L'Africa romana - UnissResearch - Università degli Studi di Sassari

116 Fadel Ali Mohamed - Joyce Reynolds
of which we shall only discuss here one which we believe to be of Julio­
Claudian date - a dedication in Latin to Demeter in her Italian guise
as Ceres, with the cult-title Augusta associating her with the Roman imperial
family. The dedicator, a Roman citizen and indubitably from Ita­
Iy, .was promagister or local manager of a company of publicani colIecting
Roman taxes which are described as publicum Cyrenense3. It is the
first direct evidence for the system of Roman tax-collection in Cyrenaica,
showing that it was contracted out to a private company, and, apparently,
that alI tax collection, including that of the land tax was let to
a single company. Cyrenaica must be added to the limited 'number of
provinces in which publicani colIected the Iand tax in the earIy empire
(as well, presUmably, as under the late Republic). Augustus did not, apparently,
regard the citi es of Cyrenaica as capable of undertaking the
work; and it would seem that the yield of the Roman taxes there was
thought insufficient to attract more than one company of collectors at
a time; the relatively small size of Cyrenaica's cultivable area may have
been as important a factor here as a depression due to its own internaI
problems and the effects of the Roman civiI wars. Since promagistri of
tax collecting companies have left remarkably few monuments anywhere
to record their activities, the use of the title was perhaps not thought
particularly honorific and it may appear here because the dedicator was
acting for his company rather than for himself. In any case his interest
in Demeter/Ceres is confirmation of the importance of cereal production
in the Cyrenaican economy and of that production in the calcuIations
of Roman administrators.
3. Very useful for the variety of its information is an ephebic inscription
set up, we suppose, in the gymnasium near Cyrene's agora (although
found at a little distance from it) in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. It provides
a firm location in AD c.172 for the governorship of Numisius Marcellinus
which has been uncertainly dated hithert0 4 ; since his was a very
active period it is particularly helpful to be sure where to pIace alI the
inscriptions which contain his name. But its main interest is for the affairs
of the city. It refers to a reform of the ephebic organisation due
to Marcellinus, and lists both the officers of the gymnasium and the ephebes
in training at the time. The number of ephebes is not very much low-
• 3 Reynolds records gratefully advice on promagistri given by Professor Claude
Nlcolet.
• 4 B. E. THOMASSON, Laterculi Praesidum, voI. I, Goteborg, 1984, col. 366, no. 47
notmg the several options.
Some New Inscriptions Irom Cyrenaica 117
er than in comparable lists of the reign of Augustus; so unless more ephebic
year groups are included here than in those it looks as if Hadrian's
introduction of soldier-colonists to Cyrenaica after the Jewish Revolt of
AD 115 had been sufficient by c.172 to compensate reasonabIy well for
the casualties inflicted in it s . The nomenclature shows the survival of some
of the families prominent in Cyrene in the first century AD, but also
some new ones, many, in all likelihood, those of Hadrianic colonists.
The character of Marcellinus' reform must be conjectural; but it is noticeable
that in the new text certain traditionally Cyrenaean titles for ephebic
officiaIs have been replaced by terms standard in the Greek world and
in the language used most of the characteristically Cyrenaican dialect
forms by those of the koine. It wouId be a reasonabIe supposition that
these features, which cannot have interested the new colonists, were abo­
Iished by Marcellinus.
4. The stele stood on a base which was re-used to hoId it, and carri es
graffiti scratched on it by ephebes of much earlier times. Graffiti of this
type are often very difficult to read and about some of these we would
neither of us wish to be dogmatic at present; but we think that one of
the graffiti-writers (surely an ephebe), who cut his name in AD 24/5,
was probably named Nasamon son oJ Aia/as. If that is right both ephebe
and father have non-Greek, Libyan names 6 , and the ephebe's is derived
from the name of the tribe of the Nasamones (no doubt heIped by
a belief that the tribal name was derived from that of its founder), Iocated
mainly in the Syrtica 7 • Derivation of a Cyrenaican personal name
from a Libyan tribal name is paralleled by Bakal, in use in Cyrene itself
and more widely in the area, which derived from the name of the tribe
of Bakales.
A significant feature of our collection of new inscriptions is, in fact,
the addition that they make to the evidence for use of Libyan names in
Greek and Roman Cyrenaica. It is of course already well-understood that
at quite an earIy date a certain number of Cyrenaican Greeks, including
men of high status, bore names of Libyan origin like Aladdeir, Ba-
S Cf. the argument of J. REYNOLOS in The Jewish Revolt oj AD 115 in Cyrenaica,
«Proceedings of the Cambridge PhiIological Society», 5, 1958-9, at p. 27.
6 On Libyan names we are heavi1y indebted to O. MASSON'S artic1e, Grecs et Libyens
en Cyrénafque, d'après les témoignages de l'Épigraphie, «Ant. AfL», lO, 1976, pp. 29-42.
7 See J. DESANGES, Catalogue des Tribus Ajricaines, Dakar, 1962, pp. 147-9 .
8 DESANGES, cito n. 7, pp. 149-50.