CORN DOLE ARCHIVE

use of the present tense of "to answer" (hypakouō) in certain formulas indicates that the roll call took place regularly and involved not only the newly qualified applicants but all of them (2927 19 n.). There may have been a regular meeting for the distribution of tokens at which a roll call was taken. Or alternatively it may have been taken at a general business meeting of the citizen body and not have been concerned, or not primarily concerned, with the corn dole, though we should observe the wording of, e.g., 2913 ii 14–16, "I request to be enrolled among those proclaimed for the distribution of the grain ration."

That distribution was based on a monthly ration is clear from the fragments of registers where each man’s name is followed by a series of month names for keeping account of the distributions (2934–2937). The monthly ration may have been one artaba, because in 2908 iii it appears that nine hundred men receive nine hundred artabas. Professor Youtie has pointed out to me that this is an amount sometimes met with as a monthly allowance, drawing my attention to P. Mich. v 355 (duplicated in PSI viii 902) and 994; see also CPlat. 136, PSI ix 1050 and, strikingly, SB X 10567 19–21, "and give to him the monthly artaba accustomed to be given to all"; for more references see the note on this passage in CE Chronique d'Égypte xliv (1969), 321–2.

At Rome the monthly allowance was five modii units of dry measure (van Berchem, Les distributions, p. 15). Because various types of artaba and modius were in use, it is hard to be sure of the relation between these two rations, but if one accepts the apparently reasonable assumptions that the artaba in question was the most usual one, the "artaba by public measure," and that the modius was the one described in Egypt as the "Italic modius," they were exact equivalents. The artaba by public measure was the equivalent of 72 Alexandrian sextarii measures of volume (Segrè, Metrologia, p. 35), while the Italic modius contained exactly one fifth of that amount, 14 2/5 Alexandrian sextarii (ibid. p. 37).

The distribution was managed by officials appointed by the city council (2918, 2924). In 2924 the distributors warned those who had received tesserae tokens (tablai) from them but had not yet collected their corn to present the tesserae immediately, because they had served their term of office and new distributors had been appointed. There is a clear implication in this that a tessera was a token to be produced in exchange for a certain quantity of corn, as in the Roman dole of the time of Augustus, cf. van Berchem, Les distributions, p. 85, citing Suet. Aug. 40. The terminology indicates that the distributors were liturgists of the curial class, appointed by the council probably for the usual annual term, and they address their warning only to "those who have obtained tokens from us." It is clearly implied that the tesserae were valid only for the term of the officials who issued them.

Quarters and tribes

From the two calculations of area totals we may draw some tentative conclusions about the organization of the tribes and the quarters.

Both 2928 and 2929 list twelve areas. From the sum totals—2,928 for an ideal 3,000 in 2929 and 93 for an ideal 100 in 2928 ii—we may conclude that the calculations