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A Letter of Hadrian in Beroea1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

Extract

Although Plassart, when publishing for the first time the inscription referred to as Text A in this article, mentioned that he had seen it ‘assez rapidement’ and that it ‘mériterait révision’, Crönert did not realise in SEG ii, 398, that he was restoring a text which had not been published in its entirety. I was able, during a visit to Beroea in the autumn of 1936 in the company of Mr. C. F. Edson of Harvard University, to examine the inscription carefully and, in addition to correcting some inaccuracies in Plassart's copy, removed, with the permission of the Δεσπότης of Beroea, a wooden bench which covered a portion of the inscription, and thus was able to read all the extant text. The accompanying photograph (fig. 5) shows clearly the part of the text hitherto unread.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © J. M. R. Cormack 1940. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

2 Plassart, , BCH xlvii, 1923, 183–5Google Scholar; SEG ii, 398; cf. Rostovtzeff, , The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, Oxford, 1926, 586Google Scholar, n. 3, where it is stated that ‘it is probable that in the recently published fragment of a letter of Hadrian to the city of Beroea granting remission of some arrears to the συνέδριον of the Macedonian κοινόν, the arrears alluded to were for the construction of roads and the feeding of the troops’. Cf. also Larsen, , Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (ed. Frank, Tenney) iv, 454Google Scholar, and Homo, , Histoire romaine (ed. Glotz, ) iii, 518, n. 134Google Scholar.

3 Delacoulonche, , ‘Mémoire sur le berceau de la puissance macédonienne des bords de l'Haliacmon et ceux de l'Axius’ in Archives des missions scientifiques et littéraires viii, 1859, 220–1, and 263Google Scholar, no. 73. The editor of SEG ii, 398, has unfortunately followed Plassart in giving false references to Delacoulonche's article. Between the two copies of the inscription given by Delacoulonche there are few discrepancies, though a diamond-shaped omicron in one is liable to become circular shaped in the other and vice versa. The text given above is from an exact tracing of the copy given on p. 263. Demitsas, , ἡ Μακεδονία, Athens, 1896, 72, no. 63Google Scholar, reproduces the Delacoulonche text but reads HY for HN in l. 10.

4 Schroetter, Wörterbuch der Münzkunde, s.v. ‘assarion,’ ‘drachme,’ ‘sestertius,’ etc. Beroea minted only occasional festival coins at this time, bronze ones in imitation of the sestertius, dupondius and as.