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Two ‘Topoi’ in the Agricola

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2011

J. C. Mann
J. C. Mann
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Extract

One of the difficulties facing the archaeologist when trying to use the evidence of ancient writers is to know when that writer (historian or otherwise) is relating fact, and when he is merely involved with ‘topoi’–the stock literary descriptions or situations inseparable from history as rhetoric. This note is concerned with two ‘topoi’ in the Agricola.

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Type
Articles
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Britannia , Volume 16 , November 1985, pp. 21 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © J. C. Mann 1985. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 CIL viii 4508 suggests that the army might be involved in tax collection in military areas.

2 2 Verr. iii, 188–92. In contradistinction to the Principate, the Verrines show that in the late Republic Rome could and did operate a system of taxation in kind but only where she had inherited it, in the case of Sicily from the kingdom of Syracuse. There is no evidence that any of these inherited systems of taxation in kind survived into the Principate.

3 In 2 Verr. iii, 174, 2 sesterces the modius is shown to be a low price; in 191–2, 3 sesterces is a high price.

4 2 Verr. iii, 163.

5 2 Verr. iii, 188.

6 2 Verr. iii, 189–92.

7 We must also not be so naive as to think that Frontinus (cos. II a.d. 98, cos. III ord. a.d. 100), when he read chapter 19 of the Agricola (published in a.d. 98), will have exploded with rage at what this young upstart of a consularis had to say about his administration in Britain. He, like other contemporary readers of the Agricola, will have been able to recognize a stock piece of rhetoric when he saw it.

8 JRS xiv (1924), 180 = AE 1925, 126 shows that in Pisidia, shortly before a.d. 94Google Scholar, the normal price was 2–2¼ sesterces the modius (but in the current famine had risen to 4 sesterces). This figure probably held throughout the first and second centuries a.d. (cf. Aegyptus xiii, (1933), 95 ff.) but a figure of 4 sesterces in time of famine is also given by CIL XI 6117, from Forum Sempronii, of second-century date.Google Scholar

9 Ogilvie, R. M. and Richmond, I. A., Cornelii Taciti de vita Agricolae (1967), 238.Google Scholar

10 Allowing for the absence of vexillations on the Rhine, ILS 9200, but see now Kennedy, D. L., Britannia xiv (1983), 183–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 This is based on the assumption of a ‘normal’ legionary vexillation of two cohorts (ILS 4195), or about 1,000 men (ILS 2726).

12 Perhaps we should also abandon the notion that Inchtuthil was built for XX VV. Where did this come from?