Abstract
The article focuses on the permits required for the use of the cursus publicus during the 4th century CE. The central interest is to arrive at a precise definition for the document referred to in the sources as tractoria and its significance vis-à-vis the most common permit type, the evectio. Through a reassessment of existing explanations in previous scholarship and a review of the available documentary evidence, a novel definition is proposed: the tractoria’s primary purpose was to allow access to the (slower) vehicles of the cursus publicus (such as redae, angariae, mules, oxen); the evectio enabled users to use the cursus publicus at large. In all other regards, evectio and tractoria seem to have been identical. The results are then placed into the context of the development of the cursus publicus at the turn from the 3rd to the 4th century and the wider historical developments of the early 4th century.
© 2017 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Siglenverzeichnis
- Judeo-Greek wedding poems from the fifteenth century
- ‘Monks who are not priests do not have the power to bind and to loose’: the debate about confession in eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium
- Evectiones et tractoriae. Identifying the permits for the cursus publicus in the 4th century
- Recollection, reevaluation, distortion: Symeon Metaphrastes’ narrative techniques in retelling the history of iconoclasm
- Die „deutsche Spur“ in der altrussischen Erzählung über die Einnahme Konstantinopels durch die Kreuzritter
- Der neugefundene Text eines Briefes von Maximos Katelianos: noch eine Fälschung von Karl Benedikt Hase
- Makarios’ cycle of epigrams on the Psalms Bodleian Baroccianus 194
- Die Odysseeparaphrase des Demosthenes Thrax
- Astrology, piety and poverty: seven anonymous poems in Vaticanus gr. 743
- Alexandros von Nikaia als Bibelerklärer: ein neues Textstück eines unerkannten Exegeten (ediert aus dem Codex Vaticanus graecus 762)
- II. Abteilung
- III. Abteilung. Bibliographische Notizen und Mitteilungen
- Totentafel
- Autoren- und Herausgeberverzeichnis zu Band 109, Heft 1 und 2
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Siglenverzeichnis
- Judeo-Greek wedding poems from the fifteenth century
- ‘Monks who are not priests do not have the power to bind and to loose’: the debate about confession in eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium
- Evectiones et tractoriae. Identifying the permits for the cursus publicus in the 4th century
- Recollection, reevaluation, distortion: Symeon Metaphrastes’ narrative techniques in retelling the history of iconoclasm
- Die „deutsche Spur“ in der altrussischen Erzählung über die Einnahme Konstantinopels durch die Kreuzritter
- Der neugefundene Text eines Briefes von Maximos Katelianos: noch eine Fälschung von Karl Benedikt Hase
- Makarios’ cycle of epigrams on the Psalms Bodleian Baroccianus 194
- Die Odysseeparaphrase des Demosthenes Thrax
- Astrology, piety and poverty: seven anonymous poems in Vaticanus gr. 743
- Alexandros von Nikaia als Bibelerklärer: ein neues Textstück eines unerkannten Exegeten (ediert aus dem Codex Vaticanus graecus 762)
- II. Abteilung
- III. Abteilung. Bibliographische Notizen und Mitteilungen
- Totentafel
- Autoren- und Herausgeberverzeichnis zu Band 109, Heft 1 und 2