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The Aljustrel Bronzes

Two inscribed bronzes from the Roman mining district of Vipasca (Aljustrel, Portugal) preserve the operating rules of an imperial mineral domain — auction dues and the bath concession, pit claims and partnership shares, ore policing, timbering, and the setbacks that protected the drainage adit. This edition prints the Latin, an English translation and a Chinese translation with every editorial restoration bracketed in all three, and keeps the three long-standing interpretive disputes open on the page. 葡萄牙阿尔茹斯特雷尔(Aljustrel)出土的两方罗马铜表,载有维帕斯卡矿区(metallum Vipascense)的成文规章:拍卖捐税与浴场承包、矿井占有与合伙份额、矿石查缉、坑木支护,以及为保护排水坑道而定的间距。本版并列拉丁原文、英译与中译,三种文本中编者补字一律以方括号标出,并把三处长期未决的解释争议摊开陈列。

The Edition

Vipasca I and Vipasca II unit by unit — Latin, English, 中文, apparatus, glossary, witnesses and images, with a certainty view that dims what editors supplied. 校勘读本 · 拉丁/英/中三栏并列

Clause Matrix

One row per rule: the regulatory architecture and its enforcement devices, filterable, each row jumping to the unit it summarises. 条款矩阵 · 逐条法律地图

Vipasca in the Production Ecology

The district modelled among the Roman production centres — the fiscal, productive and infrastructural axes read off the clause ids. 生产生态中的维帕斯卡 · 矿区模型

Audit Dossier

The working edition and audit companion: witness register, collation state, certainty policy, and the record of where the secondary literature disagrees. 审校卷宗 · 见证登记与异说记录

What the bronzes are

Vipasca I — lex metalli Vipascensis
One bronze plate engraved on both faces, with nine surviving chapters. Each face carries 52 physical lines, and the same regulatory sequence runs across both, beginning and ending at different points, so that each face supplies what the other has lost. Editors splice the two witnesses into a conventional composite of about 60 lines: a reference such as “C57” is a position in that editorial composite, and no face of the plate has a fifty-seventh line. The chapters regulate the one-percent auction charge, the crier, the bath, shoemakers, barbers, fullers, the working of slag and stone, schoolmasters, and the register of pit claims. Older descriptions that make it two independent bronzes, or that raise the chapter count into the thirties, do not match the object. 一整块两面刻写的铜板,现存九章。每面刻 52 行;同一套规章在两面上均有刻写,起讫处不同,两面互补所缺。校勘者遂将两面拼合为约 60 行的编者合成本:C1–C60 系合成本行号,铜板任何一面都没有第 57 行。诸章所规范者为百一拍卖捐、唱卖人、浴场、鞋履匠、理发匠、漂洗匠、矿渣与石料加工、塾师,以及矿井占有的登记簿。旧说以之为两块各自独立的铜板,或将章数计至三十余,均与实物不合。
Vipasca II — lex metallis dicta
A one-sided fragment in a single column of 46 physical lines, naming the living sacratissimus imperator Hadrianus Augustus and therefore promulgated between 117 and 138 CE. Its first preserved words continue a salutation to Ulpius Aelianus; its last line breaks off inside the rules on the drainage adit. Both ends are lost, together with an unknown quantity of text before and after them. Its rules cover payment for fiscal rights, continuous working, partners, transfer of shares, ore movement and theft, shaft safety, and protection of the adit. 单面残片,单栏 46 行,文中称在位之 sacratissimus imperator Hadrianus Augustus,故其颁行在公元 117 至 138 年间。首存之语承接致 Ulpius Aelianus 的问候,末行断于排水坑道条款之中。首尾俱失,其前后所佚之量不可知。所载规则涉及府库权益的价金、持续开采、合伙人、份额转让、矿石搬运与盗窃、井下安全,以及坑道的保护。
Two documents, not one running text
Vipasca I is CIL II 5181 = ILS 6891 = FIRA² I 105; Vipasca II is AE 1906, 151 = FIRA² I 104. The FIRA numbering runs opposite to the conventional tablet order and is easy to reverse, so this edition always names the tablet as well as the number. The two bronzes are separate documents of different date and different scope; what survives does not run continuously from one into the other. Vipasca I 为 CIL II 5181 = ILS 6891 = FIRA² I 105;Vipasca II 为 AE 1906, 151 = FIRA² I 104。FIRA 编号与铜表的习惯次序相反,极易互换,故本版凡引编号必同时标明铜表名。二者为年代与范围各异的独立文书,现存文字并不自其一连贯读入其二。
The district
The fiscus controlled the mineral territory through a procurator metallorum. Within it, occupatores took up claims, coloni worked or held pits, partners contributed expenses in proportion to their shares, and registered shares could be sold or given away under restrictions. Contractors and their agents farmed the dues and the essential services. What the tablets show is an imperial resource domain administered through licensed, capital-bearing operators and revenue concessions. 元首府库(fiscus)通过矿务监管(procurator metallorum)控制该矿区。区内由占有人(occupatores)提出矿权主张,矿场经营人(coloni)开采或持有矿井,合伙人按份分担费用,已登记的份额得依限制出售或赠与。承包人及其代理人包收捐税与承办必需之公共服务。铜表所呈现者,是一片经由领照且自负资本的经营者与包收特许而治理的元首资源领域。

The three cruxes

Some of the best-known claims about Vipasca rest on disputed supplements rather than on surviving letters. The edition prints each serious alternative in the apparatus and marks which restoration a reading depends on. 关于维帕斯卡的若干著名论断,所据者为有争议的补字,而非铜板上现存的字母。本版于校勘记中并列各家可采之异说,并标明每一读法所依赖的补字。

A · What was the centesima argentariae stipulationis?

A one-percent auction tax farmed out to a conductor, or a banker's and auctioneer's service commission. The choice is entangled with the restorations in Vipasca I lines 1–6 — uenditionum against stipulationum, ab emptore accipito against ne exigito — and with the opaque phrase summa excepta in auctione. 其一,包与承包人(conductor)征收的百分之一拍卖捐;其二,银钱业者与唱卖人的服务佣金。此一取舍系于 Vipasca I 第 1–6 行的补字(uenditionum 抑或 stipulationumab emptore accipito 抑或 ne exigito),以及 summa excepta in auctione 一语的晦义。

B · What did the fisc's pars dimidia mean?

One reconstruction keeps the fisc entitled to half the ore as it is extracted. Another treats the fiscal half as an alienable interest sold to the first qualified payer, after which the price, rather than a perpetual share of output, remunerates the fisc — a reading supported by Vipasca II's proprietas, emerint, pretium solverint, and its registered resales. The rule that a fiscally sold pit may be reoccupied after six months' interruption “so that the half-share is preserved to the fisc” resists both simplifications; the fragment appears to contain more than one acquisition route. The HS 4,000 of §2 is disputed in the same way — a complete price, an initial payment within a larger process, or a Hadrianic concession for silver pits. 一说以元首府库对采出矿石之半保有持续请求权。另一说以府库之半份权益(pars dimidia)为可让与之权益,售予首位合格缴款人,此后酬偿府库者为价金,而非永续之产出分成——Vipasca II 中 proprietasemerintpretium solverint 及登记转售诸语,均支持此读。而“凡经府库出售之矿井,停工六月后得由他人再行占有,俾采出矿石时半份权益仍归府库”一条,两说皆难消解;残片所载取得途径似不止一种。第二节之 HS 4,000 同在争议之列:或为足额价金,或为更大价金程序中的初付,或为哈德良对银矿井的特许。

C · Was the lex metallis dicta general or local?

Vipasca I, chapter 9, directs occupation e lege metallis dicta, and Vipasca II refers to what is contained hac lege. Domergue read a broadly applicable imperial mining law adapted and updated for local use. Others weigh the site-specific copper and silver distances, the adit engineering and the district administration, and prefer a local or regional ordinance. The genre is clear — an administratively dictated regulation for a resource domain. The geographical reach is a hypothesis and is labelled as one. Vipasca I 第九章命依 e lege metallis dicta 行占有,Vipasca II 则称 hac lege 所载。Domergue 读之为通行于帝国、经地方改订增修的矿业法。他家则重铜矿井与银矿井间距之因地而设、坑道工程与矿区行政之具体,倾向于视之为地方或区域规章。其文体明确:为资源领域行政颁定的规章。其地域效力范围则属假说,本版亦以假说标之。

Four layers are kept apart throughout: what is physically preserved on the bronze, what editors restore in the lacunae, what a deliberately literal translation can say, and what historians and Roman lawyers infer from the restored text. Phrases such as “extraterritorial district”, “thousands of slave mineworkers”, “an empire-wide mining code”, and “complete private ownership after a one-time buyout” belong to the fourth layer and are marked as interpretation wherever they appear. 全书始终区分四层:铜板上物理存留者、编者于缺文处所补者、刻意直译所能表达者,以及史家与罗马法学者据补足文本所推论者。“治外法权矿区”“数以千计的奴隶矿工”“帝国通行的矿业法典”“一次买断后的完全私有”诸语属第四层,凡出现处一律标为解释。

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