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Fractional Arithmetic in the Tabula Alimentaria of Veleia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2019

Charles Stewart
Charles Stewart*
Affiliation:
University of Reading
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

The Tabula Alimentaria of Veleia records the details of two second-century a.d. imperial alimentary schemes at the northern Italian town of Veleia, providing a rare insight into the workings of these schemes. Imperial loans are made to local landowners in exchange for pledges of specified property. Interest paid by landowners is used to fund cash subsidies for the upbringing of selected local children. In the early twentieth century, the French scholar Félix de Pachtere came close to demonstrating a consistent arithmetical relationship between a landowner's declared property value and the loan received. However, anomalies remained. This article proposes a revised formula which establishes a precise and consistent linkage between loan amounts and property declarations. Based on this arithmetical dataset, the paper proposes some hypotheses about how these fractional computations might have been performed in second-century Rome.

Keywords

alimentade PachtereRoman arithmeticRoman fractionsVeleia
Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 109 , November 2019 , pp. 89 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the Editor of JRS and its anonymous readers, whose comments greatly improved the quality and clarity of this paper.

References

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