Violence in Roman Egypt. Ari Z. Bryen

      Figure 3. P.Mich. V 230. Digitally reproduced with the permission of the Papyrus Collection, Graduate Library, University of Michigan.

      These two documents have striking similarities, but it should be immediately obvious that they are telling different stories. In one (229), the story focuses on a seemingly unplanned act of violence, coming on the heels of a violation of property; in the other (230), there is also a violation of property, but the violence here is certainly not planned. In the second document (230) the petitioner is trying to convey that Paytnion is the thief himself. Likewise, in the first case, the violence is described at greater length, focusing on the blows to “all the parts of the body,” whereas in the latter document, any personal injuries received by the petitioner have been subordinated to the injuries to and grave condition of the child he claims to have been carrying on his shoulder.

      That both of these documents are mediated through a scribe, and probably through the same scribe, makes them a good test case for asking some questions about the nature of narratives in the papyri, and what the proper methodological guidelines should be for using these documents as sources for individual experience. No tidy solution to this problem is possible, given that there is little evidence for the ways in which these documents were composed. Nonetheless, it is worth making three main methodological suggestions.

      First, the temptation to isolate scribal intrusions into the narrative, strip them from the text, and then look at the remainder is methodologically problematic. Certain kinds of legal boilerplate show up in all petitions, but to attribute this to the hand of the scribe alone is to enter dangerous territory. There are good reasons for thinking that there is an interactive process going on when petitions are composed, and that the interface between the scribe and the speaker is a dynamic one.¹⁹ In Chapter 5 I detail a case of how the draft of a petition is turned into a final (or at least a subsequent) version, and how the appropriate legal language is inserted into the document to bolster the position of the petitioner and clarify her legal complaint. Additionally, we know precious little about scribes, and to vest them with such agency in a process of complaint is risky. For the moment, however, it will suffice to note that the insertion of certain kinds of legal boilerplate into these documents is not a mere formality.

      Second, legal language is loaded. The words themselves carry meanings, and these meanings would be critical for the ways that the complaint was subsequently processed by magistrates. The form of the document was likewise important. As scholars have recently cautioned, papyri must be imagined not only as texts, but as artifacts.²⁰ As such, we must imagine how the document would have been read. It was necessary to make it look like a petition, so that the strategos or the relevant members of his staff would know exactly what they were looking at the instant that they unfolded it—as Traianos Gagos once pointed out, it is probably no accident that the physical shape of petitions in the Roman period remains so consistent.²¹ No mistakes could be made about this, and thus we also see that certain documents have labels telling the reader what they were. P.Mich. V 229 does this: on the verso, it declares that it is the petition (hypomnema) of Petsiris of Talei. Form had to be gotten right.²²

      Third, the idea that scribes hold a monopoly on legal words is dangerous. Legal anthropologists have, in the last twenty or so years, reminded us that while legal language may come from the “top down,”—though it need not—it can be appropriated and made meaningful to large segments of the population that are not responsible for its initial genesis.²³ In contemporary life legal words are used with great frequency and precision precisely because they are packed with communicative force, even we often use them in ways in which they were not originally intended. For instance, if a police officer touches me menacingly, I know to shout “police brutality” (at least if there are witnesses present). If he subsequently arrests me, I know to remind him that “I’m not resisting.” Certain legal words worked themselves into the popular vocabulary in Egypt as well: in a letter from a man named Demarchos, he tells his sister Taor, “I want to acknowledge that you wrote me about what Agathinos did to me. If I live a while and return to my homeland I will get satisfaction for myself (ἐκδικήσω ἐμαυτόν).”²⁴ Demarchos’ use of the verb ekdikein is unusual in a letter that is otherwise overwhelmingly concerned with mundane matters, but the term is common in legal documents. Likewise, in a letter with otherwise mangled language, a son writes to his father inquiring, “who … is the one who has done violence to you?” (ὕβριν σοι πεποίηκεν).²⁵ In the next chapter I look in greater detail at a personal letter that is almost exclusively concerned with violence. But for the present purposes it should suffice to note that the kinds of language that were critical for activating legal action were also, to a certain extent, part of the larger vocabulary. What is important, then, is to see the final product (the petition) as a