Leiden conventions rendered as EpiDoc: restorations as supplied(reason=lost), gaps as gap, abbreviations as expan(abbr+ex), omitted letters as supplied(reason=omitted), surplus as surplus, corrections as corr. Critical apparatus as listApp. The facing translation is div type=translation; the historical commentary is div type=commentary.
The Emperor Caes[ar] Vespasian Augustus, pontifex maximus, in the ninth year of tribunician power, eighteen times acclaimed imperator, consul for the eighth time, father of the fatherland, sends greeting to the quattuorviri and the decurions of the Saborenses.
Since you report that your weakness is pressed by many difficulties, I permit you to build your town, under my name, on the level ground, as you wish. The revenues which you say you received from the Divine Augustus, I uphold; if you wish to add any new ones, you will have to approach the proconsul about them — for, with no one to make answer, I can settle nothing. Your decree I received on the eighth day before the Kalends of August; the envoys I dismissed on the fourth day before the same Kalends. Farewell.
The duumvirs C. Cornelius Severus and M. Septimius Severus had this engraved on bronze at public expense.
The document opens as a letter — and the form is the genre's signature. After the emperor's full titulature comes the formula salutem dicit, ‘sends greeting’, and the named addressees: the quattuorviri and decurions of the Saborenses. An edict proclaims to all; a letter answers a particular correspondent (Crawford, in Girard & Senn, Les lois des Romains, no. 7).
The titulature dates the letter exactly to AD 77 — Vespasian's ninth tribunician year, eighth consulship. Sabora, a small town of Baetica, had sent a decree and an embassy to the emperor; the letter is his reply, and the town then cut it in bronze.
The reply is brief and businesslike, and answers three requests. The town, weak and ill-sited, may move down to the plain and rebuild — sub nomine meo, ‘under my name’, taking the Flavian name as its new title. The revenues it already holds from Augustus, Vespasian confirms. But new revenues he will not grant by letter: the town must go to the proconsul (Crawford, in Girard & Senn, no. 7).
The reason is a small masterpiece of imperial procedure: ego enim nullo respondente constituere nil possum — ‘for, with no one to make answer, I can settle nothing.’ A grant of new taxes touches other interests; the emperor will not decide it ex parte, without the other side heard. The letter then closes by dating its own diplomacy — the decree received, the envoys dismissed — and a single word, Valete, ‘Farewell’.
The bronze ends not with the emperor's words but with the town's. The two duumvirs, both named Severus, record that they had the letter cut in bronze publica pecunia, at public expense (Crawford, in Girard & Senn, no. 7).
That subscript is the whole point of the object. A letter is, in itself, ephemeral — a sheet that reaches one council. By engraving it on bronze the Saborenses turned a private reply into a permanent public title: proof, fixed in metal, of the emperor's leave to move their town and of the revenues he had confirmed. The document survives because a small Spanish town chose to make a monument of it.