In what wasn’t exactly the tax evasion trial of the century – given that it took place in the second century – the charges faced by the defendants were so weighty that they included forgery, financial fraud, and fraudulent slave sales. While tax evasion is an age-old practice, these particular crimes were deemed extremely serious under Roman law, with penalties ranging from hefty fines and lifelong exile to grueling labor and, in the most severe cases, being devoured by wild animals in a practice known as damnatio ad bestias.

The details of the allegations were recorded on papyrus, which was discovered decades ago in the Judean Desert and recently subjected to analysis. The documentation includes preliminary notes for the prosecutor and hastily drafted minutes from the judicial hearings. According to the ancient records, the tax evasion schemes involved document tampering, illicit slave sales, and manumission.

The accused in both tax cases were men. One of them, Gadalius, was the son of a poor notary who had ties to the local administrative elite. In addition to convictions for extortion and forgery, his extensive list of transgressions included banditry, incitement, and four appearances in court for tax evasion before the Roman governor. Gadalius’s partner in crime was a certain Saurus, identified as his “friends and collaborators,” and the mastermind Caper. While the ethnicity of the accused is not explicitly mentioned, their Jewish background is inferred from their biblical names Gedaliah and Saul.

This ancient legal saga unfolded during the reign of Hadrian, around the year 130 AD or possibly before 132 AD when Simon Bar Kochiba, the leader of the Messianic rebels, launched a large-scale uprising, marking the third and final conflict between the Jewish people and the Empire. The rebellion was brutally suppressed, resulting in hundreds of thousands of casualties, mass expulsions of Jewish communities, and the renaming of Syria and Palestine by Hadrian.

Anna Dolganov, a historian of the Roman Empire at the Austrian Archaeological Institute who deciphered the scroll, remarked, “The papyrus sheds light on the Roman authorities’ suspicion of their Jewish subjects.” She pointed out that there is archaeological evidence of a coordinated effort during the Bar Kochiba rebellion. “It is plausible that individuals like Gadalia and Saurus, who sought to subvert Roman rule through tax evasion, were involved in the uprising’s planning,” Dr. Dolganov suggested.

In the latest edition of Tyche, an ancient journal published by the University of Vienna, Dr. Dolganov and three colleagues from Austria and Israel present court proceedings as case studies. Their research unveils how Roman institutions and imperial law influenced the administration of justice in an environment with relatively few Roman citizens.

“This document provides intriguing and valuable insights into the slave trade in this region of the empire,” noted Dennis P. Kehoe, a classicist at Tulane University not involved in the study. “The allegations may involve the Jews owning slaves.”

Tracing the Papil Trail

The exact date and location of the papyrus’s discovery remain uncertain, but Dr. Dolganov suggested it was found by an ancient Bedouin dealer in the 1950s. She suspected Nahal Haver, a steep canyon west of the Dead Sea where Bar Kochiba rebels sought refuge in a cave hid along the natural fault line of a limestone cliff. In 1960, archaeologists unearthed documents from the era in one of the Jewish hideouts, with more discoveries made since then.

A 133-line irregular scroll, initially misclassified, went unnoticed in the Israeli Antiquities Authority archives until 2014 when Hannah Cotton Parietl, a classicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, identified it as being written in ancient Greek. Given the complexity and exceptional length of the document, a team of scholars was assembled to conduct detailed physical examinations and cross-referencing with historical sources.

Deciphering the papyrus and piecing together its intricate narrative posed a significant challenge for Dr. Dolganov. “The text features small, densely packed letters and highly rhetorical Greek replete with technical legal terminology,” she remarked. Unlike more straightforward documents such as contracts, there were no standardized templates for translation ease. “The fact that we only have the latter half of the original text further complicates matters,” Dr. Dolganov added.

Researchers speculated that the tax evasion scheme aimed to circumvent official scrutiny. This necessitated meticulous detective work to decipher the sequence of events. “I had to adopt the Roman fiscal authorities’ perspective to grasp the text’s nuances,” Dr. Dolganov explained. She also had to step into the accused’s shoes to understand the rationale behind tax fraud in the remote fringes of the Roman world.

The ancient stratagems resonate with contemporary tax experts. A German legal expert relayed to Dr. Dolganov that the subterfuges of Gadalius and Saurus mirrored present-day practices of tax evasion, such as asset shifting and fictitious transactions. The Roman interrogation methods aligned closely with modern-day investigative custody for financial crimes, marked by intimidation and frequently rigorous questioning.

A Princeton University classicist unaffiliated with the project, Brent Shaw, remarked:

Championing a Rebellion

The cases against Gadalius and Saurus were bolstered by intelligence provided by informants who betrayed them to the Roman authorities. Interestingly, the text implies that the informer might have been none other than Saurus himself, who implicated his partners to shield himself from an imminent financial scrutiny. The most plausible scenario posits that Saurus, a Jewish resident, orchestrated the pseudo-sale of several slaves to Chareas, a neighbor residing in the adjacent Arabian province, as per Dr. Dolganov’s interpretation.

By selling slaves across provincial borders, Saurus sought to obfuscate assets from scrutiny. While physically present in Saurus’s custody, the slaves, undocumented in Arabia, evaded declaration by Chareas. “Effectively, the slaves vanished on paper from Judea and never materialized in Arabia, eluding Roman oversight,” Dr. Dolganov noted. “This ensured that no further taxes were levied on these slaves.”

The Empire implemented a sophisticated system for monitoring slave ownership and collecting various levies, including a 4% tax on slave sales and a 5% duty on estates. “To emancipate empire-owned slaves, detailed documentary evidence of current and prior ownership was mandatory,” Dr. Dolganov elucidated. “Any missing or dubious documents would trigger an inquiry by Roman administrators.”

In an attempt to conceal Saurus’s double-dealings, Gadalius, the son of a notary, allegedly fabricated bills of sale and other legal documents. When authorities detected irregularities, the defendant purportedly bribed the local municipal council for protection. During the trial, Gadalius shifted blame onto his deceased father for the forgeries, while Saurus implicated Chaireas in the document tampering. The papyrus does not provide insights into their motives. “The rationale behind men risking forgery to liberate slaves without legitimate documentation remains a mystery,” Dr. Dolganov mused.

One conjecture posits that by orchestrating fake slave sales followed by manumission, Gadalis and Saurus may have been adhering to a Jewish religious mandate to free those enslaved. Alternatively, there might have been a profit incentive in capturing individuals across borders, potentially entrenching them as free Romans after freeing them from “enslavement.” Or Gadalia and Saurus might have engaged in human trafficking, a possibility that is as speculative as it is fraught with implications, Dr. Dolganov emphasized.

One aspect of the trial that struck Dr. Dolganov was the prosecutor’s professionalism. Employing sophisticated rhetorical strategies reminiscent of Cicero and Quintilian, the prosecutor exhibited a mastery of Roman legal terminology and concepts in Greek. “Here, on the edge of the Roman Empire, we witness a highly skilled legal practitioner steeped in Roman law,” Dr. Dolganov remarked.

The papyrus does not reveal the final verdict. “If a Roman judge deemed these men as incorrigible criminals deserving execution, Gadalius, as a member of the local elite, might have met a more merciful end through decapitation,” Dr. Dolganov suggested. “In any case, it beats being torn apart by a leopard.”