Violence in Roman Egypt. Ari Z. Bryen

      The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life

      Pain may be a human universal; writing about one’s own pain is not. When historians see individuals transforming pain into narratives that complain about neighbors, local officials, or family members, we would do well to pay attention. These narratives about pain and injury invite a series of questions: What can we learn from the ways that people experience, describe, and complain about violation, pain, and injury? In what ways, and under what circumstances, can we use a narrative about violence to give an account of the ways in which non-elite individuals theorized their own behaviors? In what ways can accounts of pain—and the redemption and socialization of pain through petitions—contribute to a historical account of empires?

      These questions are hardly unique to the ancient world. And they are tricky enough for social historians, especially those of an anthropological bent. They become yet more complex when we have to take into account that, in the Roman world at least, we have our accounts of pain and violation only because they have been mediated through legal structures. This is so not only in the narrow sense that these narratives were attempts to participate in the legal arena by asking authorities to judge and punish violators, but in the broader sense that the practice of defining what counts as a violation was already contingent on particular sets of legal categories. This fact of legal mediation in the writing of non-elite history is thereby complicated not only because a layer has been added to the analysis, but also because such a history runs up against a deep and persistent disciplinary division.

      In the historical tradition, one might say, individuals exist in the subjunctive, always as an endless series of possibilities, capacities, and complexities; law exists in the imperative, a series of commands, reductive and violent. Individuals make their world within dense and overlapping reciprocal networks; within these networks they share stories, rituals, gods, meals, and families. Law reduces networks to flowcharts of authority, abstracting those within the networks and treating them as replaceable units of analysis. Individuals exist in time and space; law tries its best to develop an allergy to such categories. The project, then, would seem to be built on a fundamental tension between two different visions of how to map the social world, and the histories