This content originally appeared on Open Culture and was authored by Colin Marshall
It was surely not a coincidence that the New York Times published its story on the trial of a certain Gadalias and Saulos this past Monday, April 14th. The defendants, as their names suggest, did not live in modernity: the papyrus documenting their legal troubles dates to the reign of Hadrian, around 130 AD. These men were charged, writes the Times’ Franz Lidz, with “the falsification of documents and the illicit sale and manumission, or freeing, of slaves — all to avoid paying duties in the far-flung Roman provinces of Judea and Arabia, a region roughly corresponding to present-day Israel and Jordan.”
In other words, Gadalias and Saulos were accused of tax evasion, a subject always on the mind of Americans under the shadow of their tax-return due date, April 15th. While the prospect of an IRS audit keeps more than a few of them awake at night, ancient Roman law went, predictably, quite a bit harsher.
“Penalties ranged from heavy fines and permanent exile to hard labor in the salt mines and, in the worst case, damnatio ad bestias, a public execution in which the condemned were devoured by wild animals,” writes Lidz. Such a fate presumably wouldn’t have been out of the question for those convicted of a crime of these proportions.
The long-misclassified document of this case was only properly deciphered, and even understood to have been written in ancient Greek, after its rediscovery in 2014. “A team of scholars was assembled to conduct a detailed physical examination and cross-reference names and locations with other historical sources,” which resulted in this paper published this past January. For any scholar of Roman law, such an opportunity to get into the minds of both that civilization’s judges and its criminals could hardly be passed up. Even out on the edge of the empire, prosecutors turn out to have employed “deft rhetorical strategies worthy of Cicero and Quintilian and displayed an excellent command of Roman legal terms and concepts in Greek.” This will no doubt get today’s law students speculating: specifically, about the existence of an ancient ChatGPT.
via NYTimes
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
This content originally appeared on Open Culture and was authored by Colin Marshall
Colin Marshall | Sciencx (2025-04-17T09:00:57+00:00) How to Evade Taxes in Ancient Rome: A 1,900-Year-Old Papyrus Reveals an Ancient Tax Evasion Scheme. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/04/17/how-to-evade-taxes-in-ancient-rome-a-1900-year-old-papyrus-reveals-an-ancient-tax-evasion-scheme/
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