Violence in Roman Egypt. Ari Z. Bryen
Augustus onward. A number of these rules penalize crossing status-boundaries: various forms of intermarriage are forbidden; Egyptians who “pick children up from the dung heaps” (illegally adopt or enslave their potential social betters?) are fined a quarter of their property at death; Roman soldiers acting as citizens when not properly discharged are fined a quarter of their property; Egyptians who try to register as citizens of the Greek cities are fined; and so on.36
At first glance the mere existence of such a list of rules seems to indicate a harsh and oppressive regime bent on keeping people of differing social status carefully separated according to rank. These classes, however, are fundamentally juridical ones, and as such, they are suspiciously neat. The realities were more complex. Putting aside, for the moment, the complex problem of how status was inherited and transmitted (in practice rather than in theory), it is to begin with unclear how these distinctions were maintained: the Roman army (lightly staffed, according to Strabo) was never intended to be a proactive internal police force, and the Roman government (also lightly staffed) would have been ill suited to policing the choice of domestic sexual partner or the transmission of an inconsequentially small inheritance unless someone actively complained about it.37 The attempts of the Roman governors to get parties to register their inheritance documents were notoriously unsuccessful.38 Yet even accepting that the rules contained in the Gnomon were well enforced (and I think this is doubtful, for reasons I will explain in a moment), and therefore that these juridical distinctions were meaningful parts of lived reality for the ways in which people interacted with their neighbors or with their government, there is nevertheless very little evidence that these juridical categories can be mapped to a sense of identity, and if they can, it remains unclear under what circumstances a concept like “identity” might be a meaningful analytical category for the study of violence or of social relations in general. I will return to these questions in Chapter 4, but for the present it will suffice to note a few things. First, while there is sometimes a temptation to think of these juridical classes as living in completely separate spheres, this is highly doubtful: in light of the papyrological evidence, we should instead imagine a high degree of intermixing of populations, even when such a mixture was incapable of being represented through juridical language.39 Thus papyri amply document newly discharged veterans (Roman citizens), as well Antinoopolite citizens, interacting in the countryside with Egyptians,40 or Egyptians living in Alexandria.41 This does not, of course, mean that these people liked each other, or were interested in overlooking a degrading legal status to focus on the content of their neighbors’ characters.42 It means that they did not conscientiously move in separate geographical, political, or social spheres, and, in light of what we know about mobility in other imperial/colonial contexts, there was likely to be the kind of cross-pollination of ideas, language, and culture that makes for situations that are also juridically complex. The evidence of onomastics points similarly to overlap: a Greek ephebic inscription, for instance, lists new citizens with names like Sarapammon, Sarapion, and Aphrodisios son of Annoubias.43 Second, while there are a few statements from the papyri that we might classify as “politically incorrect” slurs directed at Egyptians,44 there is very little to give us insight into each community’s (if this is indeed the right word) self-perception.
This gulf between imperial administrative rules and local realities is indicative of some larger issues about what it meant for Egypt to be a province, and therefore relevant to how we should imagine the relations between empire and subject in the Roman period. The Roman government’s desire to keep the population distinctly ranked by ethno-juridical status was in tension with its ruling ideology, namely, that it was a responsive and rational empire that was accountable to its citizens.45 And in Egypt, this claim was particularly meaningful, since Egypt had a long tradition, particularly under the preceding Ptolemaic monarchy, of allowing its subjects the right to complain and giving them officially sanctioned avenues to obtain redress. It is at the intersection of this ruling ideology and this preexisting tradition of complaint and response that we can best understand why the segregated, carefully demarcated world of the Gnomon of the Idios Logos looks so different from the lived experience of a petitioner in Egypt.
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It is from here that we can move to the actual administrative practices that characterized Egypt under the Roman Empire, and come to understand in a more robust way why complaint is such an important category of social behavior for revealing the dynamics of an ancient empire. There are two threads to this story, and both of them involve giving an account of the position of the Roman governor.
Like the strategos mentioned earlier, the governor of Egypt had a difficult job. He was ultimately responsible for extracting grain from Egypt to feed Rome (and later, Constantinople). This involved a delicate process of calibrating the extraction at the proper level to enable feeding the population in one area and to avoid starving the population in another. The management of grain also involved the proper management of water, as the Nile flooded only once a year and had to be properly distributed through an intricate series of canals lest everybody starve. The system of corvée labor that dug and maintained these critical veins and arteries needed to be overseen and managed, and the whole process had to be documented and accounted for. In other words, the simple task of extraction could easily be a full-time job in itself, and depended on managing the participation of individuals at many levels of the imperial hierarchy (and some who were not on this hierarchy at all), with substantial local knowledge of how to run large-scale agricultural production in geographically diverse regions (such as the Fayyum basin), without permanently and irreparably irritating any particular constituency.46 Given that the governor’s means of enforcement resembled more a sledgehammer than a scalpel, and given the scope of the challenges of extraction,47 “best practices” probably involved trying to make as many people happy as much of the time as possible while simultaneously, if infrequently, applying spectacular levels of brutality to particular malefactors. Governors often failed (like Aulus Avilius Flaccus, at least in Philo’s description), leaving their successors to clean up their messes. Such seems to have been the case when Tiberius Iulius Alexander, himself a rare example of an Egyptian governor with extensive local knowledge (and a nephew of Philo of Alexandria) acceded to the governorship of Egypt in A.D. 66:
Tiberius Iulius Alexander declares: since I care very much about preserving the city in its fitting condition in which it enjoys the benefits which it has received from the Emperors, and in keeping Egypt in good health so that she may happily serve both the annona and the greatest flourishing of our present times, without being burdened by new and unjust exactions:
Scarcely had I left the city (Alexandria) when I was shouted down by petitioners in both large and small groups, and from both the wealthy classes and the country farmers, who complained about the recent offenses; accordingly, I have wasted none of my efforts in setting the situation straight. So that you might have a more confident hope in all these matters concerning your salvation and profit because of the shining example to us of our safety, the benefactor of the entire race of men, Imperator Caesar Galba, and so that you know that I have concerned myself with the matters that pertain to your benefit, I have therefore made public notice concerning each of the things that I have inquired into, and I have done those things which it is allowed to me to do or to decide; and those things which are more important and which need the power and greatness of the Emperor, I will present to him with all frankness.48
A list of concessions to good governance follows: the elimination of compulsory service as a tax collector, the regulation of immunity, limitations on litigation concerning financial matters, among other things. The extensive text was circulated through the land on papyri and was inscribed on stone (copies of both exist), proclaiming that the governor would, henceforth, attempt to achieve a level of fairness in his extractions.
Tiberius Iulius Alexander’s proclamation is fascinating, not only because it shows a detailed awareness of a series of local issues, but also because it points to the complex situation of the governor of Egypt in managing a series of constituencies who were particularly vocal in their demands. Not quite in the “place of kings” (in Tacitus’ vision), Alexander had to make certain to refer issues of particular import to the Emperor himself; nevertheless,