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The View from the Customs House 209
tunistic practice, which was by its nature flexible and variable,
and the particularities of the levies recorded in the Elephantine
palimpsest suggest that a Mediterranean captain or merchant
of the fifth century bc needed to be alert to the same bewildering
range of port-specific information that is so eloquently
witnessed by the Italian merchant pratiche of the later Middle
Ages. 24 While there were certain places, such as Rhodes and
its peraia, or the approaches to the Hellespont, or the Isthmus
of Corinth, which were specially well suited to the levying
of revenues of this kind, and where large sums might be taken,
it is important to repeat that such places were not rare, and
that every community with access to the sea participated, as
the Aeolic Kymaians so laughably failed to, in this activity. 25
Moreover, it is not appropriate to use the language of determinism
about the development of communities in zones
favoured in the geography of connectivity. The place did
not somehow spontaneously generate the entrepôt: Bacchiad
Corinth, post-synoecism Rhodes, Delos after 166 bc were in
suitable places, but their response to the advantages was the
result of the political choices of elites, inside or outside the
community.
The document that sheds most light, however, on how harbour
taxation worked in Antiquity is a Roman-period inscription
published in 1954, from Caunus in south-western Anatolia,
on the borders of Lycia and Caria, in the peraia of Rhodes,
and indeed, at a vital period in its history, a major mainland
24 C. Ciano, La Pratica di mercatura datiniana (secolo XIV) (Milan, 1964),
is an excellent example. But note the growing consensus that these documents
are not intended to be directly practical, for all their technicality: rather they
evoke a world of expertise and broad information, the education of a merchant
on the edge of the Renaissance. Thus B. Dini, Una pratica di mercatura in
formazione (1394–1395) (Florence, 1980), publishing the treatise of Ambrogio
de’ Rocchi (c.1374–96). The Vélissaropoulos principle that differential taxation
of different commodities begins only in the Hellenistic period is excessively
rigid.
25 Contra M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1974), 130, on Rhodes (‘the outstanding example of a port-of-call’): ‘a significant
group [of cities] which by their location were clearing-houses and transfer-points,
deriving substantial income from tolls, harbour-dues and dockcharges’.
Oropos in Xenon, ap. [Dicaearchus] 8 (Geographi Graeci Minores
I.101): pantes telonai, pantes eisin harpages.