Violence in Roman Egypt. Ari Z. Bryen
would not alleviate many difficulties, since we would often be comparing apples with oranges: robbing a traveler on a public road is different from punching a neighbor in the course of an argument, is different again from breaking into a person’s home to take back something you think is yours, and is emphatically different from when the governor beats you with rods because you’ve failed to pay your taxes or you’ve finally exhausted his limited patience. Accordingly, any procedure of marking off behaviors that a modern historian or sociologist might take to be antisocial and then trying to measure them as an index of civility produces odd results. I am reminded of the line of former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry, spoken during the rash of drug-related murders in the late 1980s, that “outside of the killings, DC has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.” Absurd, perhaps, but also indicative of the problem: the categories by which we measure what counts as a violent place are everything, but they are also extremely hard to define in a way that is sociologically—or historically—meaningful.76 This has consequences for comparison, whether with other regions of the Roman Empire or between ancient and modern systems. I suppose that if I were forced to choose between being dropped off in downtown Topeka or downtown Detroit, I would choose Topeka, at least if I were being dropped off at night; but given the choice between Topeka and second-century Oxyrhynchos I confess that I am at a loss to know where I would fare better, in what ways, or at what time of day.
All of which leads to the last possible answer to the initial question, itself taking the form of a question. What is one trying to communicate when one labels something as “violent,” and what precisely is at stake in such a designation? It is here that we have to look to a complex modern historiography on violence, contextualize these academic perspectives in terms of their larger theoretical and political projects, and move from there back to the ancient evidence, attempting to bring these two traditions into conversation with one another.
CHAPTER 3
Violence, Modern and Ancient
At the end of the previous chapter I raised the question of the links between violence and conceptual apparatuses that purport to measure violence—crime rates, for example. The question of what can be learned through the study of something like a “crime rate” leads in turn to another problem: for better or for worse (probably for worse), we inhabit a world that exhibits a strong tendency to criminalize things that are unpleasant, to make political issues into criminal issues, and to organize state resources around the policing and protection of citizens from these criminal acts. In other words, as sociologist Jonathan Simon has argued, we “govern through crime.”1 Crime is a powerful concept in modern society. In contemporary discourse, criminality is juxtaposed to civility; crime is something that is necessarily horrid and bad; it is not supposed to happen, or at least, it is not supposed to happen “over here”—crime is only tolerable when it is on the other side of the line that separates civilization from barbarism. Within the ever-increasing universe of things that are “crimes,” violent crime, however, remains the easy case. Even for those who have substantial doubt as to the effectiveness or morality of modern penal policies, there is instinctive and near-universal agreement that the “real criminals”—the violent criminals—deserve to be removed from society and sequestered elsewhere.
This is not, of course, the place to discuss the ethics of modern penal policy; I dwell on it only because our modern understandings of violence as a category which is primarily criminal have a major effect on the ways in which we understand what is at stake in labeling something an act of violence. Our insistence on treating violence as crime leads us easily to treat violence as something fundamentally other, horrid, or incomprehensible—to treat it as something that challenges the capacity of our analytical categories to describe and understand. Here the fact that our understandings of violence are mediated through our contemporary legal categories has been joined to certain moves in twentieth-century critical thought which I will outline below; this fusion of perspectives (crime and critique) has, I will suggest, led to a complicated and dangerous dead end in contemporary scholarship on violence, namely, a tendency to think that our scholarly categories and forms of disciplinary reasoning cannot possible capture what is “violent” about “violence”—or even what is meaningful or interesting about it. The end result of this is a body of contemporary scholarly literature on violence that is by turns both shrill and melancholic—a body of literature which frequently ends up apologizing for violence or being awe-struck by it, rather than engaging in a sober and reflective analysis of it.
It is this chapter’s goal to describe in greater detail what was meant by a claim of “violence” in Roman Egypt, to describe what we might mean by such a claim today, and then to attempt to see how these two categories can inform one another, while also trying to avoid this particular impasse. I will defend in some detail the claim I made earlier, namely, that violence is not a thing or an act (though acts can indeed be termed violent), but instead an ethical label, one that is located within matrices of power and of what one considers acceptable and unacceptable. As with all categories of ethical and moral evaluation it is subject to contest. It is therefore also political, insofar as concerns of power will adhere in the contest over whether the label of “violence” applies. But this is not merely a question (as it is in modern society) where what is at stake is the exclusion of the perpetrator of violence from society as a whole. Instead, in a world that was largely reluctant to criminalize interpersonal acts of harm, what was at stake in calling someone’s behavior “violence” was the nature of the obligation that he or she had incurred by the act of violence, and by extension, also the nature of personhood inherent in such concepts of obligation. I will unpack this idea in greater detail below.
To claim that violence should be treated soberly and analytically by scholars is not to say that it can be trivialized, or to claim that there is not something unique about it: violence does retain something distinct from other relational categories and ethical labels, since by moving into the world of inchoate emotions such as pain it also intersects with two other important categories, namely, language and subjectivity. It is related to subjectivity at least in the sense that the experience of personal violation (about which more specificity in what follows) challenges the boundaries of the self and causes those boundaries, often taken for granted, to become an object of reflection;2 it is related to language in the sense that language provides a highly imperfect vehicle for the expression of pain, a condition that in turn affects the making of claims about pain and the forging of intersubjective bonds between the one who suffers and the one who sympathizes, or who comes to be convinced that he must sympathize.3 Violence runs up against subjectivity and language in important and fascinating ways, and any appreciation of how violent acts come to “mean” things—in the ancient world or the modern—must take account of this dynamic, for only with this relationship in mind can we return to the world of the papyri, and the importance of the power of narration for petitioners, governors, and the law.
What follows proceeds in three parts. First, I proceed philologically and terminologically, and try to map the semantic range of the vocabulary of violence in Roman Egypt. This leads to a particular problem, namely, the question of the “authenticity” of this language, and the problems posed by the fact that such language was mediated through a scribal tradition. Petitions concerning violence were obviously mediated, but historians, I argue, have erred in taking this mediation to be a methodological problem, rather than an opportunity. This mediation gives us opportunities for understanding what is “at work” in the language that petitioners use. Still, knowing the words for violence is only a part of the equation; it does not help us to piece together the kinds of claims that are being made when someone declares someone else’s actions to be “violence.” This leads to a question of whether we know what we mean when we identify something as violence. In the next part of the chapter I move to the problems that contemporary historians encounter in writing about violence, and the challenges that modern understandings of violence pose for understanding ancient violence. Key in the modern historiographical tradition, I argue, is a divide between two traditions that follow the path of Max Weber: one group which prefers to write about violence as something ethically neutral (force), and another which writes about it as ethically problematic