A public 'house' but closed: 'Fiscal participation' and economic decision -making on the Oxyrhynchite estate of the Flavii Apiones

"A Public 'House' but Closed: 'Fiscal Participation' and Economic Decision Making on the Oxyrhynchite Estate of the Flavii Apiones" is based upon the extensive papyrological documentation concerning the Middle Egyptian holdings of an aristocratic family that moved in the stratosphere of late antique society. It seeks both to draw late Roman Egypt further into the vital discourse concerning the nature of premodern economies and to repudiate (via, "private" economy analysis) a "feudal" modeling of the province. Work toward the former objective is specifically a response to recent arguments, that the Apion estate was an exemplar of late antique agricultural capitalism; it also replies to a much older consensus that holds that the Apiones derived the majority of their wealth from massive vineyards in their Oxyrhynchite homeland. The argument for capitalism is largely wishful thinking; research has revealed an exceptionally conservative enterprise, one in which a safe and steady income was valued above all else, and the risks of the market were to be shouldered by others. Such a characterization of the Apiones' economic objectives accords well with a "substantivist" (or "primitivist") reading of the ancient economy, and this should not cause wonder: The literary sources that are at the foundation of the primitivist paradigm are products of the same social stratum that the Apiones occupied. As for the Apion vineyards, though significant, they were nowhere near as large as has been thought. One must therefore posit a tremendous amount of holdings outside of the Oxyrhynchite just to bring the family up to the income level of an average senator from the West. This discovery is significant because the Apiones are usually cited as the exception par excellence to the traditional view that members of the Roman senate were much better off than their counterparts in Constantinople. More importantly, it provides the "key" for the dissertation's second objective; that is, it enables a quantitative demonstration that the Apiones were willing participants in the imperial administration, not "feudal magnates" (with private armies and "proto-serfs") who were locked in a power struggle with the State for control of the provinces.