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The View from the Customs House 219
Rhetoric, where imports and exports hold their own alongside
other revenue, war and peace, defence, and legislation. 52
Within the world so delineated, it may be easier to make sense
of the problem of ancient states’ politique douanière. On the one
hand, ancient communities saw the intricate play of taxes on
mobility as part of oikonomia, within which they were very alert
to the opportunities and the pitfalls, just as they were in other
sections of the struggle for survival in a risky environment. On
the other, their priorities were wholly different from those of
modern states. The epigraphic and papyrus evidence for revenue
extraction from maritime redistribution exhibits what
Julie Vélissaropoulos called ‘l’indifférence envers le commerce
en tant que tel’. 53 The most important proposition is simple and
unexpected: it is indeed a central element of the tax morphology
that we are looking at that exports were taxed too. 54 Taxing
what you need to survive and what you produce in exchange for
it, even at such a low rate, has rightly been seen as essentially
oppressive, especially in a world in which, in Guiraud’s words,
‘states produced little of what they needed and consumed little
of what they produced’; but it is characteristically Mediterranean
in its tendency to regard all movement of goods and people
as an undifferentiated, generalized phenomenon. 55
The Caunus law spectacularly confirms this point. This was a
regulation of a more-or-less independent city. Although it
seems, even in post-Ancient Economy days, counterintuitive,
the Caunians were happy enough about taxing their own citizens,
until the benefaction which was the subject of the particular
inscription; and they had no compunction at all about
taxing their own exports. 56 Neither is there any trace of awareness
that a city like Caunus, which does not have an unusually
large, varied, or fertile territory, is bound to depend for its
52
Aristotle, Rhet. 1. 4. 7. cf. 11.
53
J.Vélissaropoulos, Les nauclères grecs: Recherches sur les institutions maritimes
en Grèce et dans l’Orient hellénisé (Geneva, 1980), 231.
54
See for instance Eupolis, Autolycus, the ellimenion which you have to pay
before you go. Cahen, ‘Douanes’, emphasizes this in a medieval context.
55
Andreades, History, 141. P. Guiraud, La main-d’oeuvre industrielle dans
l’ancienne Grèce (Paris, 1900), 72.
56
A payment of 60,000 denarii yielding 7,200 in interest was sufficient for
the relief commemorated.