“Documentary” sources provide one way around this problem. (It is conventional, in ancient history, to distinguish literary sources from “documentary” ones—namely, inscriptions and papyri.) Inscriptions record massive amounts of information regarding administration, official careers, and burial practices, to name but a few categories. Making history from inscribed documents is still very much a work in progress, despite huge advances over the last two hundred years. This progress has improved substantially our knowledge of the ancient world, and given insights into the precise ways in which the literary tradition distorts matters. But inscriptions were an expensive technology. While they served to monumentalize things that individuals thought important, they are hard to use to write non-elite history.
It is papyri that provide the greatest promise for this sort of project. While they are found in a variety of parts of the Roman Empire, Egypt provides our greatest concentration of them. Starting in the late nineteenth century, they began to be published by generations of careful scholars, on whose work and expertise this study rests. Still, they are not an “even” data set, even within Egypt. Recovered papyri tend to come from two main areas, the Fayyum basin and the excavated cache of documents preserved in the garbage mound of the city of Oxyrhynchos. A few come from other places as well: the western Oases, for example. They come primarily from concentrated areas of population—towns, cities, and villages, not predominantly agricultural areas. Their preservation is also chronologically uneven—the second and fourth centuries are well represented, whereas information for the fifth century, for example, is spotty. Chronological preservation also varies geographically. Additionally, while many thousands of papyri have been preserved, large numbers remain unpublished. What publications there are (and there are many) are the product of shifting editorial interests, from the earliest phases in which social history was subordinated to literary and legal history, to the more recent editorial interests in archives and record-keeping. As for the content of the documents themselves, what is published is rarely a straightforward record of personal beliefs, but is almost exclusively mediated through scribes and literate professionals composing on behalf of a largely illiterate society. Additionally, though papyri initially were considered to have much promise for social historians, they are not representative of the population as a whole. Though all who work with papyri will concede this point, it is still largely unclear and hotly debated what segment of the population they do represent.
These difficulties aside, papyri in general, and petitions concerning violence more specifically remain an important data set. The people writing them were significantly different from the writers of the literary tradition. They were non-elites in any meaningful sense of the term. Here, for reasons that will become apparent, I have focused on petitions from the first six centuries of Roman rule in Egypt: a period from the Roman acquisition of Egypt in 30 B.C. until, more or less, the age of Justinian in the sixth century A.D. Justinian is formally my endpoint, but I have resisted treating the sixth century in a rigorous fashion: this is because one major cache of sixth-century papyri, the papers of Dioskoros of Aphrodito, are currently being reedited by the able hands of Jean-Luc Fournet and his team of students. But the pre-Justinianic papyri are important in a different sense: they come from a period before the introduction of the first properly comprehensive promulgation of Roman law, Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis—that is, they come from a period in which law was largely uncodified and, despite imperial queasiness with this fact, also still developing. I have little to say about the preceding Ptolemaic period. There is certainly a story to be told here, but since I lack the linguistic capacities to deal with the demotic evidence, someone else will have to tell it. And for the purposes of preserving my already limited sanity, I have restricted myself to material from Egypt, though we have petitions concerning violence from other places as well.
PART I
The Texture of the Problem
CHAPTER 1
Ptolemaios Complains
Sometime between A.D. 145 and 147, Ptolemaios, son of Diodoros, sent a petition to Lucius Valerius Proculus, prefect of the province of Egypt (praefectus Aegypti), the highest magistrate in the land and a man appointed directly by Emperor Antoninus Pius. His complaint recounted a violent incident with a man named Ammonios, also named Kaboi. According to Ptolemaios, Ammonios was sent to attack him by another man, Isidoros, son of Mareis. This Isidoros held a privileged position in the area, being one of the nautokolymbetai (“sailor-divers”)—apparently (since we only know the term from Ptolemaios’ complaint) a group of people in charge of the administration of water in the Fayyum—no unimportant task in an area where careful management of water could mean the difference between security and starvation. In recompense for this important service, Ptolemaios goes on to explain, Isidoros and his fellow nautokolymbetai were excused from liturgies (compulsory public services—a redistributive scheme of mandatory “gifts” of public goods by the wealthy, and increasingly in the Roman period, by anyone foolish enough not to produce an excuse to avoid paying for them). Because of the nature of his position, Isidoros was excused as well from the burdensome poll-tax. Lest we be misled into treating Isidoros’ services to the community as an index of a magnanimous character, Ptolemaios explains further: Isidoros is personally a nasty individual who makes money on the side by forging official leases for personal gain. Ammonios, Isidoros’ subordinate, is no better: a man incapable of living moderately, his behavior had brought him to public attention on a previous occasion. Ptolemaios, by contrast, is a quiet person. He holds an official lease, for which he has given security, and in addition he pays his taxes—great sums of them, at that. He is a model inhabitant of Rome’s empire: a landholder, a stakeholder; presumably in general he is resistant to raising a fuss, but who could abide officials acting illegally? When he was violently treated by Ammonios and Isidoros, when he was thrown out of his house by them, and when they beat him until he paid them money to stop, he had no choice but to avail himself of the intervention of their superiors. The emperor would have guaranteed it, and Ptolemaios knew that the prefect himself would have wanted as much as well.
Accordingly, Ptolemaios went to the scribe of his local village, and through a combination of stock phrases and idiosyncratic rhetoric detailed his complaints against his local enemies. We know that in other cases he drafted his own petitions, since we can match the signature at the bottom of this particular complaint with the handwriting on some of his other documents; in this case it is unclear if he drafted an initial version, but certain (because of the distinct handwriting) that a scribe wrote this version for him, not least because of the necessity of making several copies—probably three or four in total.1 Once these copies of the original complaint were made (and likely after a process of negotiation that would produce the final version), the scribe would have given the copies back to Ptolemaios to submit on his own behalf—generally in person at the prefect’s annual assizes, though in this case we know they were sent, since Ptolemaios tells us that the assizes for this year were delayed due to the upcoming Nile flood.2 Of the copies one has survived; it was purchased by B. P. Grenfell and F. W. Kelsey in Egypt in March 1920, and brought by Kelsey back to the University of Michigan, where it is now housed in a temperature- and humidity-controlled room on the top floor of the Hatcher Graduate Library. Other documents relating to Ptolemaios have come to light as well, and reside in locations as diverse as Cairo, Florence, Geneva, Hamburg, New York, Oslo, and Madison.
This particular papyrus, published according to standard papyrological notation as P.Mich. III 174 (document number 174 contained in the third published volume of documents from the Michigan collection), is, if nothing else, a model of good preservation. From the annotations on the bottom of the papyrus, we can tell which copy this was: it was one of those that he had sent to the prefect. A copy would have remained in the prefect’s archives, and another would have been returned to Ptolemaios, bearing two bits of text. One is that of whichever member of the prefect’s staff was in charge of handling this