Record of testamentary charities, in Latin, manuscript on bronze [Mediterranean, dated 209 AD.)]

Record of testamentary charities by different testators, made to freeborn legitimate and illegitimate boys and girls in set proportions by an established charitable foundation, according to the Roman laws of Septimus Severus, in Latin, manuscript in transitional script between square and rustic Latin capitals, on bronze tablet[Mediterranean (perhaps Spain, Italy or southern France), dated to the fourth day before the kalends of November in the consulship of Claudius Pompeianus and Lollianus Avitus (ie. 29 October 209)] Large bronze tablet with losses at edges and base, remains of inscription in single column of 13 lines of Roman capitals (each approximately 9mm. high, and these lines in three sections: the first recording the charitable gift, the second discussing the town council and recording the consulships, the third recording only the date), some surface scratches, else good condition, 222 by 142 by 5mm.; in fitted case Provenance: 1. Produced for display in either a public place or a temple. Reported in 1994 as "said to be from Spain", but, as Tomlin notes in a pers. comm. in 1997, one of the donors may be identifiable with a known early third-century official from Venafro in southern central Italy. Alternatively, the provenance of the item in the French trade opens the possibility that it may be from a site on the southern coastline of that country.2. Quaritch, London, acquired by them from the French trade immediately before December 1994. 3. Schøyen Collection, London and Oslo, their MS 1976, acquired from Quaritch. Text: When complete this tablet was most probably a public record of charitable gifts by a number of donors, erected as a permanent public record by the town in which it was displayed. Suetonius records the use of such tablets in his note of Vespasian's replacement of some 3000 tablets that had previously hung in the Capitoline Hill in Rome, but were destroyed during the fires at the end of Nero's reign. Their inscription on bronze conveyed authority and permanence, and some national lawcodes, such as the Icilian Law hung in the Temple of Diana on the Aventine, and civic land registers such as those recorded at Orange in south-eastern France, were produced in that format to impart those qualities to their contents. The charitable acts recorded here must have been held in the same regard by the community that produced this grand record of them. The text of this record was reconstructed and published by Tomlin in 2000. Published:R.S.O. Tomlin, 'An Early Third-Century Alimentary Foundation', Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 129 (2000), pp. 287-292.P. Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire, 2002, p. 115, no. 15.E.A. Hemelrijk, Hidden Lives, Public Personae: Women and Civic Life in the Roman West, 2015, p. 149.C. Laes, Children in the Roman Empire: Outsiders Within, 2006, p. 280.