On Dressel 20 and Beyond: Management, Punishment and Protection in the Context of Roman Imperial Oil Distribution

Abstract

All along the Roman Empire, Baetica was known to have exported huge quantities of oil to Rome from the age of Augustus onwards in the Dressel 20 amphora. The inscriptions written on these amphorae varied across time, according to the way that the distribution was organised and financed. For many years, these inscriptions were only considered under the focus of the Roman government, diminishing the importance of private subjects in distribution, and ignoring the role of the locationes or contracts by which these goods were collected and distributed. The aims of these agreements were to keep imperial involvement in these ventures but entrusting much of the work to private entrepreneurs or contractors. The inscriptions of products addressed to public supply reveal a large network, which ensured that the tasks agreed for gathering and shipping the goods were performed through a well-organised administrative machinery. Thus, the study of Dressel 20's epigraphy reveals economic phenomena taking place in particular moments of the Empire and help us understand the management of their distribution and the logic of the operations lying behind their inscriptions.

Shipwrecks, Legal Landscapes and Mediterranean Paradigms

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