120 EDwARD M. HARRIS
of walls within one foot and buildings within two feet of another man’s land;
beehives were to be placed at least 300 feet away from existing beehives (Plut.
Sol. 23.6; Dig. 10.1.3). There appear to have been similar rules in Ptolemaic
Alexandria during the third century BCE.^26 A stele from Thasos dated to the
early fifth century BCE contains regulations for a road leading to the sanctu-
ary of the Graces, which required inhabitants to keep the area in front of their
houses clean and forbid them from pouring water from their balconies into
the street.^27 A detailed set of regulations from Pergamon from the period of the
Attalids places many restrictions on homeowners. Some concern the repair of
party-walls; others require owners to keep cisterns watertight.^28 Even though
the restrictions on owners may have varied from one community to another,
the basic rights of owners were the same throughout the ancient Greek world.
Greeks, like people everywhere, shared a common understanding of the con-
cept of ownership. Without such an understanding, it would have been impos-
sible for economic agents to negotiate with each other.
To protect the rights of ownership the Greeks realized that it was important
to maintain public records.^29 In his Laws (741c, 745c-d) Plato proposes that
officials inscribe the allotments of land on tablets of cypress-wood to create
written records for future reference, and place them in the shrines. These allot-
ments were to be permanent and could not be used as collateral to contract
loans, but Plato also proposes that any property acquired beyond the original
allotment, which could be alienated, should also be registered: ‘All the prop-
erty of every man over and above his allotment shall be publicly written out
and be in the keeping of the magistrates appointed by law, so that law-suits
pertaining to money may be easy to decide and very clear.’ What is interesting
to note here is the purpose of these records: they are not kept for tax purposes
but to help decide lawsuits and to protect the rights of owners. Now of course,
the state of Magnesia described in the Laws is an ideal state.^30 In his Politics,
however, Aristotle was attempting to describe the standard features of Greek
city-states in his own day. He says that one of the regular offices found in a
community is one having responsibility for records about property: ‘Another
magistracy very closely connected with this one is the supervision of public
and private properties in the city, to secure good order and the preservation
and rectification of falling buildings and roads, and of the boundaries between
different persons’ properties, so that disputes may not arise about them, and all
the other duties of supervision similar to these’ (Pol. 1321b18-23). Once more,
the purpose of these records is not to help the state to collect taxes but to
make it easier to resolve disputes between individuals, in other words, to secure
the rights of private owners. In another passage, Aristotle stresses the need to
maintain records about legal relationships between individuals and court deci-
sions, which could be used as evidence in court to prove title (Pol. 1331b6-11).
An entry in the lexicon of Hesychius (s.v. ἐν λευκώμασι) reports: ‘It was