Questions and Feedback
Thank you for completing the online survey! Hopefully, the experience
of reading this text was informational and enjoyable. Below are
some questions about the text you've just seen.
Questions to think about:
1. Why do you suppose this soldier needed to borrow money? Soldiers
were paid their stipendia every three months, and since
the soldier in question was a low-ranking miles, he would
have recieved the base stipendium of 75 denarii (300 denarii per
year). Unfortunately, the part of the papyrus indicating the amount
of the loan is lost.
2. In contrast to earlier editors, Bruckner and Marichal seem to
think that line 7 is written by the same person who wrote the body
of the contract, citing similarities between letter shapes. Do you
agree or disagree? Consider not only the palaeographic evidence
(the handwriting style) but also the place of this line and its
role in the contract.
3. Although Latin papyri from Egypt are rare, this type of Roman
cursive hand is also found in the Vindolanda tablets—wooden
tablets found in a Roman fort along Hadrian's wall in Britain. For
more on the Vindolanda tablets, visit their website at vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk.
This site also offers visitors the chance to try to read
some of the tablets themselves.
4. For more examples of this type of papyrus, see this list
of acknowledgments in the APIS database. Or, to see examples
of other types of documentary papyri, browse
the list of papyrus subjects.
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