Violence in Roman Egypt. Ari Z. Bryen
shame about their penchant for violence. Accordingly, in the Roman tradition the Egyptians are also famous bandits (or famous for their bandits), who play a feature role in Lucian’s Toxaris and a bit part in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius (3rd cen. A.D.).22 The author of the Historia Augusta (like Juvenal, a complex and satirical text) sums up the tradition well: “the Egyptians, as is well known, are fickle, raving mad, boastful, violent; they are also liars, children, always striving after revolution even in their public gossip, makers of verse, writers of epigrams, astrologers, soothsayers, and folk-healers.”23 As proof, the author introduces a (phony) letter of Hadrian, supposedly written to a certain Servianus, in which Hadrian accuses the Egyptians of multiple perversions, ranging from religious confusion (the Christians are actually worshippers of Serapis, and the priests of Serapis are actually Christians; but it does not matter, since what they in fact all worship is money) to unusual and shameful ways of impregnating their chickens.
What seems most striking is the relative consistency of this tradition of violent seditiousness over time: once it appears, it canonizes quickly and with a minimal degree of meta-commentary. While other members of Rome’s empire eventually come to be integrated, and their elite classes taught to blend, if sometimes imperfectly, into the broader culture of civilized men, Egyptians still belong to a rough and nasty part of the world. This tradition persists at least into the late fourth century. Roughly contemporary with the Historia Augusta, Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Egyptians as “mostly darkened, with a look that is more gloomy than mournful; skinny and dry, they get heated up at any disturbance; they are quarrelsome and they are the bitterest debt-collectors. It is shameful among them if they cannot show whip marks on their bodies acquired from not paying their taxes. No torture has yet been invented harsh enough to get a hardened bandit from that region to give up his true name unwillingly” (22.16.23). More of the same, perhaps, but nevertheless intriguing in light of a vignette from earlier in the same book of Ammianus’ narrative:
Per hoc idem tempus rumoribus exciti variis Aegyptii venere conplures, genus hominum controversum et adsuetudine perplexius litigandi semper laetissimum, maximeque avidum multiplicatum reposcere, si conpulsori quicquam dederit, ut levari debito possit, vel certe commodius per dilationem inferre, quae flagitantur, aut criminis vitandi formidine, divites pecuniarum repetundarum interrogare. hi omnes densati in unum, principem ipsum et praefectos praetorio graculorum more strepentes interpellabant incondite, modo non ante septuagensimum annum extorquentes quae dedisse se iure vel secus plurimis adfirmabant. cumque nihil aliud agi permitterent, edicto proposito universos iussit transire Chalcedona, pollicitus quod ipse quoque protinus veniret, cuncta eorum negotia finiturus. quibus transgressis mandatum est navigiorum magistris ultro citroque discurrentium, nequis transfretare auderet Aegyptium, hocque observato cura perpensiore evanuit pertinax calumniandi propositum, et omnes spe praesumpta frustrati redierunt ad lares. unde velut aequitate ipsa dictante lex est promulgata, qua cavetur nullum interpellari suffragatorem super his quae eum recte constiterit accepisse.
At the same time a large number of Egyptians arrived (at Constantinople), roused up by a number of rumors. Egyptians are a difficult race of people, who customarily take the greatest pleasure in complicated litigation. If they have ever handed something over to a debt collector, they are particularly eager to ask back many times what they paid, so as to lighten the debt if they can, or to do better through stalling. And they summon rich men to court for extortion, since due to fear they are eager to avoid the charges. All these people came into the city as a crowd, interrupting the emperor and the praetorian prefects as they whined like jackdaws, trying to get back money that they swore that they had paid, rightly or wrongly, to all sorts of people some seventy years ago. Since nothing else could be accomplished at the court, the emperor posted an edict demanding that they all cross over to Chalcedon, and promised that he would come over as soon as possible and take care of their claims. Once they had crossed an order was given to the ferry captains who crossed back and forth over the strait not to carry any Egyptian passengers. This law was carefully observed, which put an end to their attempts at blackmail, and they all went back home with their hopes dashed. As a result, a law was passed almost as if justice herself had declared it, that no patron could be harassed on account of sums that he had lawfully accepted.24
In this case, the problem, it appears, is not that the Egyptians are allergic to government, but rather that they complain too much. This is a telling detail: though Ammianus thinks that they have made up all of the charges, there is something ironic in that at the heart of his complaint is the claim that the Egyptians are now doing precisely what they are supposed to be doing: filing petitions and relying on the imperial legal system. On one reading, then, it would appear that the Romans are hateful bigots, and the Egyptians cannot catch a break.
At the same time, however, Ammianus’ emphasis on litigiousness might provide some insight into the genesis of the stereotypes of Egyptians in the Empire. As I have noted above, the stereotype of the ungovernability of Egypt seems to arise in the late first century A.D. One place to locate the source of the stereotype could be found in the riots between Alexandrians and Jews in A.D. 38—riots that were continuous, in some sense at least, with a Jewish revolt that lasted well into the second century. These riots were certainly brutal, leading to embassies to Emperor Claudius and famously documented not only by Philo of Alexandria’s In Flaccum and Claudius’ response to the Alexandrian and Jewish embassies, but they also led to the creation of a difficult and problematic literature, the Acta Alexandrinorum, a body of literary texts masquerading as legal documents and claiming to demonstrate the bravery of the Alexandrian ambassadors who end up confronting the emperor and being put to death.25 At the same time, there is reason to place this discrete episode of violence in a broader historical context. Historical events, no matter how violent, do not automatically lead to particular stereotypes; there has to be reason to read them in particular ways. I would suggest that the historical context for this reading of Egyptian violence is to be found in political and conceptual sea-changes in the nature of imperial government and society.26
The dynastic watersheds of the late first century marked a series of changes in the ways in which the Romans began to think of the imperial project, and the role of discrete peoples within the project. While the Flavian dynasty had begun a process of installing a new aristocracy and marking off conquered peoples from Rome as a whole, these processes of reinterpreting the provinces come to a different sort of fruition under the Antonines.27 These cosmopolitan emperors took an increasing interest in the provinces in a different sense: first, in the promotion of a common urban culture within the provinces;28 second, by analogy, by marking off distinct and homogenous “urban” cultures from their native surroundings (such being the case, for instance, with Hadrian’s foundation of Antinoopolis).29 It should be added that this urban culture—or at least an idealized version of it—frowned on lower-order people taking their cases to court, preferring that these people stay in what the imperial powers imagined to be their proper places in the social hierarchy.30 At the same time, it is reasonable to suspect that this transformation of provincial culture took place against a complex backdrop of social mobility in the Empire, of the sort that was emphasized in a seminal article by Greg Woolf on the “epigraphic habit” in the western provinces. For my argument, the most important of Woolf’s points come in his emphasis on provincial agency: provincial participation in the epigraphic “culture” of the Roman world, he emphasized, was not simply a matter of provincials copying metropolitan practices. It was instead a means of asserting a stable identity in a rapidly shifting world.31
Woolf’s argument can be expanded, mutatis mutandis, and used to explain the complex dialectic that I suggest led to the crystallization of these Roman literary stereotypes in the high empire. Ammianus provides the clue by making the link between violence and litigiousness, which is then racialized through the description of the Egyptians’ bodies as skinny, dark, dry, and prone to overheating. Even if we reject Ammianus’ judgment that litigiousness is a sign of a violent character, his emphasis is interesting, and seems to correspond to certain realities in the province itself. If we track the number of petitions submitted in Egypt over the first three centuries A.D. (for Ammianus an index of litigiousness, and therefore ungovernability) we see a significant uptick in the late first century. (We similarly see strategies for keeping people out of