Direct Taxation

Of direct taxes, the two most important will have been those that struck at the productive capacity of the land.Footnote ¹⁰ These were of two kinds: taxes levied on whole communities, reckoned in silver money, and taxes on certain categories of land, reckoned as a percentage of output or property value. For the first, we have only a single notice, the letter of the future Attalos II to the Pisidian city of Amlada, ca. 160 (RC 54; D12). There, Attalos first speaks of an annual tax payment of 2 talents (τῶν δύο ταλάντων ἃ τελεῖτε κατ’ ἐνιαυτόν) (line 7). He later seems to characterize the same payment as φόρος καὶ τέλεσμα (lines 13–14). That collocation, phoros kai telesma, calls to mind the similarly enigmatic phrasing of the first decree of Teos for Antiochos III and Laodike III, probably of 203, which praises the king for designating the city as aphorologos and releasing the citizens from the syntaxeis of Attalos I (SEG XLI 1003). While the citizens speak of ὧν ἐφέρομεν συντάξεων (“those syntaxeis we used to pay”; line 19), Antiochos speaks of ὧν συνετάξαμεν φόρων (“those phoroi we have assessed”; lines 33–34). The task of distinguishing phoros from other levies called syntaxis, telos, telesma, and so on, has proven exceedingly difficult, especially in light of a comment of Polybius on the Treaty of Apameia:

For the ancients, we know, each term carried different connotations. Classical Athens provides a case in point. During a second go-round of empire, known as the Second Athenian League, Athens’ leaders substituted the term syntaxis in deliberate contradistinction to the earlier Delian League’s phoros.Footnote ¹¹ Put simply, contribution sounds better than tribute. The scholarly debate is over just how fungible the fiscal lexicon was in practice. Most scholars have given up on trying to recover a distinctive institutional reality behind each term.Footnote ¹² Yet the connotations are elusive, too. The payment of phoros was clearly a mark of subjection, but as Polybius suggests, political autonomia was not incompatible with this way of taxing – or talking about taxation. Still, it may be possible to draw a few concrete conclusions about the nature of the phoros in the Amlada letter. First, in terms of incidence, this tax falls on the community as a whole. Ultimate responsibility for payment may fall on elites like Oprasates, an ambassador of the Amladeis who happened to enjoy the Attalids’ favor (line 12).Footnote ¹³ However, the phoros of the Amlada letter is exacted from the community, and it also seems to have been assessed on that basis. The polis as collective forms the basic taxable unit. Second, in terms of punctuality, far more than any of these other terms, phoros implies regularity and indeed perpetuity, hence κατ’ ἐνιαυτόν (annual) payment.Footnote ¹⁴ The annual payment of 2 talents, while not explicitly named phoros in Attalos’ paraphrase of the Amladeis’ request, is likely just that. What is less clear is whether the remission of a half-talent ἀπὸ τοῦ φόρου κα[ὶ] τε[λέ]σ[ματ]ος (“from the phoros and telesma”) will be subtracted in its entirety from the phoros sum.Footnote ¹⁵ Unless the pairing is simply hendiadys, the introduction of the term telesma raises the specter of a broad range of indirect taxes and irregular contributions. Attalos may have had something very specific in mind by telesma: corvée labor, quartering, or grain. Yet the promise to subtract the 2 talents ἀπὸ τοῦ φόρου κα[ὶ] τε[λέ]σ[ματ]ος introduces an element of ambiguity. It will have allowed the Amladeis room to maneuver. They may have been able to shift the burden, or at least spread the benefit of the half-talent remission around their local economy.

That direct taxation of the polis invariably took the form of a collective obligation in cash, on the model of Amlada, has come in for debate in light of the puzzling final lines of the second letter of Eumenes II to Toriaion (D8 lines 43–47). Eumenes, we recall, had set in place an earmarking arrangement, which “for the present” routes revenue from the agoranomia into an oil fund for the gymnasium. The arrangement is envisioned as temporary: ἕως ἂ̣ν̣|ἐπισκεψ̣άμενος Ἡρ̣ωίδης ὁ ἡμιόλιος ἀποτάξη̣ ἑτέρα̣ν,|ἐάν τε ἀπό τινος̣ κτή̣ματος ἢ χώρας, ἐά̣ν τ’ ἀφ’ ἑτέρου ε̣[ὐ]|δοκιμάζ̣ηι, καὶ τῶν πάντων γενημάτων φέρειν [τὴν]|δεκάτην.Footnote ¹⁶ The central problem is the relationship of the last clause to what precedes, and as of yet, no one has clarified the grammar. φέρειν is clearly an imperatival infinitive, but the conjunction καὶ seems redundant. Only Schuler has argued for breaking the connection with the instructions for an official, the hemiolios Herodes. Provocatively, he proposes that the land in question, subject to a tax of one-tenth on all of its produce, has nothing to do with the land (chora or ktema) designated by Herodes to replace with its revenues the agoranomia as the source of the royal earmark.Footnote ¹⁷

On this interpretation, the one-tenth “of all agricultural products” is the general tax rate on all land in the new polis of Toriaion and its territory. Were Schuler right, this would imply that the individual landholders of Toriaion all paid a dekate directly to the royal fisc, though perhaps payments were pooled into a single sum. However, as Helmut Müller points out, the conjunction ἐάν ensures a relationship between the two clauses: whether Herodes chooses this ktema or that chora – whichever piece of property he ultimately chooses – it will pay the one-tenth on all of its produce. As we shall soon see, the convention of royal administration was rather to tax the different products of the land at different rates. Thus the mention of the dekate is a further articulation of the revenue demanded of the land that one day will be set aside for the oil fund. Eumenes either was prescribing an unusual tax rate for that land or was emphasizing that it remained subject to the dekate over and above its contribution to the gymnasium. Either way, this text does not prove the existence of an alternative to the method of direct taxation of the polis known from Amlada. The Toriaion letter does not support the claim that the Attalids took 10% of all agricultural production in a polis, even a nascent “subject” polis, since the land in question will have been royal property or a royal dependency – the details are left up to Herodes to decide – which lay outside, but necessarily in the vicinity of, Toriaion’s territory. Exactly as Antony boasted of the Romans in Appian’s account, the Attalids left to the communities themselves the right of taxing agriculture on their territories.Footnote ¹⁸

Direct taxes were also levied on plots of land (kleroi) assigned to military settlers (cleruchs). We have already had occasion to discuss the katoikia-type towns in which they lived. Under the Attalids, such towns came increasingly to resemble poleis, with respect to both territoriality and institutions. From the case of the katoikia of Apollonioucharax and its various dependent villages (D2), we can see that these communities raised revenues of their own.Footnote ¹⁹ Individual cleruchs seem to have paid the king tax on their allotments. The key text here is RC 51 (D13), a letter to cleruchs holding plots in the hinterland of Pergamon, dated by Welles to the second century. Each kleros included arable and vine-land. The produce of that land was taxed variously. A proportion of the harvest was demanded, a twentieth from the vines (eikoste), and a tenth (dekate) of the grain and “the other fruits” (τούτων εἰ̣[κοστήν, ἐκ δὲ το]ῦ τε σίτου καὶ τῶν λοιπῶν καρπῶν δεκά|την; lines 16–17). We also know that the settlers at Apollonioucharax paid an annual tithe of 10%, the dekateia, from which they were all released (for one year?) by Attalos II (καὶ τῆς ἐφ᾽ ἔτους δεκ[α]|τείας παρεθήτωσαμ πάντες) (D2 Side A lines 22–23).Footnote ²⁰ In contrast to the citizen of a polis, the cleruch paid an individuated tax on the produce of the land. In the end, it was land that he had received from the king.

There is reason to suspect that the tax liability of a kleros was in fact greater than the annual tithes of 5, 10, or 12% reported in the sources, if we can extrapolate from the details of the valuation of the estate of Mnesimachos, from third-century Seleukid Sardis (I.Sardis 1). In an influential treatment of that inscription, Raymond Descat has argued that the gift-estate (dorea) allotted to Mnesimachos was subject to both an annual tithe of a notional 10% and a phoros reckoned as one-twelfth of the cash value of the estate.Footnote ²¹ Thonemann has modified Descat’s conclusions slightly, casting the phoros as one-twelfth of the cash value of the produce of the nonarable part of Mnesimachos’ estate.Footnote ²² It is of course conjectural whether the system of “mixed phoroi,” an Achaemenid inheritance, which Thonemann sees as standard for early Hellenistic gift-estates, can simply be assumed for late Attalid cleruchic land. Yet the language of lines 16–17 of D13, concerning land just outside Pergamon, suggests that the mixed-phoros regime was indeed retained under the Attalids.

On the one hand, we have tax rates for two specific crops, grapes and grain, corresponding to the two different forms of land granted, gê psilê and gê ampelon. On the other hand, we have one tax rate for “the other crops (τῶν λοιπῶν καρπῶν δεκά|την).” This “tenth” on the non-vine and nonarable parts of the allotments may not be a tithe at all, but a fixed sum of cash, the argyrikos phoros, paid annually in addition to one-tenth of the land’s grain and one-twentieth of the produce of its vines. On this account, each year, instead of delivering to the royal fisc one-tenth of his figs, fruits, and nuts, all the sundry perishables of his allotment, the cleruch makes a single cash payment. This is in essence an arbitrary figure, but it is understood as one-tenth of the cash value of those “other crops.” To carry one step further the analogy with Mnesimachos and also with the estate of Krateuas of Gambreion, if the cleruch alienates the land, a possibility that our text envisions (D13 lines 25–27), he transfers this bundle of fiscal liabilities too.Footnote ²³ Thus in doling out fertile plots to cleruchs, the Attalids chose a traditional – and administratively efficient – land tenure regime, not dissimilar to the one employed by their predecessors on their gift-estates. And like the owners of those earlier gift-estates, the cleruchs were tethered to the monetary system of their kingdom via the mixed-phoros regime. If, as we shall argue, the cistophori appeared simultaneously with the buildup of a belt of katoikia-type towns in the 160s, then these new communities, sited remotely at the heads of river valleys and the edge of the Anatolian steppe, were from the beginning linked to the kingdom’s urban centers, the cities which issued the coinage in which the settlers perforce paid an important part of their taxes.

Beyond its poleis and katoikia-type towns, Anatolia contained vast stretches of territory worked by populations bound by different relationships to the Attalid state. Some of these were organized on a regional basis, and identified themselves as a demos or an ethnos; others were organized as villages, either attached to gift-estates and sanctuaries or even, one now admits, independent.Footnote ²⁴ Presumably, all of this land might have been taxed, although we have next to no evidence from the period of Attalid control.Footnote ²⁵ It may have been that the different populations related to royal fiscal authority through different channels, depending on the status of the land they farmed. For example, in a dossier of the future Attalos II from 185 concerning the settlers (katoikoi) of Apollo Tarsenos in the upper Kaikos Valley, the cult’s high priest seems to play a significant role in securing a grant of tax privileges (RC 47; D14).Footnote ²⁶ Were such priests also collecting tax on sacred land and transmitting a portion to the crown?

This would make sense, given the implied dependence of the katoikoi of Apollo Tarsenos on the sanctuary and the close connection of local priests to Attalid officials tasked with sacred affairs. The fiscal system of the Attalids certainly preserved the power of the old priesthoods, but it also seems to have monitored the priests’ finances ever more closely. This is best observed north of Sardis in the sanctuary of Apollo Pleurenos, where two inscriptions reflect the Attalids’ interaction with a community of initiates (mystai), arrayed under the local priests. One local priest goes so far as to obtain permission to put up a stele inscribed with the initiates’ names, submitting his request to a royal official called archiereus (high priest) (SEG XLVI 1519). The post seems to have been taken over from the Seleukids, but the nature of the request signals an intensification of control. Another priest honors a local man, ὁ ἐπὶ τῶν ἱερῶν προσόδων (overseer of sacred revenues), which may suggest that the Attalids refined the Seleukid system, adding a layer to the hierarchy in order to increase access to sacred wealth (SEG XXXII 1237).Footnote ²⁷ Yet as Robert suggested, the source of that wealth is likely to have been the fecund Lake Koloe/Gygaia, not land.Footnote ²⁸ In sum, direct evidence for the taxation of the majority of cultivable land in the Attalid kingdom is unavailable.

We know that the Attalids levied a tax on persons, now commonly termed a poll tax or a head tax. This is what Ps.-Aristotle calls the epikephaleion or cheironaxion, while the epigraphy of Greek cities generally speaks of taxes on the body or person (soma), as in the expression ἀτέλεια τοῦ σώματος (immunity from personal tax).Footnote ²⁹ Our only direct indication of an Attalid poll tax is the letter of Eumenes II of 181 concerning the fiscal status of the inhabitants of a village called the Kome Kardakon, in western Lycia, adjacent to the polis of Telmessos (D3).Footnote ³⁰ The Kardakes were required to pay an annual tax in cash, referred to euphemistically as a syntaxis (contribution), on “each adult person (ἐκά̣σ|του σώματος ἐνηλίκου)” (lines 10–11).

Two other inscriptions suggest the practice was not out of the ordinary. In Apollonioucharax, the Attalids raised an annual (?) eisphora (D2 Side A line 24). That this eisphora was not a collective obligation but a poll tax is implied by the fact that it fell not on the entire adult population but only on certain registered settlers.Footnote ³¹ The other comparandum also comes from western Lycia, but its author and addressee are both a matter of dispute. This is the royal document first published by Michael Wörrle as a fragment of a letter of Eumenes II or Antiochos III to the city of Telmessos (SEG XXIX 1516).Footnote ³² Certain members of an unnamed community, artisans who seem to be “recently arrived,” are released from the cheironaxion on condition that they take up a public service called (h)orophylakia (τοῦ χειρωναξίου παρεθήσονται οἱ μεταπορευ|[όμε]νοι τεχνῖται τὴν ὁροφυλακίαν αἰρόμε[νοι]; lines 7–8). Again, we know from Ps.-Aristotle that the cheironaxion was a tax on persons, applied discriminatorily, as we can see from this document, on certain craftspeople.Footnote ³³ The question here is the status of the taxpayers and the tax authority. Wörrle hypothesized that the artisans in question were metics, which would make the cheironaxion a civic tax of Telmessos, albeit one that the king summarily abolishes.Footnote ³⁴ Others have countered that the text is rather an analog to that very letter of Eumenes II concerning the Kardakes and their poll tax (D3), which makes the addressee a royal official and the community at issue a katoikia or kome (village), but certainly not a polis.Footnote ³⁵

In sum, the evidence permits us to posit an Attalid poll tax for certain populations discernible within non-polis communities. Ideologically, taxation of these persons was risk-free. Administratively, however, all Hellenistic bureaucracies faced a shortage of knowledge about such people, relying on the dragnets of temples, craft guilds, and military institutions to identify them and collect their poll tax. So it is hazardous in the extreme to assume the direct taxation of persons was universal, or even consistently applied outside the polis. As Philippe Gauthier writes of one of the scarcely attested civic poll taxes, “Though the Greeks were hardly consistent, one is tempted to believe that here too the épiképhalion was related to war, or was at least episodic.”Footnote ³⁶ The royal poll tax may not have been any more regular, and one can supply a multiyear crisis of Galatian troubles or other wars as the historical context for each of the confirmed Attalid cases.Footnote ³⁷ Yet in quest of quantitative models of royal economy in Asia Minor, one has been tempted to make the leap, even though we know how variegated the political landscape of inner Anatolia must have been.Footnote ³⁸ It is preferable to understand these direct taxes on persons as part of a greater fiscal burden that included inheritance taxes on cleruchic land and various corvée labor obligations, from which only the name and ideology of the polis provided ultimate defense.Footnote ³⁹ Meanwhile, even for non-polis communities, the typically ad hoc character of these exactions made the poll tax a subject of negotiation with the king, as the case of Apollonioucharax demonstrates.

Indirect Taxation

For taxation of the exchange and movement of goods we are better informed. Yet both of our key texts from the context of sale require commentary. In the case of Toriaion, the revenue (prosodos) earmarked for the oil fund is termed, ambiguously, “from the agoranomia” (D8 line 43). That institution, however, is usually translated “the office of agoranomos.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Accordingly, SEG translates in line 43, “the revenue accruing from the office of agoranomos.” Naturally, the office governed exchange in the market, but did the agoranomos raise a tax on sale? Does the Toriaion dossier in fact demonstrate that the Attalids taxed sale? Much of the evidence for the function of such magistrates relates not to sale but instead to the maintenance of social order in the market, price regulation, the enforcement of standards of quality and measurement, and the adjudication of disputes.Footnote ⁴¹ For example, an agoranomos from Hellenistic Tralles is honored exclusively for jurisprudence (I.Tralleis 32). A third- or second-century agoranomos from Metropolis dedicated a measuring table.Footnote ⁴² It is then likely that a portion of the agoranomia revenue of Toriaion came from fines.Footnote ⁴³ On the other hand, it is explicit neither in the text nor in any of the comparanda adduced in the editio princeps that the rest of the revenue came from sales taxes, from the farming out of those taxes, or from what are commonly called “market dues.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Sales taxes are well known from Greek public finance.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet to associate them with the office of agoranomos is to ignore a large body of evidence, particularly rich from Hellenistic Delos, that points to the enforcement of market rules, some of which were no doubt fiscal, as the primary duty of the magistrate.Footnote ⁴⁶

Our best evidence for an Attalid tax on sale is the aforementioned dossier concerning the high priest and katoikoi of Apollo Tarsenos (D14). It is important to note both the nature of the community, cult dependents, seemingly without a polis as overlord, as well as the specific occasion. This has been shown by Adolph Wilhelm and Piejko (against Welles) to be a festival, the panegyris restored in lines 4 and 12 of Text A.Footnote ⁴⁷ The inscription merely records that Attalos awards the cult community ateleia probatôn, a tax remission on livestock (Text A lines 5–6 and Text B line 4). This could mean freedom from a head tax on livestock or their progeny, from customs levied on the movement of livestock across political boundaries, or from sales tax. Rostovtzeff read here a head tax, and indeed Christophe Chandezon’s analysis of Greek civic taxes on pastoralism shows direct taxation predominates, either on pastures or on the animals themselves.Footnote ⁴⁸ On the other hand, Chandezon’s evidence for royal taxes on pastoralism points toward indirect taxation as the norm, and the festival surely provoked the movement of large numbers of animals toward the shrine of Apollo and precipitated their sale. Accordingly, with the festival more firmly established in the restoration of the text, scholarly opinion has settled on an interpretation of sales tax.Footnote ⁴⁹

As for customs duties, we can surmise that the Attalids, like most in the premodern Mediterranean, relied heavily on what amounted to taxes on mobility and interdependence.Footnote ⁵⁰ We catch sight of the customs regime already ca. 280–275, when Cyzicus honors Philetairos for a grant of tax immunity on the movement of livestock and other wealth into his territory, as well as on the export of purchased animals (OGIS 748 lines 8–12). In order to make sense of the fact that the territories of Cyzicus and Philetairos were not contiguous, but in fact separated from each other by Seleukid territory, Christophe Chandezon suggests transport by sea, making the tax an ellimenion of some kind collected in the Pergamene port and satellite city Elaia.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet the fiefdom of Philetairos need not have shared a border with Cyzicus for the dynast to have claimed customs on the flocks that the Cyzicenes shepherded into his territory in time of war. We know from contemporary interstate agreements from Crete that pastoralists en route from one polis territory to another routinely crossed the territory of a third city.Footnote ⁵² Moreover, Hellenistic Asia Minor was a patchwork of different fiscal authorities, the kind of place that is not easily represented on a textbook map. In the end, it matters little whether we place the customs house of Philetairos in Elaia or on his northern frontier. The point is that the fiscal territoriality of the Attalid state had already taken shape at this early stage.

After 188, the Attalids extended their customs regime over much of the territory allotted to them at Apameia. This is evident in the long inscription from Ephesus known as the Customs Law of Asia (CLA), which is a Neronian compilation of regulations on the collection of customs in the Roman province of Asia.Footnote ⁵³ The first version of this accretive and palimpsestic document may date all the way back to the years 129–126 BCE, during which the Romans first organized the province. If so, it captures an image of the kingdom of Attalos III at the very moment when the proconsul Manius Aquilius received and began to reshape it. That the CLA transmits information about the late Attalid kingdom is not in doubt. However, one has not completely disentangled the Attalid bits from the rest.Footnote ⁵⁴ Stephen Mitchell has shown that the scope of the first version of the law, which includes the Bosphorus and Pamphylia, both regions that did not belong to province of Asia in Nero’s time, gives away an Attalid template.Footnote ⁵⁵ After all, long before Pompey organized the province of Pontus and Bithynia, much of the Bosphoran territory covered in the CLA had belonged to Pergamon. As for Pamphylia, the Attalid hold on this region has been questioned, but not their claim.Footnote ⁵⁶ Nevertheless, the Attalid template has its unresolved problems. For example, in a section on import and export by sea, the CLA lists coastal cities with customs stations, moving in geographical order south and southeast from the Bosphorus to Pamphylia, but passing through Caria along the way (lines 23–26). It seems unthinkable that these coastal Carian cities in the heart of the Rhodian mainland territory (peraia) ever belonged to the Attalid kingdom. In other words, regrettably, we cannot discern an Attalid core to the CLA.Footnote ⁵⁷

That disclaimer notwithstanding, the CLA is crucial for our reconstruction of the Attalid customs regime. The first of two key passages, lines 26–27, follows immediately after the list of maritime customs stations:

The extent to which Hellenistic customs regimes targeted the transport and smuggling of goods by land has been underappreciated.Footnote ⁵⁸ This passage depicts the interior of Asia Minor as a patchwork of fiscal zones, each of which contained its exaction points. Navigating them all may have cost traders more than a simple import and export through coastal harbors. There is no consensus on how to understand these four categories of land, introduced from the end of the lacuna. It is especially difficult to see what makes these cities “free,” but they are obviously not free of a customs regime imposed from above.Footnote ⁵⁹ The origin of all four, however, seems to lie in the Attalid kingdom, which treated separately with poleis, ethnê, and demoi in the interior, all the while directly governing certain rural lands, termed here, as restored, chora basileias (“land of the monarchy”). In fact, the tripartite collocation of poleis, ethnê, and demoi, to which the Romans here add former royal land, seems to anticipate the membership of the Koinon of Asia. It suggested to the document’s first editors that an inheritance from the Attalids lay behind the Koinon.Footnote ⁶⁰

Clearly, the Attalid kingdom contained within its political boundaries a patchwork of fiscal zones. No single, contiguous customs barrier surrounded Attalid territory. On the political frontiers, not only in the busy Aegean harbors, but also in the mountainous Mysian borderlands opposite Bithynia, or in the Maeander corridor running through Tralles, the Attalids surely exacted customs. The CLA pulls the curtain back on the interior, which proves to be riven with enclaves of royal fiscal authority, in addition to royal land, a variety of polities that stood in various relationships of dependence to the kings. In fact, the Attalid state had no interest in rendering all of this territory fiscally homogeneous. The taxation of goods moving between the many different zones of the interior was sufficiently profitable to justify investment in physical infrastructure. As a matter of shared sovereignty, the best point of comparison is the federative koinon. For example, the Lycian customs law from Andriake, also emanating from Nero’s reform, shows that while the Lycian Koinon collected one set of customs in the various harbors, a part of which were sent on to Rome, the constituent poleis also raised their own dues.Footnote ⁶¹

A second passage from the CLA, lines 67–70, which mentions Attalos III by name, shines a light on the infrastructure of taxation:

Unfortunately, even here, the evidence for the Attalid system may not be unadulterated. Mitchell takes the passage as the very end of the first version of the law, drafted perhaps between 129 and 126, while Helmut Engelmann and Dieter Knibbe give a terminus ante quem of 75.Footnote ⁶² Crawford holds out the possibility that these lines are a post-Sullan supplement to the original document, pointing out that the lacuna at the beginning of line 70 makes it particularly difficult to generalize about the Attalid kingdom, since we may have lost a reference to parts of the province of Asia that had not belonged to Pergamon.Footnote ⁶³ Still, we receive precious information about the built environment of royal customs collection. The Attalid infrastructure appears substantial: two different sets of structures, the epoikia and a plural masculine supplement for βασ]ιλικούς, for now, the vague stathmoi (barracks, stables, or the like).Footnote ⁶⁴ From the instructions to register and declare in each city by the sea in their absence, we can recognize these as maritime customs houses, either in poleis or in the coastal territory of ethnê. From the perspective of the CLA (and no doubt for the inhabitants of Attalid Asia Minor, too), the presence of these structures was a mark of subjection. Yet the text does not permit us to place those poleis and ethnê without royal customs infrastructure outside the kingdom – or even beyond the reach of its fiscal authority. As these very lines from the CLA remind us, the same state can collect the same tax with or without its own infrastructure; Roman tax farmers were required to make use of old Attalid customs stations if available. The Attalids, by contrast, seem to have created a new infrastructure for tax collection, increasing surveillance and revenues. A measure of transparency was also gained, an encouragement to the very quasi-voluntary compliance that Nero was pursuing. Yet to be clear, the Attalid customs houses did not delineate the political or economic boundaries of the Attalid state.Footnote ⁶⁵

Saltpans, Lakes, and Lagoons

Our evidence for Attalid taxation includes two references to coastal lagoons and lakes containing saltpans – and presumably much else of value besides.Footnote ⁶⁶ This is a special case both because indirect and direct taxation were combined in the exploitation of this domain, and because it represents one of our best opportunities to register fiscal intensification, as well as outright confiscation, topics to which we shall return. The first episode involves the city of Priene, which at the beginning of the first century BCE disputed with certain Roman tax farmers called halonai over revenues from saltpans (haleai) in a coastal lagoon in the Maeander Delta called the Gaisonis.Footnote ⁶⁷ For our purposes, the following is the significant passage of the honorific decree for Krates (ISE 182 = I.Priene 111 Column XVI lines 112–17):

To divine the Attalid role here we are required to imagine what it was King Attalos (II or III) had exploited earlier, since the object of εἰργάζετο is lost in the opening lacuna. In her study of salt in the Greek world, Cristina Carusi lends little credence to a restoration of saltpans. She notes the text’s juxtaposition between, on the one hand, the saltpans that Priene claims it possesses and exploits and, on the other, whatever King Attalos was working.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet, as Thonemann argues, what is contrasted here is rather two different historical property claims on two different saltpans. In one case, the Attalids staked a claim, perhaps rooted in a confiscation of Alexander, rather than in a confiscation of their own. The Attalid claim gave the Roman tax farmers legal ground to stand on. In the case of the Gaisonis it had – by contrast, so the argument goes – always belonged to Priene, always been exploited by its citizens, and always been reserved for Athena Polias. Thus Thonemann, invoking those same lines 67–68 of the CLA just discussed, restores the lacuna: [τὰς μὲν ἁλέας τὰς βασιλικὰς, ἃς π] ρότερον εἰργάζετο βασιλεὺς Ἄτταλος. “the royal saltpans, which earlier King Attalus had worked.”Footnote ⁶⁹

The second episode occurred in Ephesus, which, Strabo tells us, won its own dispute with tax farmers over the “great revenues (megalai prosodoi)” of a seaside lake called Selinousia, as well as a second, contiguous lake:Footnote ⁷⁰

Consensus holds that “the kings” who confiscated the sacred lakes were the Attalids.Footnote ⁷¹ We know that already in the archaic period, the temple of Artemis Ephesia raised revenues on salt (I.Ephesos 1). If those same revenues belonged to Pergamon after 188, this would represent a major reconfiguration of power in the Kayster Delta. The particular products that provided these revenues have been the subject of debate. Yet it is more than unhelpful to quibble over whether the revenues came from salt, fish, or other sources.Footnote ⁷² It obscures the multifaceted character of the ecological niche exploited by the Attalids in the hinterland of both Priene and Ephesus. A useful point of comparison is the so-called Little Sea (mikrê thalassa) near coastal Iasos, which was far more than a large fishing ground, but also a source of salt and seasonal pasturage on a regional scale.Footnote ⁷³ Moreover, human mobility across these coastal lagoons produced revenues. A fine example from our period was then known as the Iônopolitikos Kolpos, but today as the inland Lake Bafa due to coastline change, poised between Miletus and Herakleia-under-Latmos. In the late 180s, those two cities jointly farmed a τέλος τῆς πορθμίδος (ferry tax) on the marshy gulf (Syll.³ 633 lines 100–104).Footnote ⁷⁴ One quickly understands why Roman tax farmers resorted to violence: only with arms could they wrest these places away from owners as powerful as the goddesses Athena Polias and Artemis Ephesia. These were lucrative monopolies, though we should not extrapolate from the evidence of Priene and Ephesus a universal Attalid monopoly on salt, compulsory purchase of salt, or a salt tax as head tax.Footnote ⁷⁵ Fundamentally, these were taxes on the usage of distinctive natural resources (enkyklia telê). Under the Attalids, the revenues of certain coastal lagoons, the mainstays of local economies, were absorbed into the royal patrimony.Footnote ⁷⁶

The Personnel of Tax Collection

One of the lessons of Mark Antony’s tendentious gloss on the tax history of Asia Minor is the significance of the state’s choice of collection agents. This was not simply a matter of choosing the most efficient agents, but of engineering compliance. As with rates and economic incidence, personnel choices affect the perception of fairness in taxation. As the Greeks knew incredibly well, tax farming had its advantages, chiefly, the off-loading of risk, but also the outsourcing of assessment and surveillance.Footnote ⁷⁷ Tax farming was ubiquitous in the public finance of the cities and non-polis communities of Hellenistic Asia Minor, so much so that it would be otiose to enumerate examples. As is well known, the problem with tax farmers is that they are hard to control; their abuses can lead to diminishing returns, as taxpayers lose their appetite for compliance. This is of course precisely what happened in Asia Minor of the Late Republic. Indeed, Antony admits that the Italian tax farmers acted outrageously. Yet had the Romans not acted outrageously – in the first place – by farming out agricultural taxes to outsiders? This put basic sustenance in the hand of men “unknown and unaccountable.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Perhaps, and hence the corrective: Julius Caesar turned over to the communities of Asia Minor the responsibility for the collection of those taxes. This prompts the question of whether these communities had known an imperial power to tax them through its own tax farmers, rather than demand lump sums and fixed percentages of revenues, which the communities themselves collected through their own, internal tax farming or by other means; that is to say, whether the institution of royal tax farming ever existed on any significant scale in Hellenistic Asia Minor.Footnote ⁷⁹

Since the Attalids took over so many Seleukid administrative practices after 188, it makes sense to ask the question first of the earlier period. Little has changed since John Ma admitted, “It is still not clear whether Seleukid indirect taxation was farmed out.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Yet G. G. Aperghis can write, “There is no specific mention in the sources of the use of Seleukid tax-contractors, other than the high priests of Judaea, but one cannot discount the possibility, certainly for the revenue of cities.”Footnote ⁸¹ In the case of the Attalids, the evidentiary basis has in fact changed of late, as the honorary decree for Apollonios from Metropolis (ca. 144) has been published and pored over (I.Metropolis 1 Side B; D5). One of Apollonios’ services to his community concerns a tax dispute (Side B lines 18–23):

Here is a dispute between anonymous tax farmers and the polis of Metropolis, submitted to royal judgment (diakrisis). Presumably, a representative of the king heard the case, perhaps the strategos in Ephesus, whose title as invoked elsewhere in a dedicatory inscription portends involvement: “the strategos appointed over Ephesus and the places around Ephesus and the plain of the Kayster (ὁ στρατηγὸς ἐπί τε Ἐφέσου καὶ τῶν κατ᾽ Ἔφεσον τόπων καὶ Καύστρου πεδίον)” (SEG XXVI 1238 = I.Ephesos 201).Footnote ⁸² The nature of these taxes and the fiscal privileges of Metropolis underlying the conflict require scrutiny. It is generally agreed that τῶν ἐφευρισκομένων ἡμεῖν τελῶν in line 18 means new taxes that had been contrived for the Metropolitans. Boris Dreyer and Engelmann argue in the ed. pr. that these taxes were produced for the benefit of the Metropolitans; and, so their argument goes, the tax farmers violated the right of the polis to the new revenue by not transmitting it. C. P. Jones, who marshals all the evidence for grants of portfolio of tax immunities (ἀτέλεια τῶν πασῶν προσόδων, κτλ.), often tailored to specific local economic conditions, sensibly reinterprets the “invented taxes” as a violation of a particular fiscal immunity.

To a certain extent, this helps us to make sense of the tax, τὰ διαγώγια τοῦ Καϊστριανοῦ λιμένος (“the diagôgia of the Kaystrian harbor”) – the cancellation of which was absolutely vital for the citizens of Metropolis. They argued that the diagôgia – whatever it was – did not apply to them.Footnote ⁸³ As the name implies, this is a tax on passage, a tax on mobility of some kind. Is it a tax akin to that on diagôgimos sitos in Kyme, the taxable grain in-transit (SEG L 1195 line 9)? It is difficult to be more precise, as the term is an epigraphical hapax.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet the confidence of Jones that this is “a toll on goods conveyed through the ‘Caystrian harbor’” is perhaps not unwarranted. Jones places that harbor in the territory of Ephesus, which is to say, at the mouth of the Kayster. Since tiny Metropolis lay upriver, the city relied on a major coastal harbor under the control of a regional rival for its basic needs (Map 2.1). In fact, the limên Kaïstrianos must be a harbor in the Kayster Delta. For to the Metropolitans, their local harbor would have been simply ὁ λιμήν.Footnote ⁸⁵

Map 2.1

The Kayster Valley.

(After Roelens-Flouneau 2019, fig. 36)

The extra designation, Καϊστριανοῦ, may help identity the anonymous tax farmers. Both Jones and the text’s first editors suggest that these are royal tax farmers.Footnote ⁸⁶ To be clear, by “royal tax farmers,” we mean tax collectors who answer directly to royal authorities, and who are not necessarily members of the communities they tax. In this case, such men would have been stationed in the Kayster Delta, having purchased the diagôgima tax farm directly from the Attalids. The decree for Apollonios would then be the first, unique, positive indication that the Attalids employed royal tax farmers.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet it is unlikely to be so. Instead, we should see here tax farmers of the polis of Ephesus, who likely collected both civic and royal taxes, even if we are not in a position to determine how to classify the diagôgima. In general, the same civic personnel routinely collected both royal and civic taxes.Footnote ⁸⁸ Furthermore, Metropolis’ choice to leave Ephesus and its territory out of its description of the tax is telling. Their language, τὰ διαγώγια τοῦ Καϊστριανοῦ λιμένος, recalls the titulature of the Attalid official who may have judged the case: ὁ στρατηγὸς ἐπί τε Ἐφέσου καὶ τῶν κατ᾽ Ἒφεσον τόπων καὶ Καύστρου πεδίον. In the titulature, the Kaystrian plain is conceptually distinct from the city of Ephesus and its environs. The so-called Kaystrian harbor as much as the Kaystrian plain represents the supra-poliad perspective of the monarchy.Footnote ⁸⁹ For the Ephesians, this may have been just another limên. Therefore, the citizens of Metropolis assumed the royal perspective as a way of enlisting Attalid power on their side, as embodied by the strategos. Part of this official’s brief was keeping the peace in an ecology on which several communities had claims, namely, what the Attalids called the Kaystrian plain.Footnote ⁹⁰ In an analogous fashion, citizens of the poleis of Metropolis, Colophon, and Ephesus, among others, would have all sought passage through the Kayster Delta. The task of the strategos of the Attalid state, in the final analysis, was to minimize the resultant strife – especially since royal revenues were at stake.Footnote ⁹¹

The king himself did not dispatch tax farmers to collect these revenues from communities, but he did employ royal officials in a fiscal apparatus. Hovering above, and seemingly apart, was the strategos. We have noted the possibility that a strategos judged the dispute between Metropolis and the unnamed tax farmers. We are on firmer ground in two other cases. It was Korragos, στρατηγὸς τῶν καθ᾽ Ἑλλήσποντον τόπων, who requested fiscal privileges of Eumenes II for the unnamed community of D1. Moreover, while it has long escaped notice, another clue as to the role of the strategos in fiscal politics may be found in the fragmentary dedicatory inscriptions from the epistyles of two stoas on the steep Theater Terrace at Pergamon (I.Pergamon 152–55).Footnote ⁹² The fragments of I.Pergamon 152A + B clearly read προσόδων (“revenues”), which is echoed, albeit in smaller letters, on 154B. As a restoration of the title of the dedicant for 154A, Max Fränkel suggested [στρατηγ]ὸς τῆς κ[ατά] κτλ., on the model of στρατηγὸς τῆς Χερρονήσου καὶ τῶν κατὰ τὴν Θρᾴκην τόπων (I.Sestos 1; paralleled in OGIS 330). Since Fränkel’s time, new comparanda for this titulature have come to light, the aforementioned dedication from Ephesus (SEG XXVI 1238) and the ostotheke from Tralles (SEG XLVI 1434). Aperghis has argued that the Seleukids deprived the strategos/satrap of a direct role in financial administration.Footnote ⁹³ This may have been the case for the Attalids as well, but these two texts suggest that the strategos could in certain circumstances bring his weight to bear on fiscal matters.

Tellingly, the strategos is absent from a list of Attalid administrative titles ritually invoked by a cultic association in the hinterland of Pergamon, near Apollonia in the Kaikos Valley (SEG LII 1197 Side A lines 9–12; dated ca. 168–164).Footnote ⁹⁴ Many of these officials would appear to be part of the Attalid fiscal apparatus: archiereus, hêmiolios, ho epi tês poleôs, dioikêtês, archeklogistês, oikonomos, eklogistês. They are listed, according to Müller and Wörrle, in roughly descending order of seniority, though each office came with a different mandate.Footnote ⁹⁵ For example, the hêmiolios, familiar from the figure of Herodes in the Toriaion dossier (D8), will have been responsible for revenues from royal patrimony.Footnote ⁹⁶ In other cases, it is more difficult to determine which part of an official’s brief might have been fiscal, as in the case of ho epi tês poleôs, a strictly civil official at any rate. Overall, this document adds validity to the axiom that the Attalids took over much of the Seleukid system, especially since it excludes the strategos from the fiscal apparatus.Footnote ⁹⁷ As positive evidence, it gives us a confirmed Attalid tax collector in the eklogistês, the one who “collects (ἐκλέγειν),” but once again, no indication whatsoever that Pergamon auctioned off its taxes to the highest bidder.Footnote ⁹⁸ Finally, a model begins to emerge. Pergamon’s tax collectors were local tax farmers, operating within civic institutions – and, therefore, socially embedded in their communities. Crucially, they were known and accountable to taxpayers. For their part, royal officials such as those named in the inscription from Apollonia provided a different service: coordination between communities, cultic associations, tax farmers, and the central administration. Finally, the strategos will have interfered only in extraordinary circumstances.

It must be admitted that we have no evidence for how the Attalids conducted tax assessment. For the Seleukids, at least, we have slim evidence for a cadaster system.Footnote ⁹⁹ However, there is scattered evidence for Attalid land survey and surveyors: καταμέτρησις̣ [δὲ τῆς] χώρας (measuring out of land) in Temnos (D4 Fragment D line 18); Lykinos, the γεοδώτης, active in the vicinity of Apollonioucharax (D2 Side B lines 23–24) and possibly also among the Mysians of Emmodi (SEG XL 1062). The techniques employed in land distribution probably facilitated tax assessment as well. Finally, for the levels of taxation, the record is again poor, but intriguing. We have already discussed attempts to quantify revenues on the basis of the few numbers that have survived. These are, principally, the head tax of the Kardakes, “one Rhodian drachma and an obol,” and the phoros kai telesma of Amlada of 1.5 talents (D3 and D12). Each case has its idiosyncrasies, which makes generalization hazardous. In each case, negotiation has reduced an original level of taxation to our final number. One other tax rate is available from the anonymous city Τ-, possibly Temnos (I.Sardis 2). A royal rescript, either Attalid or Seleukid (difficult to determine which, as the stone perished in a modern war), fixes that city’s annual rate at a mere one-third of a talent. To put these numbers in perspective, Aperghis has estimated revenues of 1–2 talents per 1,000 people in the Seleukid empire.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The small, nascent Pisidian polis of Amlada seems to fit well within those parameters. These numbers contrast markedly with those reported by Polybius for the Rhodian zone: Kaunos and Stratonikeia, the Rhodians claimed, produced 120 talents per year, surely a mix of direct and indirect taxation (30.31.7). Given the sovereignty challenges that the Attalids faced and their penchant for solving their problems with money, these are surprisingly low rates. They suggest a lighter, though perhaps broader burden than the one that Rhodes imposed on its peraia, and indeed the Rhodians’ subjects did complain to Rome of their overlords’ “heaviness (barytês).”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Pergamon’s need for revenue must have been met by broadening the tax base to include large parts of Anatolia that had been loosely integrated if at all into the Achaemenid or Seleukid political economy. The typically light tax rates of the Aegean coastal poleis may have become even lighter, while new cities, towns, and other civic organisms in inner Anatolia traded arbitrary, unpredictable, and harsh exactions for the regularized and lenient coastal rate.

To summarize the conclusions of this survey of the evidence: Pergamon’s direct taxes fell on communities, not landholders – unless those landholders were cleruchs, in which case they paid the traditional mixed-phoros: a tithe on grain and often vines, a cash sum for “the other fruits.” Villagers who were dependents of temples and sacred estates might also pay taxes on the land that they farmed, but they paid those taxes to their local priest, who became ever more accountable to the royal bureaucracy. For indirect taxes, cautious interpretation of key documents was urged. Poll taxes, which fell on non-polis communities as a rule, were nevertheless both irregular and ad hoc. The Attalids collected sales tax, but not in the form of Toriaion’s agoranomia, the source of one of their earmarks. Customs dues were likely the most important form of indirect taxation, as evidenced by the CLA. The Attalids built up an infrastructure of surveillance in order to capture revenue from the flow of goods between the sea and the highlands – and between a multitude of fiscal zones within Anatolia. Taxes on the usage of parts of the royal patrimony such as saltpans and lagoons will also have been significant. These resources may long have been claimed by outside powers, but the interests of the surrounding poleis and priesthoods were at stake in a battle over natural resources. Finally, the personnel of tax collection did not include royal tax farmers. This was the most significant of the many respects in which the Attalid system of personnel mirrored its Seleukid forbearer.

1. Negotiation Is Routine

Certain generalizations now present themselves. In accusing the Attalids of raising a “riskless revenue (akindynos phoros),” Antony aimed his criticism at their system of assessments (timemata), implying that a community’s timema was fixed, arbitrary, and immutable. Yet the cases of Amlada and the Kardakon Κome belie this characterization. The Kardakes achieved a 72% reduction of their head tax, while the Amladeis knocked 25% off their annual collective payment. There is no way to determine the representativeness of these figures. By contrast, can we assume that the amount of negotiation that went into each assessment was typical? Just how appropriate was this kind of bargaining in the fiscal arena? On the one hand, we have already tried to demystify the process of earmarking by bringing the attendant negotiations out into the light. It makes sense to check for negotiation elsewhere in the fiscal system. On the other hand, we have to contend with both the admittedly tendentious evidence of Antony’s speech that makes of the timema a fixed sum, as well as the idiosyncrasies of Pisidia ca. 160 and western Lycia in 181.

With their origins still in dispute, we cannot describe the katoikountes of the Kardakon Kome simply as military settlers, although the Attalids clearly had a strategic interest in reconstituting the community in 181.Footnote ¹⁰² In 184, Eumenes II had repulsed what was, according to Attalid propaganda, a major incursion into the region by Prusias I and the Galatians under Ortiagon.Footnote ¹⁰³ This war may have been behind the failure of the Kardakes to pay their taxes. Yet this is not explicit in the letter of Eumenes II to his official Artemidoros, which resumes the community’s request for a lightening of their tax burden (D3). Artemidoros had transmitted the request to Eumenes and checked into (ἐξετάζων) the claims of poverty. Not only had bad harvests befallen the village; the villagers had actually started to flee the land. Artemidoros’ investigation implies that claims of poverty may have been commonplace, a hint that negotiation was widespread. The position of Eumenes was in its own way rather weak, as the king needed to incentivize the Kardakes with tax privileges and the aid of a skilled mason in order to repopulate and refortify the village.

Unlike the Kardakes, the Amladeis could communicate directly with the king, even if he could answer them only as “polis and gerousia,” not the normative “boulê kai demos” (D12).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In this case, a large embassy delivered the community’s request to Attalos II. Again, the conditions seem catastrophic. Pisidian Amlada had proven disloyal in the recent Galatikos polemos, so much so that they had been compelled to surrender hostages and now owed the Attalids reparations for “repairs (ἐπισκευ[ῆς ἕνε]|κ]ε) (?)” (lines 6–7). It is difficult to know whether these hostilities were a continuation of the Great Revolt of the Galatians or a separate series of local wars that eventually involved Prousias II in the revolt of Selge in 156.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Like the Kardakes, the Amladeis represented themselves as impoverished: “since you are now weak from many financial burdens (ἐπεὶ θλιβέντες ἐμ πλείοσιν ἀσθενῶς [νῦν ἔ]|χετε” (lines 8–9).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ We would not expect self-abasement from Attalos, but was his position so much more secure? The sources provide a mixed picture of the Attalid hold on this part of southwestern Anatolia.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Nearby Olbasa evidently felt the need to send its honorific decree for two Attalid officials to the king for confirmation.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ However, we know the region to have been restive. For example, Selge’s battle with kings for parts of the plain of Pamphylia was worthy of Strabo’s retelling (12.7.3).

The historical contexts for the negotiations between the Attalids and the Kardakon Kome and Amlada may have been extraordinary, but not the tenor of those negotiations, nor the rules of the game. If these two small, semi-Hellenized communities on the periphery of the kingdom could engage the Attalids over tax assessments, it is likely that a polis of the core could too. Amlada’s ambassador Oprasates enjoyed royal favor, but other cities launched their own native sons into senior positions at court and in the administrative hierarchy. We can consider Adramyttion as the model. In the 160s, it issued a decree honoring its citizen Pamphilos (SEG XXXVII no. 1006). He was no ordinary citizen, but in his trustworthiness and moderation was deemed worthy of appointment to a position in the Attalid court (συστα]θεὶς τῶι βασιλεῖ Εὐμένει) and taken into the confidence of Queen Stratonike (lines 3, 9). The decree records in typically vague and heavy-handed language that Pamphilos continued to serve his polis and its citizens with honor (lines 13–18). Unfortunately, we are not given a narrative in the motivation clause to describe what is likely taken for granted, namely, that many of these services of representation before the monarchy were fiscal in nature.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Rather more is spelled out in a long honorary decree of the city of Pergamon for a royal courtier (I.Pergamon 224 + I.Pergamon II p. 509; OGIS 323).Footnote ¹¹⁰ Most discussion of the text concerns the identity of the courtier, given here the title of syntrophos (royal age-mate), and usually identified as the powerful Andronikos, who was a representative of the Attalids at Rome in their quarrels with the Bithynians and ultimately a key figure in the coup of Nikomedes II against his father Prousias II.Footnote ¹¹¹ By contrast, recent treatments of the Stadt und Herrscher relationship have not made much use of this important statement, perhaps because Pergamon was no ordinary polis under the Attalids.Footnote ¹¹² In honoring a courtier for his administrative virtue, the Pergamene demos provides an ideal framework for negotiation between kings and cities:

Admittedly, while we may suspect that a range of governmental affairs lie under the rubric of “matters of administration (oikonomiai)” – the language of “straightening out (diôrthosis)” is redolent of public finance. Generically, the honorific decree represents an ideal, which those “other cities” surely trotted out in negotiations with the monarchy: we have a distinctive constitution (politeia) and certain laws (nomoi) that preclude some forms of taxation and guard us from arbitrarily high rates. If this argument carried weight in Pergamon, which was under tight royal control, it is all the more likely to have resonated farther afield. Interestingly, it is a tactic of negotiation known from the peer–polity context, too. In 205, for instance, the city of Xanthos replied to the request of the city of Kytenion for financial aid, pleading that “no extraordinary levy on (our) citizens is possible because we have decreed a nine-year oikonomia (ἐπιβαλεῖν τε τοῖς πολίταις | οὐδεμίαν ἔξεστιν ἐπιβολὴν διὰ τῆν γεγενημένην οἰκονομίαν μετὰ ψηφίσματος εἰς ἔτη ἐννέα)” (SEG XXXVIII 1476 lines 53–55).Footnote ¹¹⁴ In the end, Xanthos gave Kytenion 500 drachmas, but the institution of the nine-year oikonomia, ratified unilaterally, had set limits on the negotiation. I.Pergamon 224 shows that the city of Pergamon, in its agonistic competition with other poleis, strove to place an analogous set of limits on royal power.Footnote ¹¹⁵

2. Royal Fiscality Is a Calque

We have been using Antony’s polemic as a guide through the tax morphology of the Attalid state, but it is not primary evidence for the indignation of the taxpayer. For that, we must pay attention to the outrage in Metropolis where new taxes had been “invented (ἐφευρισκομένων)” (D5 Side B line 19). As we have argued, the Attalids had not invented these taxes for the Metropolitans, though in the end, they succeeded in cancelling them. Yet the episode could have been a cautionary tale for royal power: the creation of new domains of fiscality remained taboo. The best way to reduce compliance was to invent new taxes – or to be perceived as doing so. As for inventions, nothing had changed with the advent of the Attalids. It was an old imperial habit in Asia Minor to assimilate the cities’ own fiscal categories.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Conceptually, if not always economically, royal taxation was epiphenomenal.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Our best example of this effect comes from Toriaion, where Eumenes II earmarked for the oil fund “for the present, the revenue from the agoranomia (κα̣τ̣ὰ̣ τ̣ὸ παρὸν τὴν ἀπὸ τῆς ἀγορανομ[ί]ας πρόσοδον)” (D8 line 43). It is unclear which institutions Toriaion possessed prior to its upgrade to polis status. And as we have explained above, the nature of the revenue from the office of agoranomos is also obscure. Yet the implication of the directive for the present is that the revenue stream for the oil fund already exists. It at least takes logical precedence over the procedure of earmarking. In other words, Eumenes did not trample into new social and economic fields in order to pay for his new expenditure. In the history of Asia Minor, the observation may appear banal, but not in the history of monarchy. For example, France of the ancien régime, at least in its last hundred years, worked very differently.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The principal direct tax in France since the fifteenth century had been the taille, but from 1695 to 1789 the monarchy introduced a series of new direct taxes, the capitation and the dixième, later renamed the vingtième, in order to fund increasing expenditures. These new taxes have been termed “universal” in that they were designed to penetrate the barriers of status and privilege that had previously shielded many French royal subjects from taxation. In search of revenues, the French monarchy created new fiscal categories, a radical innovation on the road to the Revolution.Footnote ¹¹⁹

That Attalid fiscal policy was less creative does not mean it was more benign. In fact, if we can rely on earlier evidence from Asia Minor, the calque of royal fiscality could just as easily be used to wound the polis. The classic case comes from Sardis under Antiochos III. In order to punish the city for siding with Achaios, the king added a royal eikostê (twentieth) tax to a preexisting civic (politikê) one.Footnote ¹²⁰ To what extent this form of “double taxation” was practiced is a matter of debate, but the calque need not have always been a perfect copy: the royal share of a given revenue source may have been more or less than one-half. It is clear from the letter of Zeuxis to Herakleia-under-Latmos that the same local tax farmer was collecting royal taxes and civic taxes in the harbor, even if a fixed amount of the royal receipts remained in Herakleia, earmarked for the oil fund.Footnote ¹²¹ Thus cooperation, or at least coexistence, was possible, which is why recent scholarship has highlighted not only the competition between the two fiscalities, but, to borrow the French, “connivance” and “cohabitation.”Footnote ¹²² If the latter were a matter of dividing up a single revenue stream, the former was a fight over which revenue streams – in a more or less timeless fiscal portfolio – each side would claim. In essence, what was up for negotiation was sovereignty (kyrieia) over the different revenue streams (prosodoi), not their number and location in the civic economy. This is why royal grants of tax immunity (ateleia) so often speak of “the taxes over which the city is sovereign (ὧν ἡ πόλις κυρία ἐστίν).”Footnote ¹²³

Just which taxes those might be was subject to change, a possibility that Iasos tried to foreclose by binding an official of Ptolemy I with this oath:

The Ptolemaic state threatened the sovereignty of Iasos over one or another of its prosodoi. Hence the gist of the oath was: let all revenues be civic (politikai). The atmosphere was of course competitive, but again, the two fiscalities could just as easily cooperate. The point is that the city defined the categories of fiscality to which both parties wholeheartedly subscribed.

We have a beautiful illustration of this dynamic in a text that may very well be Attalid and post-188. It is a royal rescript (?) discovered in Sardis, but addressed to another polis, which W. H. Buckler and David Robinson suggested may have been Temnos, on account of the Τ in line 7 (I.Sardis 2).Footnote ¹²⁴ Judging from the script, they dated the inscription to 225–175. The historical context is the familiar and generic one of postwar devastation and royal euergetism, so it is very difficult to choose between a Seleukid author like Antiochos III and Eumenes II, acting on the model found in the Korragos Decree (D1). In response to a petition, a royal official grants the unnamed city of I.Sardis 2 a seven-year tax holiday, and the following permanent arrangement starting in the eighth year: “they should pay in three installments out of all the revenues produced, twenty minae in total per year, and should be taxed in no other way (διδόναι τρ̣ε[ῖς ἀναφορὰς]|[ἐκ] πασῶν τῶν γινομένων προσόδων πα[ρ’ ἕκαστον]|ἐ̣νιαυτὸν̣ ἀργυ[ρ]ίου μνᾶς εἴ̣κοσι καὶ ἄλλ̣[ως μὴ ἐν]οχλεῖσθ̣αι)” (lines 16–19). In other words, royal fiscality has a role in designing the punctuality of taxation (three installments) and in calculating the tax burden (20 minas), but it does not take part in defining any of the revenue sources (πασῶν τῶν γινομένων προσόδων). Those were left to the city’s discretion. The calque of royal fiscality meant that the battle for sovereignty was effectively circumscribed. The result was that the much larger sovereignty claims of the Attalids – the absolute claims of the Treaty of Apameia – were camouflaged.

3. The Survival of Civic Fiscality Is Guaranteed

The historical problem of the relationship of royal fiscality to civic fiscality presupposes the survival of a civic fiscal apparatus and the preservation of much of the traditional tax base of the polis within the Attalid kingdom. This is well recognized in Francophone scholarship on civic institutions in the tradition of Louis Robert and in the formulation of the problem by Frédérique Duyrat and Véronique Chankowski in their 2004 volume Le roi et l’économie. Moreover, the most recent German scholarship on the identity and institutions of the city of Pergamon under the kings makes the point expressly.Footnote ¹²⁵ However, in the technical literature on certain key sources, one reads that the Attalids, in the first instance, claimed all revenues. Only then did the kings remit to the cities whichever portions suited them. This notion may continue to warp interpretations, which justifies a brief consideration of its merits. The idea goes back to the grand syntheses of Rostovtzeff and later A. H. M. Jones, but has leaked into numismatic and epigraphical studies.Footnote ¹²⁶ Fred Kleiner’s standard treatment of the cistophoric coinage and Robert Bauslaugh’s of the so-called cistophoric countermarks both quote the judgment of Jones in summing up their views on the historical import of the coins: “The policy of the kings seems to have been to appropriate nearly all the taxes, and then to make grants from the royal treasury to the cities ‘for the administration of the city.’”Footnote ¹²⁷

Another version of this argument transposes the ideal type of the “subject city,” which is a convention of modern historiography, onto the ancient reality. Subject cities, then, were a class of poleis, which by virtue of that status surrendered not just some vague sense of autonomia and freedom of action, but specific domains of fiscality. Thus Lloyd Jonnes and Marijana Ricl write, “In the case of Tyriaion [sic], the king presently relinquishes revenues collected by agoranomoi, which in case of a subject city went εἰς τὸ βασιλικόν,” citing the Korragos Decree (D1).Footnote ¹²⁸ The interpretation of Dreyer and Engelmann of the diagôgion of I.Metropolis 1 (D5) is based on an analogous and equally unjustified assumption. Since they take Metropolis to be a “sujette ville,” the city was, as it were, “constitutionally” barred from raising its own customs dues. The diagôgion must then be a toll (Maut) and not customs dues (Gebühren).Footnote ¹²⁹ Rather, the rule of thumb should be formulated thus: each domain of fiscality was potentially an arena for negotiation, the domains themselves remaining fixed. So if we were to learn that Metropolis raised its own customs dues, it would not be any more surprising than the recent discovery that member poleis of the Lycian Koinon exercised that right.Footnote ¹³⁰

And for the Attalids, efficiency was gained by leaving the civic fiscal apparatus in place.

Finally, from this perspective, the sundry evidence for civic fiscality requires cautious interpretation. For example, an inscription reading ὅροι Περγαμηνῶν (“boundary of the Pergamenes”), albeit in a Roman-period script, was found in the vicinity of modern Aliağa, in situ but over 40 km from Pergamon (I.Kyme 27). The stone appears to mark an exclave of the polis of Pergamon, a source of revenue, which was perhaps already available to the city in days of the monarchy.Footnote ¹³¹ Nearby in the mountain country northwest of Manisa, two more boundary stones were found, reading: ὅροι Αἰγαέων (“boundary of the people of Aigai”).Footnote ¹³² While the upland Aeolian city thrived under the Attalids, the conclusions that we can draw from this evidence are rather modest. Aigai claimed this rocky terrain as part of its fiscal base, and perhaps the productive ecological niche in which the stones were erected was a matter of dispute, with another city or with the sanctuary of Apollo Chresterios. However, we cannot use this evidence to assign Aigai a political status (“autonomous” or “subject” city) in the Attalid kingdom or, by circular reasoning, to date these texts according to a status that we presume Aigai received at Apameia or after the War with Achaios. In the same vein, we should not exclude the Pisidian poleis of Adada and Termessos from the Attalid kingdom because they swore an oath to guard against the dissolution (kataluein) of each other’s laws and revenues (prosodoi).Footnote ¹³³ Such an oath is an index not of Attalid control in Pisidia, but rather of the lengths to which cities might go to protect their revenues.Footnote ¹³⁴

Surveillance

A nightmarish anxiety about the long reach of the state pervades Strabo’s story, which contrasts a king’s curated rapaciousness with the absurdity of his subject’s method of escaping detection. Truly, the descendants of Neleus were not scholars, but they knew how to hide their wealth. The historicity of its details aside, the story reminds us that the ancient world perceived the Attalids as fiercely hungry for cultural capital and money.Footnote ¹³⁵ Elevated by Rome to a notional position of great power in an unstable, anarchic Mediterranean system still reeling from the collapse of its hegemons, Pergamon’s budget ballooned overnight. Yet in their pursuit of revenue, the Attalids, as we have seen, adhered to certain rules. These traditions and norms limited the scope of tax collection. By contrast, the kings could change the scale of taxation – but only by sharpening surveillance. It was not sufficient to loosely integrate new territories into a tributary system, especially when cities like Adada and Termessos were oath-bound to march out to war over revenues. Rather, it was necessary to deepen the incidence of taxation and maximize compliance. As Strabo’s story about the heirs of Theophrastus suggests, the Attalids surely met resistance from taxpayers. Therefore, critical to Pergamon’s success was the implementation of fiscal arrangements that encouraged what sociologist Margaret Levi calls quasi-voluntary compliance.Footnote ¹³⁶ In the section on saltpans and coastal lagoons, we discussed one form of outright confiscation. There may have been more.Footnote ¹³⁷ However, arbitrary confiscation is inimical to any sense of tax fairness. The only sustainable approach was to deepen the incidence of taxation. We do not hear of a major reassessment of tax rates, such as, for example, the Athenians implemented in 425/4 (ML 69). Instead, just as the Athenians did in eventually focusing their energies on collection of an empire-wide harbor tax (the eikostê), the Attalids taxed what they could see best. Catering to the cultural preference of their subjects, they became masters of indirect taxation.Footnote ¹³⁸

The richly documented history of imperial Venice reminds us that this preference for indirect taxation is a consistent feature across Mediterranean empires.Footnote ¹³⁹ It is to be expected that the Attalids structured their fiscal system in such a way as to progressively deepen the incidence of indirect taxation in an effort to touch more transactions, groups, and individuals. In fact, the evidence points to a focus on capturing revenues from movement and exchange. Recall that in documents like the CLA, Anatolia appears as a patchwork of different fiscal regimes. This patchwork effect represented an impediment to trans-Anatolian movements of goods and people, and, naturally, it engendered on-the-ground adaptations. For example, Laodikeia-on-the-Lykos and Stratonikeia in Caria may have granted each other tax immunities late in the second century in order to reduce – by at least one – the number of fiscal boundaries a trader crossed in participating in a regional economy around the Maeander Valley.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ On the other hand, from the king’s perspective, the patchwork effect will have been a boon. The more that traders passed in and out of enclaves of Attalid control, the more taxes on mobility accrued.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Yet the king could only profit from as much of this mobility as he could observe. While Purcell has emphasized the role of customs houses in ports, assembling a model of the “Mediterranean of ellimenia,” we must also picture toll stations lining a network of inland roads.Footnote ¹⁴² Unfortunately, archaeologically, these structures are indistinguishable from fortifications and rural towers of other function. Texts, however, demonstrate that beyond the harbor lay a range of checkpoints and surveillance mechanisms, revenue officers checking bags at gates and fortified customs houses set in narrow passes.Footnote ¹⁴³ So it is no surprise that the CLA is concerned with preventing smuggling by land (lines 26–28). In addition to customs houses (telôneia), the law refers to other guard posts called paraphylakai (e.g., lines 31–33, 37–39).Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The Romans and the Attalids were both after what Ps.-Aristotle calls the revenue of telê kata gên, taxes levied along land routes ([Oec.] 2.4).

A central plank of the strategy for increasing revenues without provoking revolt, then, was the construction of a new and more sophisticated infrastructure for surveillance. In addition, the Attalids must have also dispatched units of armed men to occupy it. In the sources, these groups of guards appear as orophylakes and paraphylakitai. Already from the late fourth century on, Greek cities had organized troops of orophylakes, literally, “boundary guards.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Following Louis Robert, Cédric Brélaz has produced the spelling ὀροφύλακες, that is, “mountain guards,” which reflects the difficulty of deciding in any particular case whether a mountain or a border is under surveillance.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Often in Asia Minor, the mountain is a border. Thus the orophylakes of Miletus and Herakleia-under-Latmos are responsible for capturing and ransoming the slaves that escape from one city’s territory into the other via the mountainous divide (Syll.³ 633, lines 88–99). Andrzej Chankowski, however, has argued on linguistic grounds against the notion of mountain guards. Moreover, he adduces a wide range of evidence, from a fifth-century inscription from Chios to the Zenon Papyri, which places boundaries, public and private, under the guard of such men.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Significantly, several royal documents that seem to emanate from the late Attalid kingdom also make mention of these terms. The first is a fragmentary royal document found in Telmessos, introduced earlier in the section on direct taxation. To recapitulate, traced to the chancery of Eumenes II, the document records the king’s offer of a tax privilege to craftsmen in exchange for the service of orophylakia (SEG XXIX 1516).

As the Roberts argued, the orophylakes of SEG XXIX 1516 would have actually patrolled the mountainous borderlands high above the coastal plain of western Lycia.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Descriptions of these patrols as simply policing marginal land, the wilds that the Greeks called eschatiai, miss the mark. Indeed for Brélaz too, the service of orophylakeia is one of “securité publique” on such terrain, and he carefully notes the lack of direct evidence for the involvement of orophylakes in tax collection in Hellenistic or Roman Asia Minor.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ However, working from a wider body of evidence, Angelos Chaniotis describes such groups as “not simply policing the countryside but primarily safeguarding the revenues expected from the countryside.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ What were these revenues? Chaniotis’ examples tend to show cities taxing land in liminal and vulnerable locations. Therefore, they send armed men out for surveillance, to protect the crops and guard those bringing it in. The mountainous terrain of Asia Minor bore a different kind of fruit, which is probably why the oreinê chora (mountainous territory) is disputed in the aforementioned Syll.³ 633 (line 78). In certain seasons, this terrain surely bloomed, but the harvest that the orophylakes were responsible for was perennial. Since people and goods were always moving across the fiscal patchwork of Asia Minor, manning the interstices was always profitable. It seems reasonable to propose that the boundaries of horophylakeia could at times be fiscal. At least some of the revenue collection ensured by the Attalid orophylakes of Lycia was customs on goods transported in and out of the Pergamene exclave of Telmessos. Otherwise, the concern of Eumenes II (?) for the “public security” of the mountains of western Lycia is left curiously unmotivated.Footnote ¹⁵¹

The Attalids’ funding of these patrols is of a piece with their placement of groups of guards called paraphylakitai in permanent, fortified installations outside urban centers. In each case, the goal will have been to capture revenues from territorial surveillance. Our evidence from civic contexts is slightly more verbose on the subject. In late Hellenistic Pisidian Antioch, where the Attalids were active, a paraphylax was attached to the plain known as the Killanion Pedion (SEG XXXI 1201).Footnote ¹⁵² On this plain (Şarkikaraağaç), a mixed population of Phrygians and Pisidians worked grand estates. It also contained the city of Neapolis, an Attalid stronghold on the future Via Sebaste.Footnote ¹⁵³ Or consider that Termessos built (or rebuilt?) a paraphylakeion on a so-called royal road (basilikê hodos) (ca. 135 CE; TAM III 1 14 line 14). For cities, the point of these watches was to observe activity where revenues were at stake. It seems reasonable then to infer that, for their part, royal paraphylakitai were also guarding revenues linked to the topography of the kingdom. As in the case of the orophylakes, we should try to pin down which revenues they were guarding. The suspected Attalid paraphylakitai can be found in two places: the hinterland of Pergamon, and the Milyas. We have had occasion to mention the letter of Attalos II to Olbasa in the Milyas (SEG XLIV 1108). A second letter to an unnamed community was found nearby (SEG XLVIII 1532). It mentions basilikoi topoi (royal estates) and paraphylakitai (lines 5, 16). In part on grounds of epistolary style, Nicholas Milner suggests an Attalid author and so a date after 188, yet there is also a danger here of circular reasoning, as paraphylakitai come to stand in for the Attalids.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ From Alassos, also in the Milyas, another dedication of paraphylakitai has surfaced (SEG XLVII 1601).Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Finally, the city of Pergamon includes precisely such guards among those granted citizenship after 133 (I.Pergamon 249 lines 17–18).Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Unless a new source comes to light that describes the territorial charge of a group of Attalid paraphylakitai in the genitive case, à la the officer of Pisidian Antioch who watched over the Killanion Plain (Κιλλανί[ο]υ Πεδίου), we cannot pinpoint assignments. However, even if we knew in every case the name of the territory to which they were assigned, we would still need to explain the nature of the revenues that territorial control was meant to guarantee. The current scholarly bias leans toward landed wealth. For example, Brélaz suggests that the paraphylakitai of SEG XLVIII 1532 guarded royal estates, namely, the basilikoi topoi mentioned in the text.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Yet in that inscription, it is not possible to make out what if any relation these topoi have to the guards in question.

A consideration of the economic geography of the regions in which these inscriptions have come to light suggests that the Attalids used paraphylakitai to monitor taxable movement in the countryside. To start with the hinterland of Pergamon, which produced I.Pergamon 249: it was certainly linked in this period to a form of specialized pastoralism that fed the fabled textile production of the city.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ In fact, this is a pattern that we can also trace in the other large urban centers of western Asia Minor like Ephesus, Miletus, and Teos. Specialized pastoralism implies distinctive fiscal modalities, which is to say, it requires a great deal of moving first flocks and then semi-processed and finished textiles.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ This is why in a fourth-century synoikism document of Teos, a fiscal distinction is made between cloaks of Milesian wool that are imported to be sold and those that are brought into the city to be worked.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The density of connections formed by specialized pastoralism in western Asia Minor made surveillance of the pathways between cities, countryside, and markets a constant preoccupation. There was a palpable desire to be able to move animals and products, but also to observe others doing so – and to charge them for it. Thus it was useful for the Colophonian garrison commander who guarded the contested pass between Colophon and Lebedos (“Ta Stena”) to keep a pack of dogs.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The worry was not a surprise frontal assault. It was undetected movement through the pass. The paraphylakitai of the Pergamene citizenship grant are more likely to have monitored movement related to specialized pastoralism than agriculture on royal estates in the Kaikos Valley.

The other testimonia come from the Milyas, specifically from around Olbasa, in the Lysis Valley (Map 2.2). The mountainous Milyas region, in its geography and history very similar to Pisidia (to its east), separates the upper Maeander, that is, Laodikeia-on-the-Lykos and Apameia, from the coastal plain of Pamphylia. The Attalids were neither the first nor the last imperial power to sink resources into the region. Alexander had fought the Pisidians of Termessos for the narrows (stena) connecting the Milyas to Pamphylia.Footnote ¹⁶² Augustus would later found a colony on the site of Olbasa.Footnote ¹⁶³ The two regions that the Milyas could tie together, if so compelled by outside imperial powers, were in fact oriented in opposite directions: the Maeander Valley toward the Aegean and Pamphylia toward the Levant. In terms of the “natural” economic geography of Anatolia, the Milyas is not a vital link. Rather, the Attalids were interested in configuring it into one for profit. The resources of the fertile Lysis Valley notwithstanding, the strategic value of the region was enormous. Yet this was not simply a matter of being able to move armies through. Commerce between Pamphylia and the Attalids’ Aegean core was funneled through a series of rocky passes. The Attalid paraphylakitai of this region were not watching over out-of-the-way royal estates. The place was no longer out of the way, as was indicated by establishment of a cistophoric mint at Kormasa, on the eastern side of the Lysis, which Vulso had seized in 189 on his way from Termessos to Apameia.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Here, guards were tasked with monitoring an increasing volume of movement between these two great zones of exchange.

Map 2.2

Pisidia and the Milyas.

Indeed, along the passes that lead into and out of the western fringe of the Pamphylian Plain, archaeology has revealed a concerted buildup of fortifications, which seems to coincide with the arrival of the Attalids. Military historian F. E. Winter drew attention to the long wall at Kapıkaya, at the foot of the Güllük Dağı, a “Pamphylian Dema” as he called it, after the dragnet barrier in rural Attica.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Plausibly attributed to the Attalids, the wall would have controlled access between the Pamphylian Plain and the mountainous interior. For Eumenes II, the Kapıkaya wall could have secured a vital overland link between Lycian Telmessos and Pamphylia, crucial before the foundation of the seaport of Attaleia. As Winter emphasized, this was a wall designed to curtail movement, rather than heavy artillery, and, tellingly, he identified an adjoining structure still extant as a fortified Roman toll house. Stephen Mitchell has identified two further installations in the vicinity that may have served similar purposes. At Döşeme Boğazı (Klimax Pass), where a major Hellenistic artery and later the Via Sebaste passed in dramatic fashion into and out of the plain of Pamphylia, a fortress of Hellenistic date was discovered dominating the upper part of the site (Fig. 2.1).Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Further north, in a narrow plain below the Iron Age stronghold of Panemoteichos, Mitchell has also documented the impressive fortress on Ören Tepe, which he attributes to an aggressive Attalid intervention in the landscape.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The Sagalassos Survey has also studied several rural fortifications that may have functioned similarly, especially sites at Insuyu and one near Yarıköy.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Finally, one should note the fortification, in this period, of the site of Kelbessos, a so-called peripolion outpost also guarding access to the Pamphylia.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Granted territory on Anatolia’s southern shore, with its lucrative Levantine connections, the Attalids consolidated their winnings with infrastructure designed to monitor mobility.

Figure 2.1

The Roman Via Sebaste, retracing an earlier Attalid route, emerges from the Klimax Pass (Döşeme Boğazı) into the plain of Pamphylia. The adjacent building is Late Antique.

(author’s photo)

Centralizing Exchange

A focus on the indirect taxation of economic mobility dulled or obscured the imperial threat to civic identity. However, to meet its pressing need for revenue, the monarchy was still required to shine a light on a far greater number of taxable transactions. Preferring surgical interventions to coercion-heavy city building, the Attalids therefore directed the flow of mobility and concentrated exchange by shoring up old commercial centers and cultivating new ones. Apameia, in southwest Phrygia, is a signal case. As Kelainai, it had been a satrapal capital – an administrative center – but under the Attalids, it grew into what Strabo would call the greatest emporion of Asia after Ephesus, though Phrygia remained, as always, thinly urbanized (12.8.15). A recent analysis based on coin finds from the site helps us to see Apameia as a trans-Anatolian interchange in a highly integrated economy that linked Pergamon to Pisidia and to Pamphylia.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Another Phrygian example is the sanctuary of Pessinous, which Strabo tells us had by his time grown into a booming emporion (12.5.3). To a far greater degree than Apameia (modern Dinar), Pessinous has proven accessible to archaeologists, and it is now possible to date the emergence of the emporion to the second century BCE.Footnote ¹⁷¹ In other words, the Attalid age witnessed the birth of two enormous regional markets on the rural inland fringe of the kingdom. While strong royal connections are in evidence for both, the concentration of commercial exchange in Apameia and Pessinous surely had multiple causes. Across the entire rural southwest Taurus, we find many indications of a rupture in economic life at precisely this time – damaged agro-pastoralist relations and violent competition for resources fueled by and in turn contributing to migration, internal colonization, ethnogenesis, and the formation of a chain of rivalrous peer-polities.Footnote ¹⁷² Yet the Attalids, as imperial outsiders, figured to profit as the overlords of the newly commercialized regional economy’s two great centers.

By contrast, on the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, older entrepots were reorganized or received enhancements designed to funnel exchange into Pergamene harbors. Strabo tells us that Attalos II founded Attaleia in Pamphylia (14.4.1). There, the archaeological record for the Hellenistic period is just now emerging, but the site – previously occupied – soon became the principal port of the southern coast of Anatolia, the modern Antalya.Footnote ¹⁷³ A long-standing topographical problem relates to Strabo’s following comment that, nearby, Attalos also settled Korykos, “another katoikia, a fortress that shared its borders, and he cast a greater wall around (them both?)” (πολίχνιον ὅμορον, ἄλλην κατοικίαν καὶ μείζω περίβολον περιθέντος). One solution is to posit another Attalid foundation, but in Lycia, chalking it up to Strabo’s confusion. A second solution is to think of Korykos as a satellite military settlement of the entrepot of Attaleia, perhaps on the model of Telmessos and the Kardakon Kome.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Both of those solutions fit with behavior patterned elsewhere. What is in any case clear is that Attalid building activity in harbors always paired military with commercial considerations, though in practice they must have been closely intertwined. For example, Aeolian Elaia was a pre-dynastic maritime polis that under royal rule gave Pergamon access to the sea. Strabo’s description of the city as both a “naval station (naustathmon) of the Attalid kings” and a commercial harbor (limên) is reflected neatly in recent archaeological investigations that depict a seafront split by an extant partition wall (13.3.5).Footnote ¹⁷⁵ On a much larger scale, Attalid Ephesus was redesigned to serve the Pergamene navy, but when royal engineers dredged its harbors, Strabo tells us, it was also so that large merchant vessels (megalai holkades) could enter (14.1.24).Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The geographer thus confirms that one nonmilitary objective of the ambitious royal civil works project was to increase the volume of exchange focused in Ephesus.

The same interest in economic surveillance may also elucidate the poorly understood Attalid adventure in southeastern Thrace, especially along the route from the the Hellespont to the Hebros River – and also along the Propontic littoral to Byzantium. Where Europe met Asia, heavily trafficked land and sea routes promised a surefire source of revenue to any power that could wrangle a network of settlements and customs houses around them. Scholars have long argued over whether the polis of Bisanthe, known from the Athenian Tribute Lists, and the polis of Panion, not known from any contemporary documents, but thought to be a late Attalid foundation, were one and the same.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The crux of the problem is that at the modern village of Barbaros an inscription was found that records a dedication: “On behalf of King Eumenes, savior, benefactor, and founder of the city (ὑπὲρ βασιλέως|Εὐμένου σωτῆρος|καὶ εὐεργέτου καὶ|κτίστου τῆς πό|λεως)” (OGIS 301).Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Barbaros lies just 10 km south of Tekirdağ, the presumed site of ancient Bisanthe, on the Propontic littoral. Since the dedication for Eumenes does not record the name of the city in question, those who contend that Barbaros is the site of Panion use this inscription to make the case that it was an Attalid foundation. Alternatively, Barbaros may indeed be the site of Classical Bisanthe, but Eumenes simply refounded the city and changed its name. Indeed, there exist garbled shreds of evidence for the refoundation and renaming of Bisanthe, but as a different city, the unlocated Hellenopolis. That name rings of Pergamene Panhellenism, and histories of the Attalids typically make mention of the unresolved topographical problem, related to a confusion in the testimonia.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ We learn from the Apollodoros of Athens, active in the Library of Pergamon:

Topographers have looked for Hellenopolis in Asia Minor, specifically in Bithynia, which is to say, the Bithynia of Hellenistic geography, because of this gloss of Stephanos of Byzantium:

The meaning of “Bithynia” has not been sufficiently explored, nor the origin of Hellenopolis as a rebuilding (anoikismos) of “Bisalthe.” The linguistic phenomenon observed in the change from Bisanthe to Bisalthe is unremarkable.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ What we need is an historical context for the description of Hellenopolis as πόλις Βιθυνίας. This may come from tracing Stephanos’ sources. The Pergamene librarian Apollodoros did not describe the city in these terms, but rather Aelius Herodianus, an Antonine grammarian. Parts of Propontic Thrace belonged to the Roman province of Pontus and Bithynia from 74 BCE until the reign of Septimius Severus, and it is worth noting that Trajan assigned Byzantium to Bithynia. Still, it is difficult to understand how a place southwest of Perinthos, the capital of the Roman province of Thrace from 46 CE, could be described as Bithynian.Footnote ¹⁸¹ We are nevertheless left with the impression that an Attalid king refounded or reorganized settlement around Bisanthe. That the anoikismos of Hellenopolis also took place along the European shores of the Propontis seems likely given what we know of Attalid expansion across the Hellespont, ca. 148–133 BCE. Thanks to the work of David French on the early Roman roads of Asia Minor and Louisa Loukopoulou on the eastern boundaries of the Roman province of Macedonia, we can take the measure of late Pergamon’s European territories.Footnote ¹⁸² In addition to royal estates on the Thracian Chersonese (Gallipoli Peninsula), later known as the agri Attalici, there were also various territories under the authority of the “governor for the Chersonese and the places in Thrace” (στρατηγός τῆς Χερρονήσου καὶ τῶν κατὰ τὴν Θράικην τόπων)” (I.Sestos 1 line 13).Footnote ¹⁸³ These included all of the lowlands north and east of the Melas River (Kavak Deresi), up to the Kurudağ range, and would have included at different moments part of the territory of the Thracian Caeni around today’s Keşin. Toward the west, it extended along the Aegean coast to the territory of Ainos, and northeastward, it stretched along the Propontic littoral.

On the European side of the Hellespont, then, we must reckon with an indeterminate number of Pergamene projects, some of which seem to have fallen into oblivion with a major expansion of Thracian power seaward in the latter parts of the second century. However, this body of evidence still serves to elaborate the picture of Attalid activity in Propontic Thrace that we receive from reports of skirmishes with Prousias II and his allies the Caeni.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ This was not simply a matter of burnishing warrior credentials or protecting royal estates in the Chersonese. Rather, it was a concerted effort to build up the royal presence around the heavily commercialized Hellespont and Propontis, and as an inscription from Bizye in the Thracian plain may suggest, to expand the empire (archê) in the direction of continental Europe.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ For the most part, existing poleis seem to have been incorporated into the royal fiscal system, and we might see Attalos II in 167 at Rome requesting revenues from the port cities of Ainos and Maroneia – not political control.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ As Loukopoulou points out, the European bridgehead was also significantly expanded into resource-rich rural areas with populations afflicted by war and in need of resettlement.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ The fiscal exploitation of the Propontis was always contingent on the maintenance of a network of customs stations, which is evinced in the CLA’s special treatment of the region.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ All of the major poleis of the region possessed these outposts and indeed fought over them. Since Bisanthe/Panion – and perhaps also Hellenopolis – overlooked a commercial track that would later form the final extension of the Via Egnatia, we ought to consider the possibility that the Attalids sought their own network of positions in the region. This will have been an experiment in fiscal intensification that never quite got off the ground, leaving an incoherent mark on the historical record.

This chapter has offered a partial reconstruction of the Attalid fiscal system. The paucity of the evidence prevents us from providing the kind of snapshot of the forms, personnel, and levels of taxation for the Attalid kingdom that practitioners of the New Fiscal History have provided for many other premodern states. Yet those three questions guided the inquiry: Which taxes were collected? Who collected them? How much was collected? Direct taxes on the land, paid as the collective obligations of cities, katoikia-type towns, and smaller, dependent villages, were the bedrock of the system. It is instructive that these were in fact the only taxes mentioned in Antony’s caricature of the Attalid system. However, we have presented evidence for a variety of other levies. Direct taxes also fell on persons, though we cautioned against assuming, for the sake of a quantitative model, that the poll tax fell on everyone who was not a citizen of a polis. As for indirect taxes, the success of an imperial project turned on their collection, on the extent to which Pergamene tax men could blend into the background of economic life. For example, a sales tax must have existed, but it was not the agoranomia showcased in the Toriaion earmark. The Attalids demonstrated a preference for taxes on usage, collected in the saltpans and coastal lagoons of Priene and Ephesus, and for taxes on mobility, collected all across the fiscal patchwork of Anatolia. We also tried to demonstrate the speciousness of Antony’s claim of innocence in the offense of the Italian tax farmers. For a region that had not known Attalid tax farmers, the very insertion of an outsider into this traditional, socially embedded role was already an offense.

A model was also presented for the interaction between the royal fiscal authority and its subjects, a sketch of the rules of the game. Negotiation seems to have been appropriate – indeed, routine – around the collective tax assessment (timêma), precisely the place in the system where Antony alleged that the Attalids were unfairly transferring risk to the taxpayer. Just as in our examination of earmarking arrangements, we found much more room for negotiation than at first might meet the eye. In stark contrast, negotiation was out of the question when it came to delineating the categories of fiscality. These came from below, from the conceptual field of the polis, and, thereby, reinforced civic identity. Instinctively cautious and conservative in respecting categories of taxation, the Attalids hewed close to Seleukid precedent. The proposition may seem somewhat counterintuitive, as fiscality appears in the sources as a primary arena for the negotiation of sovereignty. Yet as Apollonios and Metropolis remind us with their complaint about the tax farmers, a ruler in this world was loath to be accused of inventing new taxes. However oppressive, royal fiscality remained a calque on civic, which ensured the survival of the latter. Therefore, pressed for revenues, the Attalids did not invent new fiscal categories to broaden the scope of taxation. They focused their energies instead on capturing more of those taxes that everyone already agreed were legitimate. As they always were in the premodern Mediterranean, these were chiefly indirect taxes on mobility and exchange. So the Attalids mustered the bodies and facilities necessary for surveillance, and they refounded or refurbished a network of entrepots to centralize exchange.