Ebook: Rationes Centesimarum: Sales of Public Land in Lykourgan Athens

The Rationes Centesimarum, inscribed accounts of a 1 percent tax paid on sales of land by Attic corporate groups (demes, phratries etc.) to individual Athenian citizens in the 4th century B.C., are an important source for the social and economic history o f classical Athens. Although some of the fragments have been known for over a century, this book is the first comprehensive edition. In addition to a new fragment, published here for the first time, it contains revised texts of the 15 fragments already k nown, based on a fresh autopsy of the stones. This has resulted in many new readings and a new arrangement of the fragments into stelai. A translation in tabular form is followed by a textual and epigraphical commentary and full notes on the 150+ indivi duals and the 60+ corporate groups mentioned in the records, a number of them identified for the first time. Prosopographical analysis enables likely dates for the sales to be established to within a few years. This forms the basis for a final discussion chapter, which identifies the inscriptions as records of a centrally organised land sale programme probably attributable to the leading Athenian financial administrator, Lykourgos.