and the responsibilities that this entails for a ruling power rather than a set of stable generative stereotypes. And as the Egyptians became more entangled in imperial systems of government, the stereotype was able to retain its currency. As I will argue in greater detail in the chapters that follow, the use of courts is somewhat analogous to the situation that Woolf describes for inscriptions: courts (and the judgments that they produce) were ways of bringing temporary stability to dynamic and complex interpersonal relationships. While the chronologies of these two different moves toward stability are slightly different (the process Woolf describes takes place over the course of the first century, whereas the evidence from the papyri begins to pick up in the late first and continues to rise in the second), they are nevertheless part of a single, dialectical process that emerges with the transition from the charismatic Julio-Claudian dynasty to the newer, stable, and increasingly bureaucratic world of the Flavians and Antonines. The stereotypes that emerge from writers like Tacitus grappling intellectually with the development of empire are as telling as the actions of Egyptian litigants.
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While potentially useful for explaining the nature of imperial stereotypes, this sort of analysis has its limits. First and foremost, it leaves vague the precise definition of “Egyptian” and gives no clues as to what that designation might have meant to someone living in the Egyptian countryside (the chora, the main source of papyri). Second, while stereotypes are easy enough to identify, there is not necessarily a correlation between a particular stereotype and the institutional framework that an imperial power sets up “on the ground,” much less a direct correlation between an idealized institutional flow chart and the way that these institutional relations actually worked.
We can begin with the question of the relationship between “Egypt” and “Egyptians.” As mentioned above, four distinct “classes” of people inhabited Egypt: Alexandrian citizens, citizens of a few select Greek cities (Naukratis, Ptolemais, and eventually Antinoopolis), Jews, and everyone else (Egyptians), which would have included descendants of “Greek” colonists who did not have a privileged citizenship.
There is reason to think that this system of classes/citizenships was meaningful for the ways that people interacted with the imperial government, at least in some respects. Philo of Alexandria records, for example, that Egyptians were subject to harsher forms of corporal punishment than non-Egyptians, in this case, both Alexandrians and Jewish elders.33 One advocate in a case in the first century thinks that the Egyptians are in general supposed to be treated harshly by the law.34 Egyptians were famously singled out for harsh treatment by Caracalla, who expelled a number of them from Alexandria (the expulsion edict is ironically found on the very papyrus that documents the grant of citizenship in 212).35 These brief mentions aside, the main source of evidence concerning relations between groups is a papyrus relating to the office of the Idios Logos, the representative of the emperor’s accounts in Egypt. Since the province was treated, from conquest onward, more or less as the personal possession of the emperor, this official would have been his chief financial representative on the ground. The papyrus in question, the Gnomon or “guide,” lists the rules accumulated from the age of Augustus onward. A number of these rules penalize crossing status-boundaries: various forms of intermarriage are forbidden; Egyptians who “pick children up from the dung heaps” (illegally adopt or enslave their potential social betters?) are fined a quarter of their property at death; Roman soldiers acting as citizens when not properly discharged are fined a quarter of their property; Egyptians who try to register as citizens of the Greek cities are fined; and so on.36
At first glance the mere existence of such a list of rules seems to indicate a harsh and oppressive regime bent on keeping people of differing social status carefully separated according to rank. These classes, however, are fundamentally juridical ones, and as such, they are suspiciously neat. The realities were more complex. Putting aside, for the moment, the complex problem of how status was inherited and transmitted (in practice rather than in theory), it is to begin with unclear how these distinctions were maintained: the Roman army (lightly staffed, according to Strabo) was never intended to be a proactive internal police force, and the Roman government (also lightly staffed) would have been ill suited to policing the choice of domestic sexual partner or the transmission of an inconsequentially small inheritance unless someone actively complained about it.37 The attempts of the Roman governors to get parties to register their inheritance documents were notoriously unsuccessful.38 Yet even accepting that the rules contained in the Gnomon were well enforced (and I think this is doubtful, for reasons I will explain in a moment), and therefore that these juridical distinctions were meaningful parts of lived reality for the ways in which people interacted with their neighbors or with their government, there is nevertheless very little evidence that these juridical categories can be mapped to a sense of identity, and if they can, it remains unclear under what circumstances a concept like “identity” might be a meaningful analytical category for the study of violence or of social relations in general. I will return to these questions in Chapter 4, but for the present it will suffice to note a few things. First, while there is sometimes a temptation to think of these juridical classes as living in completely separate spheres, this is highly doubtful: in light of the papyrological evidence, we should instead imagine a high degree of intermixing of populations, even when such a mixture was incapable of being represented through juridical language.39 Thus papyri amply document newly discharged veterans (Roman citizens), as well Antinoopolite citizens, interacting in the countryside with Egyptians,40 or Egyptians living in Alexandria.41 This does not, of course, mean that these people liked each other, or were interested in overlooking a degrading legal status to focus on the content of their neighbors’ characters.42 It means that they did not conscientiously move in separate geographical, political, or social spheres, and, in light of what we know about mobility in other imperial/colonial contexts, there was likely to be the kind of cross-pollination of ideas, language, and culture that makes for situations that are also juridically complex. The evidence of onomastics points similarly to overlap: a Greek ephebic inscription, for instance, lists new citizens with names like Sarapammon, Sarapion, and Aphrodisios son of Annoubias.43 Second, while there are a few statements from the papyri that we might classify as “politically incorrect” slurs directed at Egyptians,44 there is very little to give us insight into each community’s (if this is indeed the right word) self-perception.
This gulf between imperial administrative rules and local realities is indicative of some larger issues about what it meant for Egypt to be a province, and therefore relevant to how we should imagine the relations between empire and subject in the Roman period. The Roman government’s desire to keep the population distinctly ranked by ethno-juridical status was in tension with its ruling ideology, namely, that it was a responsive and rational empire that was accountable to its citizens.45 And in Egypt, this claim was particularly meaningful, since Egypt had a long tradition, particularly under the preceding Ptolemaic monarchy, of allowing its subjects the right to complain and giving them officially sanctioned avenues to obtain redress. It is at the intersection of this ruling ideology and this preexisting tradition of complaint and response that we can best understand why the segregated, carefully demarcated world of the Gnomon of the Idios Logos looks so different from the lived experience of a petitioner in Egypt.
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It is from here that we can move to the actual administrative practices that characterized Egypt under the Roman Empire, and come to understand in a more robust way why complaint is such an important category of social behavior for revealing the dynamics of an ancient empire. There are two threads to this story, and both of them involve giving an account of the position of the Roman governor.
Like the strategos mentioned earlier, the governor of Egypt had a difficult job. He was ultimately responsible for extracting grain from Egypt to feed Rome (and later, Constantinople). This involved a delicate process of calibrating the extraction at the proper level to enable feeding the population in one area and to avoid starving the population
