CONCLUSIONS: PURPLE-MERCHANT'S WIFE AND SISTER-IN-LAW

Why would Eulogios and his brethren, Tapia and other members of Patermouthis’ clan choose for their financial affairs the form of a fictitious sale, rather than an ordinary loan secured by an ordinary pledge, a transac­tion still very well attested in the later Byzantine papyri (even in the same archive, we find examples of a typical mortgage)?^[498]

We may of course only speculate as to their intentions.

Before an attempt at conclusion, let me have a look at just two instances, very late Greek and Coptic, of these ‘conventional’ pledges.

One of the first editions of papyri, P. Paris, offers under nos 20, 21, 21 bis and 22ter and on the following pages seven documents related to the same person, a purple-merchant Aurelios Pachymios, son of Psates.^[502] P. Paris 21ter is a deed of sale concluded in Panopolis on 13 July 599 between the protagonist of the archive, Pachymes and his wife Aurelia Maria, on one side, and his brother-in-law Arsenios, on the other.^[503] The couple acquire from their brother (-in-law) a third share in the house, formerly belonging to Kallinikos and Eugenia, the late parents of Arsenios and Maria, for 2 solidi.

On the very next day Aurelia Maria rents the whole house to Theodoros, a purple-dyer, like her husband, for four gold keratia per year (SB I 5286). The object of rent is described as belonging to her: ‘the whole house belong­ing to you with the upper and lower part and with its rightly befalling to it’.^[507] Aurelia Maria behaves as if she were the real owner of the house; furthermore, the antichresis terms allow her to live and to use the house but do not specify the right to let it. Karolien Geens suggests that Ioanna’s loan is a hidden sale.^[508] I do not find this convincing. First of all, the price is way too low.^[509] It is only the two thirds of a solidus as opposed to two solidi paid to their common brother seven years earlier for exactly same share of the house. Secondly, why would the parties want to hide a sale? In fact, in order to be able to sell the place further, Maria would have had to present the pur­chaser the deed confirming her property rights, and this she had not done. These two documents, I presume, prove something else: it seems that in these very late deeds the constitution of a pledge vested in the pledgee quasi owner-like rights, among them the right to dispose.^[510]

Let us turn now to the practice of pledges in Coptic documents.

What does it all lead to? Firstly, we may have observed that the form of the pledge in late Antique times did not really follow the pure pattern of the classical Roman law forms of pignus and hypotheca. The boundaries between property rights and the rights vested with the pledgee became less and less visible, and they became more and more alike. Secondly, in our examples, the family relations of Aurelia Tapia, the special character of the monastic communities, made for an important factor of trust between the parties that possibly induced the debtors to agree to what would otherwise be considered harsh conditions of their loan securities. This trust founda­tion, moreover, seems to have worked fine, notwithstanding the tempestu­ous litigations between Tapia and her son. In these contexts, such securities must have safeguarded not just the repayment of the money but possibly the personal relationship between the parties involved. And thirdly, also given the above, the economic reality of money buying and lending led people to search for more forms of securing debts. In each particular case, the interest of the creditor and debtor was weighted, in order to tailor the form of real security that suited them best.