A new edition of an unpublished Italian papyrus would always be newsworthy, but particularly so in the case of a document laid out in an unusual format, with little apparent connection to Ravenna (unlike all other Italian papyri), and which boasts an unconventional first attestation. The new Vicenza papyrus meets all these criteria and so, while it is unusual for a papyrus bearing only 158 legible words to generate almost 200 pages of commentary, P.Vic.’s unicorn features mean it merits the fulsome treatment it receives.
The papyrus, produced in Italy in an assured sixth-century hand, takes the form of two lists of documents, the first a series of individual summaries numbered from vii to xxv, the second a vague description of four further bundles of documents. It is clearly a fragment of a larger text: at least the first six items are lost, perhaps a result of the papyrus breaking off along the top edge after a kollesis, the join where two sheets were pasted together. Its journey to Vicenza is mysterious. The text points to a Sicilian origin, but it is first attested in an 1862 inventory of Vicenza’s Museo Civico di Palazza Chiericati, where it could be found in Room IV, exhibited next to some Tahitian fabrics. There, unread, it remained until 2001, when it was transferred to the G. Vitelli Institute in Florence for restoration and analysis.
Now, after a multi-decade collaboration, its three authors present the editio princeps in an incisive open-access volume. Each contributes two or three chapters, reflecting specific expertise, but the text has been shaped into a cohesive whole. Antonella Ghignoli translates the document, writes the general commentary and is responsible for the substantial interpretative chapter which attempts to establish the fragment’s contexts. Teresa De Robertis handles the palaeographic aspects, providing the textual edition, the palaeographic commentary and an analysis of the script, while the introduction and a chapter on abbreviations belong to Stefano Zamponi.
De Robertis and Zamponi’s contributions situate the papyrus within an office setting. The hand is professional, using the new cursive style favoured in sixth-century Ravenna. The textual commentary draws out meaningful parallels to other late antique documentary corpora, particularly the Albertini tablets and the Ravenna papyri. The papyrus’ document summaries reveal a world of soldiers, curials, widows and slaves. Their interactions are largely familiar: slaves are sold and manumitted, lands divided, reconciliations agreed. Egenanda, a respectable woman (honesta femina) with a previously unattested Germanic name, weaves her way through the listed dossier, appearing in three contestationes (disputes? complaints by petition?) against a vice-commander Laurentius. Women emerge as important property holders, just as they do in the Albertini Tablets and in contemporary Greek papyri.
But there are surprises, too. In one document, the curials of Palermo sell a house to their legal adviser, a Jewish man. He is our first Jew attested in the direct Latin documentary tradition, and his association with a municipal curia comes despite legal restrictions laid down in the Theodosian Code and reimposed by Justinian. A debt acknowledgement, described as a greca cautio, attests to the continuing production of Greek and bilingual documents in primarily Latin contexts. Document xxv contains an ambiguous agreement between Luppo (a Celtic name) and Negelio to ‘become brothers’: the editors think this might refer to the ἀδελφοποίησις ceremonies better known from the Greek East at this time, but more prosaic options are available.
Pressing contextual questions raised by the papyrus — the contexts of its creation, the organisational principle behind its enumeration of documents, the expectations of its readers — are taken on in Ghignoli’s chapter, ‘Definire un frammento’ (85–150), which forms the analytical backbone of the project. Reliant on such sparse, deracinated text, interpretation is necessarily speculative and open-ended. The prosopographical evidence, gesturing to a diverse society of Greeks, Italians, Goths, Jews and Celts, only gets us so far: little can be established by onomastics alone, and repeated names may not point to the same individuals. Overall the analysis is searching, even if one could wish for more discussion of military contexts (military titles are strewn throughout, and the war-zones of sixth-century Sicily might help explain the document’s origins), or the economic dimensions (three prices ranging from six to thirty solidi are listed, suggesting a Sicilian clientele richer than those documented in the Albertini tablets and poorer than those in the Ravenna papyri).
The text’s brevity raises many interpretative issues. Others come from the scribe’s irregular and idiosyncratic style in generating document descriptions. Some, like the records of slave sales, suggest the scribe has copied dorsal notes attached to the documents. Others read like summaries based on a quick skim through the originals. Important names, dates, prices and transaction details are omitted. Ghignoli concludes, compellingly, that the extant papyrus was originally part of a cover letter which accompanied a sack of documents between offices in Sicily, providing an inventory of documents and a (lost) explanation of what to do with them. A stray reference to a dominus noster Basilius raises several possibilities about the scribe’s identity and relationship with the recipient. Ghignoli leans towards identifying the author as an agent of a formerly unknown praetor Siciliae, rather than positioning the dominus as an episcopal or purely military figure.
Laconic and enigmatic as the papyrus is, the editors wring maximal meaning from its content and gaps alike. Inevitably and excitingly, many questions remain. Without doubt, this meticulous edition establishes P.Vic. as a significant addition to our understanding of late antique documentary cultures and to the people and institutions which produced them.
