An Imperial Slave and a Freedman (not) from Livorno: Notes on an Almost Recovered Fragment and on the tabularius sacrarum pecuniarum provinciae Cretae

Abstract

In an article that appeared in the Florentine newspaper “La Nazione” in 1883, an epigraphic fragment and an inscription were described. Both documents are now lost, but at the time they were preserved in Livorno, where they may have arrived due to antiquarian collecting. For the fragment, it seems possible to identify a publication of a scientific nature a few decades later, but in a different form from that of the first mention. The second document instead, a funerary inscription commissioned by an imperial freedman for his alumnus, constitutes the only attestation of a tabularius sacrarum pecuniarum provinciae Cretae. The analysis of the use of the locution sacrae pecuniae in other epigraphic sources and in the Cretan context leads us to believe that this office, long related to the administration of imperial property on the Aegean island, is instead to be considered as a specificity of that province, where the use by the imperial authority of funds belonging to temples or sanctuaries for the realisation of works of public utility is attested.