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230 The View from the Customs House
are three, also in order of importance, from individuals in the
territory, from trade and diagogai, and from enkuklia.
We have already suggested that these fiscal polis-institutions
are in fact in a broader sense Mediterranean ones, and not to be
regarded as distinctive to Hellenism, though it remains an
intriguing thought that the Greeks should base an economic
theory of the difference between free cities and tribute-exacting
despotisms in part on a fiscal criterion deriving from the environment.
It may further be supposed that, beyond the Mediterranean,
taxing mobility takes rather different forms which are to
be predicated of many systems other than the Achaemenid one
which the Greeks knew best. In fact, there is some evidence that
the Persian state adapted its exactions to the Mediterranean
world. The arrangements for taxing redistribution at the Canopic
mouth of the Nile seem to owe more to the Egyptian, Saïte,
practice, than they do to Achaemenid precedent. 82 When faced
with ruling coastlands, the Persian empire adapted to the distinctive
opportunities offered by the parathalassia. 83 The extension
under the Roman Republic and empire of a regime of
portoria to non-Mediterranean zones could be seen as the imitation
of the continental imperial behaviour of earlier powers
combined with the development of institutions built out of
local networks of redistribution taxation by kingdoms such as
Pergamon. 84
république romaine (Bonn, 1976), 8–11. For the possibility that the thought
involved derives ultimately from Ephoros, L. Cracco Ruggini, ‘Eforo nello
Pseudo-Aristotele, Oec. II’, Athenaeum 53 (1966), 199–236. See also O. Murray,
‘Ho archaios dasmos’, Historia 15 (1966), 142–56.
82 Briant and Descat, ‘Un registre’; nothing resembling customs dues is to
be found in the survey of the west-Asian antecedents of Achaemenid practice
by C. Zaccagnini, ‘Prehistory of the Achaemenid tributary system’, in Le
Tribut dans l’Empire Perse (Paris, 1989), 193–215. Cf. also G. Posener, Les
Douanes de la Méditerranée dans l’Egypte Saïte (Paris, 1947).
83 See H. T. Wallinga, ‘Persian Tribute and Delian Tribute’, in Le Tribut
dans l’Empire Perse (Paris, 1989), 173–81, for the portfolios of different exactions
in Persian coastlands and in the Athenian empire.
84 J. De Laet, Portorium: Etude sur l’organisation douanière chez les romains,
surtout à l’époque du haut-empire (Bruges, 1949), is still basic; the link with
Hellenistic practice is shown by the new Ephesus regulation of the portoria of
Asia: H. Engelmann and D. Knibbe, ‘Das Zollgesetz der Provinz Asia: Eine
neue Inschrift aus Ephesos’, Epigraphica Anatolica 14 (1989), 1–206 ( ¼ SEG
39, 1180); for imperial portoria see further France, Quadragesima, 205–27.