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Автор: Ari Z. Bryen
Издательство: Ingram
Серия: Empire and After
Жанр произведения: Юриспруденция, право
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780812208214
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      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

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      A Study in Legal Interpretation

      ARI Z. BRYEN

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      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

       www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      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

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       Introduction: The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life

       Part I. The Texture of the Problem

       Chapter 1. Ptolemaios Complains

       Chapter 2. Violent Egypt

       Chapter 3. Violence, Modern and Ancient

       Part II. From the Language of Pain to the Language of Law

       Chapter 4. Narrating Injury

       Chapter 5. The Work of Law

       Chapter 6. Fission and Fusion

       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

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      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

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      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