Violent Egypt
The Romans took over Egypt from the preceding Ptolemaic monarchy in 30 B.C., inheriting a developed and legally plural society with a strong bureaucratic infrastructure. They held Egypt as a province—or a group of provinces—until the Arab conquest in A.D. 640. The question that guides this chapter is, “What precisely does that mean, and what does the fact of empire contribute to a history of violence?” This question can be answered at several levels: culturally (by asking how Egypt fit within a Roman conceptual geography of the peoples that populated its empire), institutionally (by describing the governmental offices and bureaucratic arrangements that preceded Roman conquest and documenting how they shifted and transformed over time), and politically (by identifying the loci of power in provincial society and mapping them in an imperial hierarchy). These levels of analysis do not exhaust the possibilities: legal structures, which I take to be a privileged field, are also central, but as I will explain in greater detail further on, should not be described in the same way as cultural, institutional, or political structures, since one of their peculiarities in imperial contexts is that they can also serve to alter such structures. In addition, the challenge of locating Egypt in its imperial context is complicated by the unique climatic conditions that have allowed for the preservation of a large quantity of papyrological material; accordingly, it is possible to “check” in greater detail than in other provinces claims from Roman literature about the style of administration in Egypt. This ability to check and evaluate the literary sources has had two major historiographical consequences. First, it has often forced historians into falsifying, modifying, or (very rarely) affirming the claims of literary sources (the traditional, privileged canon of evidence from which ancient history is written) on the basis of papyrological documentation. At its best this can be an enlightening exercise, but in some cases it results in the history of the province being written either as tragedy or apology, instead of detailed and dynamic social analysis. Second, when attempts to make sense of both these conflicting bodies of evidence fail, it has resulted in scholars appealing to the notion that Egypt occupied some sort of “special place” in the Roman world.1
This chapter describes some of the basic institutional arrangements that prevailed in Egypt, while trying to avoid this sort of methodological impasse. Important to my central claims is a sub-thesis, namely, that while there is a convenient disciplinary division of labor between traditional historians of the Roman Empire and papyrologists, the papyrological and literary material—as well as evidence for the institutional arrangements generated by Roman provincial governors serving short (usually three-year) terms—do not constitute independent traditions that need to be checked against one another. They are, each in their own way, responses to the transformation of imperial governance and society in the first centuries A.D., and as such are differing sides of the same coin. That is, while they do periodically make claims that can be falsified or checked, they are also traditions that encapsulate ideas about what it means to govern and be governed, to rule an empire and to live in one. Both traditions therefore evolve pari passu, as part of a conversation on governance. It is, of course, a conversation between unequal partners, but as I hope to show, the gradation of inequality is less steep that some might imagine, since these inequalities were complicated, rather than reinforced, by legal arrangements.
Before moving to this analysis it is important to offer a disclaimer. The majority of this study is written from a synchronic perspective, since this seems to be the most profitable way to approach a genre of document that persists over a long period of time and is found in multiple parts of Egypt. Yet although this study will assess evidence from a broad chronological spectrum (from Augustus to the reign of Justinian, more or less), it is worth noting at the outset that Egypt was—and remains—a historical place, and as such has never been a stable entity, either “on the ground” or as part of a conceptual framework. It is true that some stereotypes die hard, and over the course of their long lives they serve to structure institutions in a particular way. The idea of a “violent Egypt” is one of these stereotypes, although I hope to show that even this one had a complex history. Accordingly, I will begin with how an imperial power came to understand its subject peoples and what role interactions with subject peoples played in the creation of these stereotypes. I will move from there to the question of institutions, and then to the role of papyri in writing the history of Egypt under the Romans. I close with reflection on the problems raised by the question, “was Egypt a particularly violent place?”
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If we were to begin to understand Egypt from the perspective of an elite Roman living in the high Empire—say, from the period after the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the civil wars of A.D. 69 through the middle of the third century—we would begin with literary sources, and conclude, after sorting through a variety of obiter dicta (since Egypt is not the subject of a extant “ethnographic” analysis or monograph after the early first century A.D.2), that it was a strange and violent place. Given that it was both strange and violent, other elements of its governmental infrastructure would seem to make more sense. It was governed in a practically unique way as compared to other provinces, namely, by a prefect of the equestrian rank who answered directly to the Emperor.3 Senators (or even other powerful equestrians) were banned from visiting the province without special permission (the unexpected visit of Germanicus in A.D. 19 being a source of chagrin for the Emperor Tiberius).4 The population as a whole was carefully structured into discrete “ethnic” groups (a problematic term, to which I will return): Alexandrian citizens, citizens of a few special “Greek” cities, Jews, and “Egyptians” (everyone else, irrespective of descent). This political and geographical isolation had consequences for social mobility into the highest echelons of Roman society (social mobility at other levels being a far more vexed issue): Egypt produced no senators until late antiquity, and relatively few equestrians. Even acquisition of Roman citizenship was difficult: Alexandrian citizenship, it appears, had to be obtained first. No colonies or municipia were located in Egypt. Symbolically important organs of local government and autonomy—town councils (βουλαί)—were absent throughout the Egyptian countryside (with the exception of the Hadrianic foundation of Antinoopolis in 130) until the visit of Septimius Severus in the beginning of the third century.5 Egypt was therefore seen primarily as a fertile area, and, since it was populated by people who were fundamentally defective if not downright seditious, its basic role in the Empire was to be subjected to agricultural strip-mining.6
The story, so told, is a tragic, almost lachrymose history;7 a counter-narrative could be posed, a narrative of resistance, in which the rich stories of individual people that can be extracted from the papyri are marshaled as a critique of the Roman tradition, a rebuke to the racist imagination of the imperial power.8 In this counter-narrative, the Romans would be ignorant of the “true” facts on the ground, wrong about the intrinsic nature of the Egyptians (or the Greeks, or the Jews, or the Alexandrians), and, like all colonizing powers, guilty of having erroneously treated the oppressed as being in some way timeless and without a historical trajectory, and/or as an “other” who served as a textual mirror for imperial self-definition.
There is something slightly ironic about this position: while there is nothing per se wrong with trying to reconstruct distinctive perspectives from the “bottom up” (and indeed this is a central aim of this study), nor with emphasizing a disjuncture between elite literary sources and realities on the ground, to do so at the expense of treating either viewpoint (that of the imperial center or the subject population) as uncomplicated and homogeneous is bad historical practice. And, as with all attempts to smooth over historically dynamic processes, some key elements are lost in the process. While it is true that Roman authors of the high imperial period tended to cast Egypt (and Egyptians) as strange and violent, these claims have a history, and one that is more complex than can be accounted for by a simple accusation of imperialism, racism, Orientalism, or self-defining “othering.”9
The Roman understanding of Egypt from the high Empire onward as strange and violent has, quite obviously, two parts. The “strange” part has a long history, dating back certainly to Herodotus, but probably originating in Hecataeus of Miletus. Herodotus famously saw Egypt as a place of inversion, an opposite of Greece, yet also a place whose very existence was a subtle critique