Violence in Roman Egypt. Ari Z. Bryen

ἐπικεφαλαίου καὶ πάσης ̣ λ̣ειτουργίας ἔτι δὲ καὶ ἐκ τοῦ δημοσίου σιτοῦνται καθʼ ὃ οὐκ ἐξὸν αὐτοῖς καθόλου ἑτ[έ]ρ̣ᾳ̣ τινὶ πραγματείᾳ παρενχειρεῖν. τούτων εἷς τις Ἰσίδωρος Μαρεῖ ἀνὴρ π̣ά̣νυ το[λ]μήεις καὶ αὐθάδης τῷ τρόπῳ διʼ ὑποβλήτων νοθεύων τὰς κυριακὰς μισθώσεις χάριν τοῦ διασεί<ει>ν καὶ ἀργυρίζεσθαι καθʼ ὃ καὶ ἀποδείξω ἐπὶ τοῦ ῥητοῦ ἐπῆλθεν ̣ καὶ ἐμοὶ διʼ ἑνὸς τῶν ὑποβλήτων Ἀμμωνίου τινὸς ἐπικαλουμένου Καβοι ἀνδρὸς ἐπιμέμπτου καὶ διὰ τὸ ἀκόσμως βιοῖν προγραφέντος τυγχάνοντι οὐσιακῷ μισθωτῇ καὶ ἱκανοὺς φόρους διαγράφοντι εἰς τὸν κυριακὸν λόγον καὶ πρὸς τὴν μίσθωσιν̣ ἱκανὰ ὑπαλλάξαντι οὐκ ἐῶν προσευκαιρεῖν τῇ μισθώσει ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῦ οἴκ̣[ου] ἐκκλείων καὶ ὕβρεις παρέχων μέχρι καὶ διέσεισέν με ἀργύριον. ὅθεν ἐπὶ σὲ τὸν π̣άντων ἀντιλήμπτορα κατέφυγον καὶ ἀξιῶ ἐπειδὴ τοῦ παρόντος παρῃτήσ̣ω τὴν εἰς τὸν νομὸν ε̣ἴσοδον κελεῦσαι γραφ̣ῆναι τῷ τῆς Θεμίστου καὶ Πο̣λέμωνος στρατηγῷ διακοῦσαί μου πρὸς αὐτ[ὸ]ν διὰ τὸ τὰς ἀποδείξεις δύνασθαί με ̣ ἐπὶ τῶν τόπων παραστῆσαι ὑπὲρ το̣ ῦ̣ ̣ ὑβρίσθαι καὶ διασεσεῖσθαι ἵνα δυνηθῷ ἐν τοῖς εὐτυχεστάτοις τοῦ μεγίστου Αὐτοκράτορος καιροῖς καὶ ἐν τῇ ἐπαφρο[δ]ίτῳ σου ἡγεμονίᾳ ἀνεπηρεάστως ἐν τῇ ἰδίᾳ διαζῆν καὶ ὦ βεβο[η]θημένος. διευτύχει.

      (hand 2) Πτολεμ̣α̣[ῖο]ς Διοδώρου ἐπιδέδωκα καθὼς πρόκιται.

      (hand 3) ὁ στρατηγὸς τοῦ νομοῦ τὰ δέοντα ποιήσει.

      (hand) ἀπόδος

      To Lucius Valerius Proculus, prefect of Egypt,

      From Ptolemaios, son of Diodoros, also called Dioskoros, one of those from the Arsinoite nome. Your inborn benevolence, lord prefect, reaches all, and I ask to receive it as well. There are a certain number of people in my district who are called nautokolymbetai. These men are public officials and are in charge of the administration of water, and are attached to the shore-wardens and cultivators, and therefore they are also relieved of the entire poll-tax and exempt from every compulsory public service. They are even fed at public expense since they are completely prohibited from engaging in any other sort of work. One of these men is Isidoros son of Mareis, a truly reckless man with a surly character, who through his henchmen counterfeits official leases for the sake of extortion and profit—all of this I will prove to you at trial. Isidoros attacked me as well, by sending one of his henchmen, a man named Ammonios also known as Kaboi, a man who is worthy of blame and who has been proscribed on account of his immoderate lifestyle. He came after me despite the fact that I am the holder of an official lease and that I pay a great deal of money into the official treasury, and that I gave security for my lease. But this man does not allow me to enjoy my lease, but instead he shut me out of my house and beat me until he extorted money from me. Therefore I flee to you, the protector of all, and I ask you, since for the moment you have delayed your assizes in our nome, to order a letter to be written to the strategos of the division of Polemo and Themistes telling him to hear my case against him, since I am able to bring proofs before him of the violence and extortion, so that I can continue to live unmolested in my private property, enjoying the most happy times of our great emperors and of your gracious governorship, and so that I may be helped. Farewell. (hand 2) I, Ptolemaios son of Diodoros, have submitted the aforementioned petition. (hand 3) The strategos of the nome will do what is fitting. (hand 4) Return it.

      Ptolemaios is an odd character, even by the standards of authors of Egyptian papyri. Because we have a number of his papers, and—equally important, for this context at least—a number of his petitions, we can recognize both an idiosyncratic style of complaint and an inability to live peacefully with his neighbors. In two other roughly contemporaneous petitions, we find Ptolemaios in trouble with a man he describes as the local loan shark; he complains about the violence the man’s assistants use against him, but also admits that he owes them the money and requests only that he not be made to pay a penny more interest than what is legal.⁴ He also complains that this loan shark—who it turns out, from another of Ptolemaios’ petitions, is also the son of a former gymnasiarch,⁵ a position of honor in the community—is keeping his case from being heard by the local court (that of the strategos), which may indicate either paranoia on Ptolemaios’ part or a probably reasonable policy of avoiding him on the part of the other villagers. In a different case, he complains that another of his enemies, a man named Sarapion, had insulted the nome strategos (why Ptolemaios chose to complain about this is, of course, obscure).⁶ One is tempted to imagine that he grated more than just a little on the other members of his village.

      Figure 1. P.Mich. III 174. Digitally reproduced with the permission of the Papyrology Collection, Graduate Library, University of Michigan.

      In addition to his habit of complaining to high authorities about the unacceptable behavior of his neighbors, it appears that Ptolemaios also fancied himself a bit of a litterateur: this petition—like his others—is marked by odd syntax and a general bombast largely absent from petitions of the second century, though somewhat more common in late antiquity (that is, from the fourth century on).⁷ He enjoys odd words: when describing Isidoros as “reckless” Ptolemaios prefers an archaism (τολμήεις, rather than the more typical τολμηρός); Ammonios is not just an attendant or a subordinate (ὑπηρέτης) but a “henchman” (ὑπόβλητος), a term which also—and probably this is intentional—means “suppositious child,” and which therefore also constitutes an insult to Ammonios’ family.⁸ “Goon” would capture it well in English. In other petitions, he is prone to clichéd platitudes: “Of all the horrid things in life, the worst is for free men to suffer violence”—a sentiment repeated, with only minor variation, in two of his petitions.⁹ Whatever he was, Ptolemaios was not a simple peasant suffering under the weight of official venality, begging abjectly to retain a shred of rights in his person and property.

      It is harder, however, to decide where to place Ptolemaios on a social scale. The editor of one of his other petitions had originally concluded from a fragmentary line that he was