Reflections on Some New Accounts from the Sixth-Century Apion Estate

The forthcoming volume of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (no. 84) will include more than a dozen accounts relating to the agricultural estate of the Flavii Apiones, a prominent senatorial family of the sixth century with extensive landholdings in Oxyrhynchus. This is the largest number of accounts published from the Apion archive since P.Oxy. 16 in 1924 and invites a reevaluation of our assumptions about the economy and workings of this important estate. This paper will summarize some of the new information provided by these documents and will offer some reflections on the ‘macro-level’ figures for the estate’s annual income and expenditure in grain.