On 16 March AD 208, Lucius Marius Maximus, governor of Syria Coele (the northernmost of the three Syrian provinces), wrote to a certain Ulpius Valentinus at Dura-Europos, 500 km down the Euphrates. The reason for his letter was the assigning of “a horse, four years old, reddish, masked, without a brand, approved by me, to Julius Bassus, a cavalryman in the Twentieth Cohort of Palmyrenes which you command, at a cost of 125 denarii” (P Dura 56A).
It is astonishing that such a high-ranking official would concern himself with the approval of a humble cavalryman’s mount. But it is clear from the cohort’s archive at Dura-Europos that the horses, just as much as the men, were carefully logged and accounted for. A fragmentary papyrus, probably dating to AD 251, gives us an insight into the unusual level of detail demanded by the Roman military bureaucracy. It is a list of twenty cavalrymen along with the status of their respective horses ( 97). As the papyrus is incomplete, it may represent the report (‘troop’), which ought to comprise 30 men.
