each village spend their time assaulting their neighbors on feast days: while their neighbors drunkenly revel (since the Egyptians, according to Juvenal, are particularly adept at this), the opposing village sneaks in and attacks. Noses get broken, cheeks scratched to the bone, eyes lacerated. But the fun of inter-village brawling could potentially be dismissed, were it enough to satisfy the malefactors. It was not:
terga fugae celeri praestant instantibus Ombis
qui uicina colunt umbrosae Tentura palmae.
labitur hic quidam nimia formidine cursum
praecipitans capiturque. ast illum in plurima sectum
frusta et particulas, ut multis mortuus unus
sufficeret, totum corrosis ossibus edit
uictrix turba, nec ardenti decoxit aeno
aut ueribus, longum usque adeo tardumque putauit
expectare focos, contenta cadauere crudo.
Those who inhabit neighboring Tentyra with its shady palm trees turn back, fleeing quickly from the charging Ombites; but one of them, running too fast and afraid, slips, falls, and is captured. He is sliced into a multitude of bits and pieces, so that one corpse will serve many. The victorious crowd devoured the whole thing, gnawing down even his bones—they didn’t cook him down in a stew pot, or even make kebabs of him, thinking it too long even to wait for a fire. Instead, they were happy with just his raw corpse.18
Conflict over strange gods that are not even gods leads to the joy of pointless violence, which even then does not satisfy until it ends in an orgy of cannibalism. Devouring enemies raw, of course, involves violating two basic elements of humanity: violation of the taboo on cannibalism, but also the rejection of minimally dignified modes of preparation (cooking).19 In this, the Egyptians are worse than the other uncivilized members of the Empire as a whole, who are at least capable of being taught civilized habits.20
Satire is meant to be funny, and this one undoubtedly is. Going farther than that, however, is perilous. It is unclear, to begin with, whether Juvenal’s poem is a hateful slander or a learned joke (or both): Ombo and Tentyra are not neighbors, which may be a sign that the poet speaks tongue-in-cheek. Divining any sort of truth about Juvenal and his beliefs (or the beliefs of those he satirizes) from his poetic persona is a fraught exercise.21 But bracketing the question of belief, there is nevertheless a commonality between Tacitus’ characterization of the Egyptians and Juvenal’s abuse: the Egyptians are violent and irascible, hard to control. They are crazed about religion. They are hard to assimilate. Moreover, they have no interest in these processes, feeling no sort of self-critical shame about their penchant for violence. Accordingly, in the Roman tradition the Egyptians are also famous bandits (or famous for their bandits), who play a feature role in Lucian’s Toxaris and a bit part in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius (3rd cen. A.D.).22 The author of the Historia Augusta (like Juvenal, a complex and satirical text) sums up the tradition well: “the Egyptians, as is well known, are fickle, raving mad, boastful, violent; they are also liars, children, always striving after revolution even in their public gossip, makers of verse, writers of epigrams, astrologers, soothsayers, and folk-healers.”23 As proof, the author introduces a (phony) letter of Hadrian, supposedly written to a certain Servianus, in which Hadrian accuses the Egyptians of multiple perversions, ranging from religious confusion (the Christians are actually worshippers of Serapis, and the priests of Serapis are actually Christians; but it does not matter, since what they in fact all worship is money) to unusual and shameful ways of impregnating their chickens.
What seems most striking is the relative consistency of this tradition of violent seditiousness over time: once it appears, it canonizes quickly and with a minimal degree of meta-commentary. While other members of Rome’s empire eventually come to be integrated, and their elite classes taught to blend, if sometimes imperfectly, into the broader culture of civilized men, Egyptians still belong to a rough and nasty part of the world. This tradition persists at least into the late fourth century. Roughly contemporary with the Historia Augusta, Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Egyptians as “mostly darkened, with a look that is more gloomy than mournful; skinny and dry, they get heated up at any disturbance; they are quarrelsome and they are the bitterest debt-collectors. It is shameful among them if they cannot show whip marks on their bodies acquired from not paying their taxes. No torture has yet been invented harsh enough to get a hardened bandit from that region to give up his true name unwillingly” (22.16.23). More of the same, perhaps, but nevertheless intriguing in light of a vignette from earlier in the same book of Ammianus’ narrative:
Per hoc idem tempus rumoribus exciti variis Aegyptii venere conplures, genus hominum controversum et adsuetudine perplexius litigandi semper laetissimum, maximeque avidum multiplicatum reposcere, si conpulsori quicquam dederit, ut levari debito possit, vel certe commodius per dilationem inferre, quae flagitantur, aut criminis vitandi formidine, divites pecuniarum repetundarum interrogare. hi omnes densati in unum, principem ipsum et praefectos praetorio graculorum more strepentes interpellabant incondite, modo non ante septuagensimum annum extorquentes quae dedisse se iure vel secus plurimis adfirmabant. cumque nihil aliud agi permitterent, edicto proposito universos iussit transire Chalcedona, pollicitus quod ipse quoque protinus veniret, cuncta eorum negotia finiturus. quibus transgressis mandatum est navigiorum magistris ultro citroque discurrentium, nequis transfretare auderet Aegyptium, hocque observato cura perpensiore evanuit pertinax calumniandi propositum, et omnes spe praesumpta frustrati redierunt ad lares. unde velut aequitate ipsa dictante lex est promulgata, qua cavetur nullum interpellari suffragatorem super his quae eum recte constiterit accepisse.
At the same time a large number of Egyptians arrived (at Constantinople), roused up by a number of rumors. Egyptians are a difficult race of people, who customarily take the greatest pleasure in complicated litigation. If they have ever handed something over to a debt collector, they are particularly eager to ask back many times what they paid, so as to lighten the debt if they can, or to do better through stalling. And they summon rich men to court for extortion, since due to fear they are eager to avoid the charges. All these people came into the city as a crowd, interrupting the emperor and the praetorian prefects as they whined like jackdaws, trying to get back money that they swore that they had paid, rightly or wrongly, to all sorts of people some seventy years ago. Since nothing else could be accomplished at the court, the emperor posted an edict demanding that they all cross over to Chalcedon, and promised that he would come over as soon as possible and take care of their claims. Once they had crossed an order was given to the ferry captains who crossed back and forth over the strait not to carry any Egyptian passengers. This law was carefully observed, which put an end to their attempts at blackmail, and they all went back home with their hopes dashed. As a result, a law was passed almost as if justice herself had declared it, that no patron could be harassed on account of sums that he had lawfully accepted.24
In this case, the problem, it appears, is not that the Egyptians are allergic to government, but rather that they complain too much. This is a telling detail: though Ammianus thinks that they have made up all of the charges, there is something ironic in that at the heart of his complaint is the claim that the Egyptians are now doing precisely what they are supposed to be doing: filing petitions and relying on the imperial legal system. On one reading, then, it would appear that the Romans are hateful bigots, and the Egyptians cannot catch a break.
At the same time, however, Ammianus’ emphasis on litigiousness might provide some insight into the genesis of the stereotypes of Egyptians in the Empire. As I have noted above, the stereotype of the ungovernability of Egypt seems to arise in the late first century A.D. One place to locate the source of the stereotype could be found in the riots between Alexandrians and Jews in A.D. 38—riots that were continuous, in some sense at least, with a Jewish revolt that lasted well into the second century. These riots were certainly brutal, leading to embassies to Emperor Claudius and famously documented
