shows that the Oxyrhynchite dole followed the Roman model closely. The same may well have been true of those in Alexandria and Hermopolis.

Alexandria and Hermopolis

For Alexandria our evidence is a passage of a paschal letter of Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, quoted by Eusebius (HE vii 21, 9). It refers to a time just after Gallienus had recovered control of Alexandria from the supporters of Macrianus and Quietus and when plague as well as war had reduced the population of the city, that is, to A.D. 261 or not much later.

"Then men wonder and debate . . . why (our) greatest city no longer bears in it as great a total of inhabitants—beginning from infant children and including the very oldest—as it once maintained of those whom it called 'elderly' (omogerontes elderly persons), but (on the contrary) the people of forty to seventy years of age were then so much more numerous that nowadays an equal number cannot be made up when everyone from fourteen to eighty years of age is enrolled and mustered for the public corn dole, and the youngest looking have turned into the contemporaries, as it seems, of those who have long been old."

Wilcken took this to mean that a corn dole distributed originally to persons of forty to seventy years of age was widened to include everyone from fourteen to eighty (Archiv iv 546). The new papyri show that the arrangements for distribution depended