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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