OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS OF THE ROMAN PERIOD

3088. LETTER OF A PREFECT, ETC.

28 4B.60/F(4)a

21 March A.D. 128?

In the better-preserved of these two letters Flavius Titianus, prefect of Egypt, gives his consent to a plan to carry out work on the baths at Oxyrhynchus using funds already collected by the municipality and other contributions the nature of which is obscured by the damage to the papyrus. The letter is addressed simply 'to the city of the Oxyrhynchites' and ὑμᾶς you in 9 therefore represents, presumably, 'you, the Oxyrhynchites'. Not much is known about the nome capitals as legal entities, see P. Jouguet, La Vie municipale, 278-82, but it is particularly clear from this letter that at this date Oxyrhynchus did have a corporate legal personality that was recognized by the prefect, cf. R. Taubenschlag, Law², 60-1. In the third century the administration of public works of this kind would have been under the control of the town council, see A. K. Bowman, The Town Councils, 87-90. How it would have been managed before the introduction of the councils is by no means clear, see Jouguet, op. cit., 309-14.

The letter of Titianus is described as a copy (7). The preceding letter ends with a warning that some offence will not go unpunished. Of the numerous possibilities a likely one might be that it is the letter of a subordinate official, who enclosed a copy of the prefect's letter to lend authority to his own pronouncements. On this, the simplest, hypothesis, the date of the first letter would be the date of the complete document. Other possibilities are not excluded. If the whole document was a collection of precedents, to take one example, the first date clause provides us with a terminus post quem limit after which (the event could have occurred) only.

The address on the back shows that the complete document was sent to, or just possibly from, some person or persons (ὑμᾶς, 4) in the Heracleopolite nome. A possible explanation of this might be that the work required the use of stone from the quarries at Hibeh, see P. Hibeh I 17 and II 217. The dossier, on this hypothesis, would have been sent to the authorities of the Heracleopolite nome to elicit their co-operation and this papyrus would be a copy filed in Oxyrhynchus.