Violence in Roman Egypt. Ari Z. Bryen
papyrus? If we could do the philology carefully and comparatively enough, could we excavate some sort of “true” or “authentic” feeling from this complaint? Does the fact that Ptolemaios wrote in an idiosyncratic style make it more or less likely that he sincerely believed the claims in his petition? If, on the other hand, we choose to avoid these questions of truth and authenticity, is it nonetheless significant that formal legal vocabularies have interpenetrated the languages of towns and villages on the margins of a vast administrative state? Should we treat Ptolemaios’ complaint, in other words, primarily as an artifact that preserves or presents evidence of linguistic and bureaucratic hegemony and ideology—or as an artifact that does not?
• We could also ask a group of questions about law, and about the operation of law in society. Did Ptolemaios’ complaint succeed in getting the prefect’s attention because he followed all the rules, requirements, and formalities of the legal system in Roman Egypt? Is there any evidence that he knew the rules in the first place? Did the scribe who made copies of the petition know the rules? Did the governor know them? What were these rules anyway, and did they change over time? Does the fact that Ptolemaios wrote a petition to Roman authorities indicate that he violated the rules and requirements of village life—a sort of ancient “code of the street” that ensured everyday cooperation and dispute-containment so that the collective did not starve? Or does the existence of his petition testify to the irrelevance or nonexistence of these rules in the first place?
These are all important questions, and the list is far from exhaustive. They also tend to be the questions that are asked of these documents by papyrologists and historians. In what follows some of them will be addressed; others, I fear, we have no possibility of answering—or at least, I have not figured out answers to them yet. But they are also, in my view, second-order questions. They use individual documents like Ptolemaios’ petition to speak to larger, preexisting questions; they attempt, in other words, to use the particular as a way of confirming or refuting the general: either Ptolemaios knew the rules or he did not, either the Roman government showed signs of corruption in second-century Theadelphia or it did not, either we can use his petition as the source of an authentic voice or we cannot.
This book, however, tries to come at these questions from a somewhat different angle. Instead of trying to use papyri such as Ptolemaios’ complaint as a source for hypothesis-testing, I want instead to try to treat these complaints as being potentially theory-generating. We cannot forget what we already know about history, rhetoric, or sociology, of course, and this is not the point. Nonetheless I hope to show that it is worth starting from the bottom and building outward, writing a largely subjective, perception-based history from the papyri.24 From reading these complaints closely, what can we learn about individuals living in a premodern Empire and how they perceived their world? What do these people tell us about what it means to live in (or run) an imperial system in which people are entitled to complain about their friends and neighbors, officials and rivals? What contribution do these complaints make towards the creation of a common culture, to the rule of law, and to imperial governance? And why is violence—and its accompanying narratives of wounded bodies and reputations—so central to all of this?
Building an interpretive framework for answering these questions, a methodological place to stand, is the central goal of this book. It involves work from the bottom up, reconstructing local worlds as they interact with imperial rules and realities of power. As such it is an exercise in the microhistory of ancient empires. But where microhistory has responded effectively to the challenges of “master-narrative” and “big” history, it has a tendency of slipping into antiquarianism at its worst, and occasionally, even at its best, into what can only be called “But-ing”: a practice whereby microhistorians insist that every narrative is surely more complicated than what a historian presents, and as such, imperfect or limiting.25 While I am sympathetic to a desire to complicate problematic master narratives, that is not the only goal of this book. The goal is to work from the bottom up and the top down, to generate a genuinely dialectical model of social interaction in a Roman province. This involves a process of reconstruction, but also an explanatory model of how individual perception and claim-making can come to interact with ruling institutions, contributing to the realities of a premodern empire and the forging of a common, tolerable—if also shifting and contested—nomos.26
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This book is about violence, and, in particular, interpersonal violence, and the narrative complaints that emerge from instances of it. It is therefore also about fighting, bruising, complaining, whining, negotiating, and lying; the main characters are petitioners and their friends, enemies, families, henchmen, audiences, bureaucrats, and rulers; its main goal is to move from bruises and black eyes to larger claims about law, politics, justice, power, and empires—and especially to make claims about how these powerful ideas and structures were activated by, altered by, and imposed on individual people. I start from the assumption, which I will defend in greater detail in what follows, that violence offers a privileged territory for these explanations. For now, it will suffice to say that violence is a category that is unique in that everyone agrees that (a) it exists, in the sense that it was and it remains a meaningful way of categorizing behavior, and (b) it’s always wrong when it happens to you (whether it is wrong when it happens to someone else is another matter entirely). Nobody, however, agrees what precisely it consists of, and this is what makes it interesting.
I also assume—for reasons I also hope to justify—that there is something special about the act of complaining, whether about violence or, for that matter, anything else. A complaint is, at its core, a claim on someone else’s attention. It is a demand that somebody else recognize and respond to your pain, and if not respond, then at least acknowledge the feelings of another person—someone, by definition, who is at a different place on the hierarchy of power.27 As a genre, it demands that a petitioner articulate, if only in bare outlines, a normative vision of his or her own world, and link that vision to a particular package of lived experiences. Sociologically speaking, certain institutions and relationships have to prevail in order for people to complain, and others for their complaints to be acted on; when these categories, relationships, and institutions do not exist they have to be invented. In short, complaints about violence are not just a source for realia of the ancient world that we can suppose to have existed anyway—that neighbors fight, that people do not enjoy pain, that the strong will sometimes take advantage of the weak. They give us, instead, a privileged perspective on an institutional world and the relationships it generates, tolerates, and sometimes invalidates. We can learn a great deal from these relationships, and how they adapt, change, and, in some cases, are reinvented when people avail themselves of them. And it hardly needs to be added that the act of complaining is interesting because it is political, both in the narrow sense that it involves a process of making claims on others, but also in the wider sense that complaints can change the balance of power in a given society—usually only at the margins, but sometimes in a much broader sense. As I write, young, unemployed people, having come to perceive themselves as disadvantaged and disenfranchised, have decided to complain. The people to whom and about whom they are complaining are justifiably terrified.
These two categories—violence and complaint—are a combustible mix, and as such they offer an unparalleled opportunity for historians. Conflict in general, and violent conflict in particular, forces individuals to articulate what they think they deserve, and forces them to transform notions of right and wrong into discernible rights and obligations. Complaining about violence was a meaningful act, a refusal to tolerate what someone else thought was deserved, a positive assertion of personal agency that sought to preserve dignity and redeem a victim in the eyes of those around him or her. The ability to call another individual’s actions “violence” must not be dismissed as inconsequential or trivial, and if at the end of the day little was actually achieved through the act of petitioning, then it is therefore no less important to ask why individuals continually availed themselves of it. There are many hundreds of petitions preserved from the six and a half centuries of Roman rule.28 Of these, there are roughly one hundred thirty that discuss violence.29 Each represents, in its own way and through a stylized, bureaucratic, yet idiosyncratic vocabulary, a vision of the world as it should be.
CHAPTER 2