Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

egypt 631
concern the Apions and their tenants. Besides showing Apion coloni going
up to the city for machinery parts, they frequently show them being
sworn for in documents that have come to be called sureties or guarantees
(cautionnements, Bürgschaft-urkunden). 90 In some of these the formulary
is, like that for agricultural machinery receipts, surprisingly elaborate and
equally long-lived. 91 In a leading example of the genre, 92 an Oxyrhynchus
lead-worker named Aurelius Pamouthius goes bail for a colonus named
Aurelius Abraham from the Apion estate (ktêma) of Great Tarouthinas in
the Oxyrhynchite nome. Pamouthius guarantees that Abraham will
remain on his assigned estate together with his ‘family and wife and
animals and furniture’. If Abraham’s presence is required by his landlords
(the heirs of Apion II), Pamouthius will ensure Abraham’s production in
the same public place where he received him, ‘the jail of the said glorious
house’.
The mention of the jail of the glorious house suggests that the Apiones
exercised a coercive authority that impinged on the official coercive authority
of the government. This, in fact, was reinforced by their employment
of soldiers known as ‘doughboys’ or ‘biscuit eaters’, bucellarii. 93 These in
Apion estate accounts appear often to be of foreign, sometimes Gothic,
origin; they were paid in kind (in grain, meat, wine and oil) and in cash, and
served the glorious house as a mercenary police force.
The presence of an estate jail and the employment of bucellarii are at first
glance shocking because these were two practices, following upon that of
patronage, that late imperial legislation tried vainly to check – yet the
Apiones were closely connected to the imperial court. 94 And these two
practices, added to the existence of great estates farmed by coloni adscripticii
(‘serfs’), are most responsible for the impression that the Apion household,
that Oxyrhynchus with its other great landlords, that late antique Egypt as
a whole was ‘feudal’ in the medieval sense of the term, and that the great
houses of Egypt were resistant to and in conflict with the imperial government.
95 Nowadays, it is argued that the Apion and other great houses of
Egypt were not working in conflict with the imperial government, but
rather with its (eventual) approval and sanction. It is not only that bucellarii
may have been at least semi-official in character, 96 privately mustered with
government approval, but that if private interests in Egypt had not (for
example) assumed the upkeep and repair of the irrigation works, the
economy would have collapsed and the imperial capital itself would have
90 Summary discussion with a list of parallel documents in Fikhman (1981).
91 Latest example, P.Oxy. lviii 3959 (Persian period, 620).
92 P.Oxy. i135(579), with several reprintings: WChr. 384, Meyer, JJP 51, Sel.Pap. i26, FIRA iii 13.
93 Hardy (1931) esp. 60–71, cf. Robinson (1968); Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops 43–7; Schmitt
(1994). 94 Keenan (1975) esp. 243–4 and n. 14.
95 Early and most influential presentation of the ‘feudal model’: Bell (1917). See Keenan (1993).
96 Gascou (1985). Cf. on the bucellarii Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops 43–7.
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