the proper management of water, as the Nile flooded only once a year and had to be properly distributed through an intricate series of canals lest everybody starve. The system of corvée labor that dug and maintained these critical veins and arteries needed to be overseen and managed, and the whole process had to be documented and accounted for. In other words, the simple task of extraction could easily be a full-time job in itself, and depended on managing the participation of individuals at many levels of the imperial hierarchy (and some who were not on this hierarchy at all), with substantial local knowledge of how to run large-scale agricultural production in geographically diverse regions (such as the Fayyum basin), without permanently and irreparably irritating any particular constituency.46 Given that the governor’s means of enforcement resembled more a sledgehammer than a scalpel, and given the scope of the challenges of extraction,47 “best practices” probably involved trying to make as many people happy as much of the time as possible while simultaneously, if infrequently, applying spectacular levels of brutality to particular malefactors. Governors often failed (like Aulus Avilius Flaccus, at least in Philo’s description), leaving their successors to clean up their messes. Such seems to have been the case when Tiberius Iulius Alexander, himself a rare example of an Egyptian governor with extensive local knowledge (and a nephew of Philo of Alexandria) acceded to the governorship of Egypt in A.D. 66:
Tiberius Iulius Alexander declares: since I care very much about preserving the city in its fitting condition in which it enjoys the benefits which it has received from the Emperors, and in keeping Egypt in good health so that she may happily serve both the annona and the greatest flourishing of our present times, without being burdened by new and unjust exactions:
Scarcely had I left the city (Alexandria) when I was shouted down by petitioners in both large and small groups, and from both the wealthy classes and the country farmers, who complained about the recent offenses; accordingly, I have wasted none of my efforts in setting the situation straight. So that you might have a more confident hope in all these matters concerning your salvation and profit because of the shining example to us of our safety, the benefactor of the entire race of men, Imperator Caesar Galba, and so that you know that I have concerned myself with the matters that pertain to your benefit, I have therefore made public notice concerning each of the things that I have inquired into, and I have done those things which it is allowed to me to do or to decide; and those things which are more important and which need the power and greatness of the Emperor, I will present to him with all frankness.48
A list of concessions to good governance follows: the elimination of compulsory service as a tax collector, the regulation of immunity, limitations on litigation concerning financial matters, among other things. The extensive text was circulated through the land on papyri and was inscribed on stone (copies of both exist), proclaiming that the governor would, henceforth, attempt to achieve a level of fairness in his extractions.
Tiberius Iulius Alexander’s proclamation is fascinating, not only because it shows a detailed awareness of a series of local issues, but also because it points to the complex situation of the governor of Egypt in managing a series of constituencies who were particularly vocal in their demands. Not quite in the “place of kings” (in Tacitus’ vision), Alexander had to make certain to refer issues of particular import to the Emperor himself; nevertheless, he retained a significant amount of agency. Similarly important is his relationship to the local peoples: in his inscription he presents himself as caring not at all whether the people who “shout him down” with their petitions are Greeks or Egyptians, but only that they represent both the local men of importance and the farmers who tilled the land. Both groups, he declares, have legitimate complaints, and, more important, both, he assumes, have rights that deserve to be respected.
This, then, is the second thread of the story: the idea that a ruler, to be legitimate, had to be responsive (rather than merely imposing his will by force) opens up a series of crucial possibilities for his subjects. To be legitimate meant to be a fair judge, and while it is likely that the Roman governors of Egypt (or any other province) felt this adjudication of cases to be an irksome chore, they nevertheless created an institutional framework that encouraged people to avail themselves of Roman justice.49 This meant treating people as if they had rights by extending to them remedies that we may think of as procedural, but which were in fact substantive (since this distinction, as Alan Bowman has pointed out, would have made no sense in the Roman world).50 It meant, above all, responding to their petitions, and finding workable solutions to numerous problems, social and economic.
What this also means is that every time the prefect, the epistrategos, the strategos, or any other official in Egypt received a petition, they were deciding what the law of the land was, and whether it should be applied, extended, or altered to fit the facts of a particular case. When these officials subscribed a petition and set the wheels of justice in motion, they were then—in a peripheral but critical sense—making law, and they were making it on the basis of people’s narratives and normative claims. In the face of such diversity and colonial cultural, linguistic, and economic overlap and indeterminacy, they also ended up making law in ways that undermined the ideal of stable, discrete populations living separately from one another.
In a system that is primarily founded on local initiative (that is, when problems are brought into the legal sphere only through the choice of nonstate actors),51 this process of law-making necessarily moves in two directions. On the one hand, there is a requirement that certain aspects of the formal law be followed: complaints must fit into a certain legal form, and certain kinds of language must be exploited to make one’s case. This can be crudely categorized both as a “top down” process, in that the language and style of complaint are determined by the state, and as a “bottom up” process, in that it depends exclusively on individual initiative to bring the matter to the attention of authorities. On the other hand, formal aspects of complaining (of translating a complaint into law) were counterbalanced by the Roman state’s financial need to maintain order and peace, as well its ideology of responsiveness. This counterbalance necessarily involves making pragmatic compromises which, while they were capable of being imagined as exceptions that fell outside the letter of the law, were in fact contributing to the shape of the body of rules as a whole. That is, these compromises often set precedents for future decisions. While there was no formally articulated doctrine of stare decisis in Roman law, people noticed precedents, and soon began to invoke them in new contexts.52 Making a legal decision, even if it was a pragmatic compromise, nonetheless involved declaring what was justice; invoking a precedent was a way of demanding that the government, which prided itself on making just decisions, live up to the reputation it claimed for itself—namely that the individual magistrate was a moral agent.53 That this process moves in several directions at once is a prime source of scholarly confusion.54 While an account of the role of the legal system is of major importance for contextualizing the documents through which we understand violence, any attempt to view this dynamic system as a static, coherent, or rationalized whole (on the analogy of a “constitution” or a “basic law”—or from the perspective of the Gnomon of the Idios Logos) is bound to be frustrated.55
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One important question, however, concerns the peculiar situation of Roman law. Roman law was famously a law for Roman citizens, to the exclusion of others. The majority of people living in Egypt (or in most other places outside the Italian peninsula, for that matter) were not Roman citizens before 212. Accordingly, there is a temptation to think the Romans would have spent most of their administrative energy dealing with the problems of Roman citizens, enforcing Roman law in their cases, and doing their best to delegate local matters to local people whenever possible.
At the level of legal technicality this is largely true, but the situation is more complicated for two reasons. One is that, despite the vast amount of legal documentation concerning both violence and other, more mundane matters, the interface between written, positive law and practical law is unclear. I believe, and outline in greater detail in Chapter
