Marcus Mettius Rufus
Marcus Mettius Rufus was a Roman
Career
While it can be assumed Mettius Rufus passed through the tres militiae, the first steps of every equestrian career, the earliest office Rufus is known to have held was praefectus annonae at some point prior to 88. This person was in charge of the public dole of bread to the inhabitants of Rome. He is attested as holding the office of praefectus of Egypt from some point before 2 August 89 (his predecessor is last attested in office 26 February 88) to some point after 12 July 90 (his successor is first attested on 14 March 92).[3]
His primary concern as governor of Egypt was to safeguard the harvest and delivery of grain to the populace of Rome, but surviving letters from his administration show his responsibilities extended further. One records an edict he issued on 1 October 89 for the inhabitants of Roman Egypt: having learned that records of property ownership were allowed to become so out of date as to be unusable, Rufus issued an edict that all property owners register the lands they owned within the next six months, and that legal clerks tighten their processes for updating property records accordingly, as well as revise the records at least once every five years.[4] The motivation for his edict may have been that the 14-year tax cycle for the province fell in that year.[5]
Another record concerns the administration of the trade route between
References
- ^ Bernard Rémy, Les carrières sénatoriales dans les provinces romaines d'Anatolie au Haut-Empire (31 av. J.-C. - 284 ap. J.-C.) (Istanbul: Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes-Georges Dumézil, 1989), p. 292
- ^ Rémy, Les carrières sénatoriales, p. 293
- ^ Guido Bastianini, "Lista dei prefetti d'Egitto dal 30a al 299p", Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 17 (1975), pp. 277-278
- A. S. Huntand C.C. Edgar, Select Papyri, II. Non-literary Papyri. Public Documents (London: Loeb, 1932), pp. 104-109 no. 219
- ^ Richard Duncan-Jones, Money and government in the Roman empire (Cambridge: University Press, 1994), p. 61
- OGISii.674. English translation in Robert K. Sherk, The Roman Empire: Augustus to Hadrian (Cambridge: University Press, 1988), p. 107