CORN DOLE ARCHIVE

but since our evidence is confined to the second half of the third century it would be implausible to set it as early as the reign of Augustus, who is supposed to have abolished the subsortitio lottery for places. In fact it is hard to resist the conclusion that an institution so intimately connected with the Roman citizenship as the corn dole could not have spread beyond the city before the constitutio Antoniniana Edict of Caracalla granting citizenship.1 The obvious implication is that the lot continued in Rome well into the imperial period.

Because there is no actual mention of the subsortitio except in connection with Caesar’s reform van Berchem explained away the two passages which imply its continuance in Rome. The first is Dio—Xiph. lv 10, 1 "Augustus closed the number of the grain-fed plebs, which was unlimited, at 200,000." Xiphilinus seems to contradict Suetonius when he says that the number had been unlimited before, but we can probably rely on the statement that in Augustus’ time the number was fixed, which implies a lottery.

The second passage occurs in Pliny’s panegyric on Trajan (ch. 25) and refers to a congiarium gift of money or grain to the people issued in A.D. 99. It is known that congiaria were distributed to the grain-fed plebs only, see van Berchem, pp. 127–130, citing especially Fronto, Princ. hist. 18: "the grain-fed plebs alone is placated by individual and nominative gifts etc." The passage of Pliny runs: "It was given to persons who had been substituted in place of those whose names had been erased and even those to whom it had not been promised were made equal with the rest." Van Berchem claimed that the number of the additional names need not have equalled the number of those erased. His argument (p. 29) is that if the number was fixed, Trajan’s generosity in giving to those enrolled between the announcement of the congiarium and its distribution would not have been great enough to merit Pliny’s praise. But we should note that on a similar occasion Augustus did not admit the newly enrolled. Suetonius’ words are quite parallel with Pliny’s: "he denied that they would receive it to whom it had not been promised" (Aug. 42, 2). Augustus’ reason was that many new freedmen, to whom the lot did not apply, see below, pp. 11 seq., had been admitted to citizenship expressly to collect the money for their patrons. Clearly Trajan’s generosity was worthy of some remark, and he may have broken a custom established by Augustus. For his panegyric Pliny naturally chose to praise Trajan’s benefaction as it applied to citizens rather than freedmen.

It seems to me that the words "in place of the erased" imply very strongly that the number of new recipients, excluding freedmen, had to be the same as the number of the dead, and that the new evidence from Oxyrhynchus justifies us in believing that the lottery for places was a standing feature of the Roman dole.

The archive also gives us reason to reconsider the function and form of the tesserae tokens in the Roman dole. The context of the single mention of them, under the name of tablai tablets/tokens,

1. There is now evidence of a corn dole distributed in Antinoopolis in the period A.D. 166–9, see 2941–2942 introd. and p. 117 n. 1, but it is still not known whether it was organized on the Roman model or on a Greek one.