Violence in Roman Egypt. Ari Z. Bryen
since at least the publication of Mitteis’s Reichsrecht und Volksrecht at the end of the nineteenth century.60 There were certainly “Egyptian” legal materials, as the Greek translation of the Hermopolis “Legal Code” makes clear.61 There were likewise traditional legal practices, especially in certain aspects of private law like contracts and marital property. But it is important to remember that any “local” practice was implicated in the larger administrative superstructure of the Empire itself. Several things follow from this premise: first, and most important, it is dangerous to assume that Roman law simply layered itself on top of local law, providing some kind of legal “veneer” or “superficial varnish.”62 Leaving aside the objectionable metaphor of culture-as-bookshelf, it makes sense to note, as scholars are increasingly realizing,63 that once the Romans showed up it was all Roman law, because the Romans were the ones enforcing it. I write this only partially tongue-in-cheek, to emphasize that local law, when it existed (and it had a checkered history), existed only because the Romans either required it to exist or defined it into existence.64 Second, it would be problematic to conclude, on the basis of the use of local law, that the Roman governors in charge of provinces knew anything about what its contents were, or were prepared to enforce it.65 Additionally, while there might have been divergent legal traditions at the moment of conquest or shortly thereafter, there was a subsequent flood of legal development throughout the Empire as a whole, through the imposition of wide-ranging legal reforms in specific regions (such as can be seen in the Flavian municipal laws from Spain) and through the constant issuing of imperial or gubernatorial edicts and constitutions, processes which likely impinge on one another, if only indirectly.66 These developments were based on principles palatable to Romans, sent off by Roman magistrates, and enforced at the local levels. Further, individuals living in the provinces seem to have been conscious of the privileges that this flurry of documentation conveyed. Furthermore, as Gonzalez has noted in the case of the Lex Irnitana, sometimes the Romans themselves imagined people as already living by the same principles as those on which they based the laws in the first place.67 Finally, and as a consequence of all these factors, at least so far as the question of violence is concerned, it is a fundamental mistake to draw a clear line between the world of legal practice in Egypt before the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212, with its divergent citizenships and status markers, and after, in a period where everyone is a citizen. This is so not only because there is so little empirical evidence for a change in the formal rules for dealing with violence in the period following the Antonine Constitution, but also because even before 212 there was a marked tendency toward the homogenization of legal culture.
For the question of violence, however, it is in my opinion more profitable to distinguish between private law as it was practiced by individuals and law as it was practiced by magistrates adjudicating between two parties. The Romans no doubt tolerated local legal forms, and permitted individuals to conduct private transactions according to them. They had no interest in preventing people who were not Roman citizens from writing contracts, marrying, buying, and selling. If there were a dispute over one of these things, though, and it came before a magistrate, the legal situation would have been more complicated. Roman magistrates understood local laws to be a disadvantage, and a brutal and inhumane one at that. In Chapter 5 I detail a case of this. Overall, a better way to understand the legal situation in Egypt before the grant of universal citizenship in 212 (and after it as well), especially as it relates to the question of how magistrates sought to judge, is to think of the administrative structure as being populated by a fragile network of administrators with ill-defined and overlapping competencies,68 and laws not as coherent systems of rules that need to be followed in their entirety, but as a system of differential privileges and disabilities. These privileges and disabilities were not absolute: in the name of humanity or good governance they could be followed to the letter or ignored.69 Roman citizenship offered the greatest number of privileges, Alexandrine fewer, metropolitan yet fewer, and so on.70 Petitioners might be treated better or worse according to their legal status, but all had the right to attempt to approach the government for redress, even when their opponents were of a higher status. This did not mean that all people would receive equal justice, but simply that all people had a right to try.71
* * *
Thus far I have tried to present an outline of how Egypt fitted into the broader world of the Roman Empire at the level of imagination and administrative practice, and argued that the picture is more complex and dynamic than either ancient literary authorities or modern scholars have allowed. In particular, the realities of administering an imperial province allowed for a system that was characterized neither by wholesale, top-down repression and extraction, nor by completely reactive governance. Instead, the administration of Egypt as a Roman province was based on two approaches that were in tension with one another: a desire to mark off discrete groups from one another was undermined, in idiosyncratic ways, by a commitment to Roman self-under-standings of being a just and rational empire as well as by the need to use discretion, precision, and well-calibrated strategies of extraction to manage the needs of two populaces in distinct areas. This tension is particularly evident from the workings of the legal system, which allowed for individual subjects to interact with their superiors in ways that could meaningfully shape future practice. More than a story of oppression and resistance, the realities of imperialism in Egypt made for an administrative regime that was dynamic and productive.
But at this point it is fair to ask, “But was it particularly violent?” That is, no matter how much explanation one gives of imperial stereotypes, the realities of provincial governance, and the dynamism of legal systems, was there some sort of underlying reality that made daily life in Egypt more brutal than life in, say, contemporary Rome or Asia Minor, or modern-day Topeka or Detroit? Depending on what one thinks is at stake in the question, the answers would be “yes,” “it’s unclear,” and “what do you mean by ‘violent’?”
As far as the “yes” answer is concerned, one could note that the Roman Empire, as a whole, was administered by relatively few people, the means of coercion were dispersed, and professional policing was limited—there were town guards, for example, but these were not what a modern person would think of as a professional police force, being recruited, instead, from the population of local inhabitants, and thereby ensconced in village hierarchies.72 There is little evidence of them stopping a crime.73 There were relatively few ways, in other words, actually to prevent a violent act—at least at the institutional level. Attempts to wipe out brigandage—obviously a problematic category—had only limited success; attempts to wipe out interpersonal violence in towns and villages were nonexistent.
But the lack of policing institutions does not automatically mean that a particular society is likely to be violent. Levels of violence, presumably, have fluctuated chronologically and geographically before the advent of policing in the early modern period. Even without policing, there were channels through which people could complain about the violence of others. But here things become less clear. Would the possibility that my neighbor would complain to the prefect pose a serious deterrent to my punching him in the face? Would the fact that people could try to avail themselves of justice have actually functioned to make Egypt any less violent? Would the fact that a complaint might not be given a hearing have made it a more violent place?
It is hard to measure deterrence even in modern societies with robust data collection, since one is both measuring acts that did not happen and presuming baseline levels of “violence”—a questionable technique, since violence is a phenomenon for which it is hard to give a robust causal account in the first place, even if we presume that we know what it consists of (and we do not, because, for reasons I will outline momentarily, it is not so much a thing as it is a contestable ethical claim). It also bears reminding that there is no way to approximate something like a “crime rate” from the ancient world: in part, the data are insufficient, but more important, the acts of interpersonal violence about which I am concerned were not, in the first place, crimes—they were delicts, private relationships of obligation between individuals and families, and as such, not of primary interest to the state.74 Even if we were to engage in the methodologically questionable exercise of grouping together things