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210 The View from the Customs House
dependency of the Rhodian state. 26 Caunus was a middling
port, in a significant location for maritime communications.
In Mediterranean terms, it was not very singular. From the
original publication on, it has been clear that one of the most
important aspects of the document is that it illustrates the
absolute normality, even under the universal dominion of
Rome, of local taxation by communities of the movement
of goods. The document is a benefaction, in which the burden
of the payment of the dues for a certain period is taken on by a
local euergete. In this golden age of civic benefaction, indeed,
the customs house, sometimes in monumental form, took its
place in the prestige architecture of the community. 27
If this topic is at last beginning to attract scholarly attention,
however, that may be the result of the discovery of one of the
most novel pieces of evidence for ancient economic history to be
published for many years, the Elephantine palimpsest. Overwritten
with a text of Aramaic wisdom literature of the end of
the fifth century bc, a papyrus from Elephantine in Upper
Egypt preserves the complete record of the duties paid on the
cargoes and crew of all the ships putting in to a harbour of
the Egyptian delta, in a year which has a good chance of being
26 Pol. 30. 31. 6, 197–188 bc. Caunus and Stratonicea, 120 talents p.a. for
Rhodian state. G. E. Bean, ‘Notes and Inscriptions from Caunus’, Journal
of Hellenic Studies 74 (1954), 10–35; H. W. Pleket, ‘Notes on a Customslaw
from Caunus’, Mnemosyne 11 (1958), 128–35; L. Robert, ‘Limenes’,
Hellenica XI-XII (Paris 1960), 264–6. Early discussions were not able to
resolve the many problems of this text, which has therefore had relatively
little attention. More recently considerable progress has been made: G. Purpura,
‘Il regolamento doganale di Cauno e la lex Rhodia in D. 14. 2. 9’, Annali
del Seminario Giuridico della Università di Palermo 38 (1985), 273–331. See
also J. France, ‘Les Revenus douaniers des communautés municipales dans le
monde romain (république et haut-Empire)’, in Il capitolo delle entrate nelle
finanze municipali in occidente ed in oriente: Actes de la X e rencontre francoitalienne
sur l’épigraphie du monde romain, Rome, 27–29 mai 1996 (Rome,
1999), 95–114.
27 ILS 8858 ¼ OGIS 525, two slave agents of a second-century contractor
for the Asian portorium (also an imperial procurator) at Halicarnassus ‘rebuilt
the customs house and its portico from the foundations and gilded the statue
of Aphrodite’, cf. ILS 1654 (Bibba in Africa, also to Venus (Augusta), in this
case a fiscal accounts office rather than customs house in the strict sense,
Ephemeris Epigraphica 5. 112); OGIS 496: the fishing-due teloneion at Ephesus
and its shrine of Isis.