How to Evade Taxes in Ancient Rome: A 1,900-Year-Old Papyrus Reveals an Ancient Tax Evasion Scheme

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

Relat­ed con­tent:

To Save Civ­i­liza­tion, the Rich Need to Pay Their Tax­es: His­to­ri­an Rut­ger Breg­man Speaks Truth to Pow­er at Davos and to Fox’s Tuck­er Carl­son

Read David Fos­ter Wallace’s Notes From a Tax Account­ing Class, Tak­en to Help Him Write The Pale King

Don­ald Duck Wants You to Pay Your Tax­es (1943)

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.