Violence in Roman Egypt. Ari Z. Bryen
that personhood is redeemed through petitions once it is violated. I close by returning to my initial point, namely, about how the language of petitions—stilted, formulaic, and mediated—can come to be meaningful, and then go on to introduce a concept that will structure Part II of this book: translation.
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It is best to begin with terminology. There is a relatively compressed vocabulary that can be mustered by a petitioner (or the scribe helping him or her compose) to describe a violent act. There is a good deal that is historically interesting about this vocabulary. Most important, “violence” is always understood to be prima facie wrong. That is to say, insofar as I can tell, there is no concept, in the papyrological material or in the literary or the legal evidence, of a “sufficient amount of” violence, “justifiable” violence, or “deserved” violence. There are, of course, gradations of wrong, but they never at any point blend into gradations of right. This is not to say that there was no understanding of justifiable force. There were plenty of situations in which force was deployed, in which it was understood to be explicitly or implicitly acceptable, and in which it could be either defensible by legal standards or tolerated (or approved of, or even celebrated) by society at large. It just could not, and would not, be called violence. It is a peculiarity of the words—hybris in Greek, iniuria or contumelia in Latin—that they simply cannot receive a positive valence.4 Iniuria can be qualified as atrox (“heinous” or “aggravated”); hybris as ἀνήκεστος (“heinous,” translating Latin atrox), or οὐ τυχοῦσα (“uncommon,” “inappropriate,” “unconscionable”). That is to say, when people sought to use adjectives to qualify these terms, the adjectives they used only made them worse, not better. For the Latin term, this is simply a feature of etymology: in-iuria, “not lawful,” or broadly “not acceptable.” If something is ius, it is broadly right. It would therefore make no sense to have something like bona iniuria—it is intrinsically illogical. The Greek word hybris, as every student of tragedy knows, is likewise never a positive thing. It is only a modern notion that recognizes that the idea of hybris, in its broader, fifth-century B.C. formation as something like “failing to be mindful of one’s station in the world” might, in fact, be connected to a certain quality that can make a person successful. For lack of a native term we call this quality chutzpah. It is also a notion that is fundamentally foreign to the ancient world.
In addition to “violence” having a thoroughly negative valence, it also has a relatively restricted scale. Specifically, in Roman Egypt, all violence is personal. There is nothing, at least in the papyrological evidence, that resembles Paul Farmer’s “structural violence”—an agent-less but nevertheless statistically visible suffering produced by inequality and unevenly distributed across a population.5 This has certain consequences: Government cannot be violent; an individual magistrate can. The fact of inequality is not in itself violent; but a very wealthy individual may, as a result of this wealth, be prone to act violently (a common theme in complaints). They key term, as I indicated earlier, is hybris, though some petitions speak more specifically of “blows” (plegai), or refer simply to “nastiness” (aedia, a term which I will translate simply as “violence” as well, avoiding the euphemism).6 In Roman Egypt, hybris has a narrower sense than it did in fifth-century Athens.7 Hybris can refer to violent or offensive conduct against a person’s body (a beating or cudgeling, for instance), or against a person’s reputation (insults, threats, or public abuse, Loidoria). Some have mistakenly understood these terms as two different types of violence, which they are not. Rather, they are based on a different concept of personhood—a concept that encompasses a wider territory than the modern definition, being both corporeal and incorporeal, or more accurately, both physical and social.8
Violence appears in the papyri in several contexts. It can be used in the context of a petition asking for redress for crimes against persons in a petitioner’s family (such as spouses and children), or immediate kin (such as parents or grandparents), or people in any given individual’s employ (such as a tenant farmer or shepherd). It probably cannot be used to refer to contemptuous or injurious treatment of slaves.9 Slaves were counted as property, and what we might call “violence” against property and financial interests was in Roman Egypt called bia (which can translate to “damage” or “harm,” but which always indicates harm not to full people but to inanimate objects, financial interests, and slaves).10 Bia could also be used to refer to coercive actions that sought to harm an individual’s financial interests (in this sense it maps, albeit imperfectly, to the Roman legal category of metus). What is important to note here, however, is that because of the nature of legal procedures, some (if not many) petitions necessarily concern more than one issue at once. Thus, in the petition of Ptolemaios discussed in Chapter 1, Ptolemaios was complaining both about harm to his financial interests (the extorted money) and about violence (the beatings through which his opponents managed to get him to give up the money). However, though both terms can exist in a single document, they refer to separately actionable issues—for instance, to a crime against property and an incidence of violence. It is also important not to confuse violence (hybris) or harm to property (bia) with the adjectival or adverbial form of bia (βίαιος, βιαίως). This descriptor appears a number of times in petitions to refer to people’s behavior and character (e.g., so-and-so is a violent/harmful/unpleasant person), but so far as I can tell never is used formally to define the action itself.11 There are likewise procedural peculiarities that exist for violence but not for damage/harm, as I will outline in greater detail in Chapter 5.
In addition to the fact that the language used to describe violence is bound up with the language of wrong, the language that surrounds the core legal terms is the language of disdain, hostility, and eventually, of prayer and redemption. When petitioners are “approached” they are also “attacked” (ἐπέρχεσθαι in both cases, which also, and perhaps tellingly, means “to take to court”); they are knocked down (κατακόπτειν); “tortured” or “abused” (αἰκίζειν); and “despised” (καταφρονεῖν), to give just a few commonly recurring examples. People’s opponents are joyfully overbearing: they “take confidence” (θάρρειν) in their power to get away with doing violence; they act “in the manner of thieves” (λῃστρικῷ τρόπῳ), or in the manner of tyrants (τυρρανικῷ τρόπῳ). Petitioners, in turn, wish for “punishment” (ἐπέξοδος) or “revenge” or “judgment” (ἐκδικία). In other words, despite their repetitious nature, petitions still record a rich language of scorn and insult.12
Nevertheless, this repetitiousness of a limited number of tropes over a long period of time should cause some concern. There is no question that these documents were mediated through a scribal tradition. This raises an important question of method: what if we are not, in fact, looking at first-person narratives that reflect an individual’s subjective self-perception and evaluation of self-worth? What if what we have, instead, are various examples of how scribes would have interpreted pain? This leads to a pair of objections that might be labeled, for the sake of convenience, the skeptical position. By this I mean a belief that either (a) all we have in the resulting petition is the voice of the scribe or (b) even if there is more than the voice of the scribe, we can take no methodologically defensible epistemological position through which we could separate the scribe’s voice from that of the petitioner.13 Even when petitions vary, scribes are manipulating formulae to make a “best fit” between formal language and the experience of violence. It is further likely that even outside the bounds of scribal mediation, petitioners are lying, or at least manipulating the truth. They are creating, in other words, what Natalie Zemon Davis has called “fictions”—massaged, rhetorical, well-designed statements that were intended to resonate with broader social ideas about truth and justice.14 They are not delivering the truth about violence;