EDICT OF CAPITO ON MILITARY EXACTIONS AND ON FINANCIAL MATTERS
   
( December 7, AD 48 )
 
 
( Johnson, Coleman-Norton & Bourne, Ancient Roman Statutes, Austin, 1961, p. 146, n. 176 ).
 
 
      A copy of this edict with a covering letter both of the prefect and of the strategus was engraved on the walls of the great temple at Girgeh, Upper Egypt, where it was reported in 1821.
 
 
ENGLISH TRANSLATION.
 
 
      1) Gnaeus Vergilius Capito proclaims :
      2) For some time I have heard that unjust and unreasonable charges have been made by those persons who use their power shamelessly and with arrogant greed and recently I have come to know of it particularly by the protest of the Libyans : how, since persons in service extort with out fear, money is expended as dues for expenses and for their entertainment, charges which neither are allowed nor ought to be allowed, as well as charges made in the name of transport.
      3) Therefore, I order that those persons who travel through the nomes, whether infantry, cavalry, orderlies, centurions, tribunes, and all others, shall take nothing nor shall they exact transport, unless they have my official warrant ; that these travelers shall be given shelter only and shall exact nothing beyond that prescribed by Maximus. If anyone makes a payment or renders an account of a payment as given and exacts it from the State I shall exact from him ten times what he exacted from the nome, and to the informant I shall give fourfold from the property of the guilty person.
      4) The imperial scribes and the scribes of the villages and the scribes of the administrative districts of the nome shall make a declaration and report within sixty days, those in the Thebaid within four months, all charges against the nome, if any have been exacted illegally or otherwise, to the finance bureau and to Basilides, the imperial freedman in charge of the bureau, and they shall send auditors, that, if any account has been rendered illegally or if anything has been illegally exacted, I may correct it.
      5) Likewise it is my will that I shall be informed if any contributions have been given for the purchase of wheat or in lieu of billeting. For I have learned this for the first time, hearing it from others, that contrary to the imperial edict some have dared to exact billets or to take money in lieu of billeting . . .
      6) I have written in reply that the monthly accounts of the whole nome shall be posted in the metropolis, the village accounts in the villages, that anyone that wishes can inform against those persons that render false accounts. I also order the bankers of the nome to send to me a record of their accounts in money under classified headings . . . as well as to Basilides and to the auditors, that we may take them under consideration . . . and whatever is entered in the accounts by mistake the auditors shall report to the idiologus within the period specified by custom.
      7) Year 9 of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus, Choiak 11.