RESCRIPT OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS AND CARACALLA
  
ON THE VOLUNTARY SURRENDER OF PROPERTY
   
( March 27-April 25, AD 201 )
 
 
( Johnson, Coleman-Norton & Bourne, Ancient Roman Statutes, Austin, 1961, p. 222, n. 271 ).
 
 
      This rescript deals with cessio bonorum, which may imply either the voluntary surrender of property in bankruptcy or the Greek practice that when a person thought that he had been nominated to a public liturgy unfairly or out of turn, he could nominate another candidate. If the latter refused, he could offer an exchange of property, in Attic law called antidosis. Such an offer was made at Hermopolis some fifty years later (CPR 20 ; Wilcken, Chrest. 402), when the person making the surrender was entitled to retain a third of the income for his personal expenses. Presumably this surrender was not a permanent transfer of title, but the transferee could use the income for the performance of the liturgy in question.
      This document on papyrus is fragmentary and the only part that offers connected sense is translated. It was reported in 1898.
 
 
ENGLISH TRANSLATION.
 
 
      Emperor Caesar Lucius Septimius Severus Pius Pertinax Arabicus Adiabenicus Parthicus Maximus and Emperor Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Pius, Augusti . . .
      The law has been established by the godlike constitutions that those persons who make a surrender of their property cannot be held for public services or for private contracts nor can they be held for any other payments, but are released . . . on account of their gift of money . . .
       Year 8, Pharmuthi . . .
       Farewell.
      Aurelius Apollonius and Soter, the strategus . . .