Violence in Roman Egypt
EMPIRE AND AFTER
Series Editor: Clifford Ando
A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
VIOLENCE IN
ROMAN EGYPT
A Study in Legal Interpretation
ARI Z. BRYEN
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes
of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may
be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Bryen, Ari Z.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Violence in Roman Egypt : a study in legal interpretation / Ari Z. Bryen — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Empire and after)
ISBN 978-0-8122-4508-0
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Criminal procedure (Egyptian law). 2. Criminal procedure (Roman law) 3. Violent crimes—Egypt—History —To 1500. 4. Victims of crimes—Legal status, laws, etc.—Egypt—History—To 1500. 5. Violence—Egypt—History—To 1500. 6. Egypt—History—30 B.C.–640 A.D. I. Title. II. Series: Empire and after.
KL3085 .B79 2013
345.32'05 2012041493
To my parents and my sisters
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life
Part I. The Texture of the Problem
Chapter 1. Ptolemaios Complains
Chapter 3. Violence, Modern and Ancient
Part II. From the Language of Pain to the Language of Law
Conclusion: Nomos and Its Narratives
Appendix A: The Papyrus on the Page
Appendix B: Translations of Petitions Concerning Violence
List of Papyri in Checklist Order
Three cases of assault and battery in our city justice courts so far this week are another indication of returned prosperity. Times have been so hard the past few months that when a man got mad at another he would swallow his wrath, go home, and pound his dog. Now that the good times have returned, he gets into a scrap with the cause of his anger and winds up with a round in the justice court.
—Town Newspaper, Wisconsin, October 1897, cited by Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip.
INTRODUCTION
The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life
Pain may be a human universal; writing about one’s own pain is not. When historians see individuals transforming pain into narratives that complain about neighbors, local officials, or family members, we would do well to pay attention. These narratives about pain and injury invite a series of questions: What can we learn from the ways that people experience, describe, and complain about violation, pain, and injury? In what ways, and under what circumstances, can we use a narrative about violence to give an account of the ways in which non-elite individuals theorized their own behaviors? In what ways can accounts of pain—and the redemption and socialization of pain through petitions—contribute to a historical account of empires?
These questions are hardly unique to the ancient world. And they are tricky enough for social historians, especially those of an anthropological bent. They become yet more complex when we have to take into account that, in the Roman world at least, we have our accounts of pain and violation only because they have been mediated through legal structures. This is so not only in the narrow sense that these narratives were attempts to participate in the legal arena by asking authorities to judge and punish violators, but in the broader sense that the practice of defining what counts as a violation was already contingent on particular sets of legal categories. This fact of legal mediation in the writing of non-elite history is thereby complicated not only because a layer has been added to the analysis, but also because such a history runs up against a deep and persistent disciplinary division.
In the historical tradition, one might say, individuals exist in the subjunctive, always as an endless series of possibilities, capacities, and complexities; law exists in the imperative, a series of commands, reductive and violent. Individuals make their world within dense and overlapping reciprocal networks; within these networks they share stories, rituals, gods, meals, and families. Law reduces networks to flowcharts of authority, abstracting those within the networks and treating them as replaceable units of analysis. Individuals exist in time and space; law tries its best to develop an allergy to such categories. The project, then, would seem to be built on a fundamental tension between two different visions of how to map the social world, and the histories