Getting Rich in Late Antique Egypt by Ryan E. McConnell (review)

The Oxyrhynchus “archive” of the Apiones has occupied scholars interested in Late Antiquity for a long time. After the first wave of text editions, culminating in P.Oxy. XVI of 1924, the first fundamental study appeared in 1931 with E. R. Hardy, The Large Estates of Byzantine Egypt. Scholarly attention dropped off for a while, but first A. C. Johnson and L. C. West, Byzantine Egypt (1949), then A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602 (1964), and finally J. Gascou (in a long article now in his Fiscalité et société en Égypte byzantine, 2008) attempted to understand the dossier comprehensively. A second wave of text editions, starting with P.Oxy. XLVIII (1981), has been followed by more monographs, such as J. Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity (rev. ed., 2007), R. Mazza, L’archivio degli Apioni (2001), P. Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (2006), G. Ruffini, Social Networks in Byzantine Egypt (2008), and T. M. Hickey, Wine, Wealth, and the State in Late Antique Egypt (2012). Mc-Connell’s monograph is of more limited scope (and size) but no less ambitious. He surveys the scholarship in chapter 1.

The fundamental question that McConnell tries to answer is how the Apiones acquired their wealth. In chapter 2 he rejects Sarris’ idea that the largely undocumented autourgia (direct exploitation by the Apiones of their own property) would have been a more important source of income than the documented prostasiai (indirect exploitation of their property through tenancy and tax collection on what they did not themselves own), because the autourgia seems to have consisted mainly of land grown for fodder, which is hardly a cash crop. McConnell accepts Hickey’s demonstration of the relative unimportance of vineyards, where a real cash crop was grown (but drawing on the much earlier P.Amh. II 79 for a percentage of land owned by the Apiones that would have been vineyards seems reckless; see my remarks in ZPE 191, 2014, 249–250 for the rhetorical nature of this text).

Unfortunately, the evidence does not allow us to answer the question about the origin(s) of the wealth of the Apiones, because the dossier (over 300 texts and counting) dates from a time when they were already wealthy. The dossier exemplifies various administrative operations having to do with the management of the estate of the Apiones and their wider responsibilities for the collection of taxes in the Oxyrhynchite nome (or district) in the sixth century. At best, such texts can show us how they managed their wealth and perhaps hung on to it, but it has always seemed as if they were increasingly worse off, in the sense that the “state” hoisted more and more responsibilities on them. McConnell thinks that the incomplete picture of the administrative drudgery in the sixth century can be manipulated to show us how the Apiones became rich. The idea, set out in chapter 3, is that in collecting taxes for the state, they took a cut—a big cut.

This is how it is supposed to have worked. Taxes and rents were collected by so-called pronoetai, who charged more than they reported and added 15% to every amount in kind they collected. Traditionally, the 15% “increase” has been explained as the difference between two measures. The “big” measure used to collect taxes and rents in kind was 15% bigger than the “small” measure used to report such taxes and rents. The term used for the latter measure, cancellus, suggests that it leveled off heaped measures used for the former with the help of a device called cancellus. But a new orthodoxy thinks the measures are of the same size, forty choinikes each, and that the higher amounts reflect a 15% bonus for the Apiones. The pronoetai would have charged taxpayers and tenants even more than 115% to allow a margin for their own profits.

The...