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208 The View from the Customs House
proverbial for being slow on the uptake: 300 years after their
foundation they ‘gave away’ their customs dues, and before that
the people had not made use of (ekarpouto) this revenue at all, so
that people said the Kymaians had not noticed that their city
was on the sea. 20 The implication is obvious—any community,
however small, as long as it was on the sea, was expected to
derive income from customs dues. 21 Scattered later evidence
confirms how ubiquitous dues of this kind were. Alponos on the
Malic Gulf is hardly a name to conjure with: we hear incidentally
of an undated occasion, Classical or Hellenistic, when
twenty-five girls climbed the purgos ellimenion, the tower of
the harbour-due authority, there, to see better during the festival
of the Thesmophoria, but it collapsed and they fell into the
sea. 22 That the headquarters of the harbour-due exacting authorities
should be a purgos, even if such an inadequate exemplar
of the genre, is to be noted.
But it is from the epigraphic record that the most abundant
testimony to the ubiquity of these practices comes. This is not
the place even to outline the principal characteristics of this
material, which ranges from the stele by which Pharaoh Nectanebo
II in the mid-fourth century bc gave the revenues of the
customs of Naucratis to the goddess Neith—under whose tutelage
lay the Great Green, the Mediterranean—to municipal
tariffs from Carales in Sardinia and Anazarbus in Cilicia at the
end of Antiquity. 23 We are dealing with an essentially oppor-
20
Strabo 13. 3. 6. When was the foundation, and when and what was the
‘giving away’ of the dues?
21
The inscription-rich and densely packed little cities of Crete offer good
examples such as I. Cret. IV. 186 (customs arrangements between Gortys and
Lappa). I. Cret. IV. 184, discussed by M. Guarducci, ‘Ordinamenti dati da
Gortina a Kaudos in una iscrizione inedita di Gortina’, Rivista di Filologia 8
(1930), 471–82, is also very instructive: the harbour tax of the tiny island of
Gaudhos, insignificant in itself but offering a refuge on a dangerous but
much-frequented coast, is part of a carefully delineated portfolio of revenues
available to the community of katoikountes and the city from which they come.
22
Strabo 1. 3. 20 (unclear how this fits into the context of flood-damage
caused by the Spercheios).
23
Carales: J. Durliat, ‘Taxes sur l’entrée des merchandises dans la cité de
Carales-Cagliari à l’époque Byzantine (582–602)’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 36
(1982), 1–14; Anazarbus: G. Dagron and D. Feissel, Inscriptions de Cilicie
(Paris, 1987), 170–85, (no.108).