that whatever the actual, written law of the province, there was in practice a substantial amount of pragmatic muddling through in day-to-day affairs, and provided that certain formal aspects of the law were followed, the Roman governors in Egypt were willing to tolerate petitions from a broad range of individuals. While not all these would necessarily receive justice, the governors attempted to serve the populace in the best way possible—provided certain rules of approach were followed.56 The second problem, however, is more difficult, and comes to a larger question of the evidence itself. The problem, posed in its most basic form, is this: if there was a legal remedy for violence extended to all individuals, and if the government was willing to enforce it, who would actually have taken advantage of it? In other words, to whom was the system accessible? Could it be accessible to the defective Egyptians of Tacitus, Juvenal, and the Historia Augusta?
The papyrological evidence provides limited answers to these questions. First, while writing may not have been a prohibitively expensive technology, the papyri do not give us access to the entire socioeconomic spectrum of Roman Egypt.57 As usual, the lowest of the low are excluded. This is predictable, of course, but a complicating factor is that we have very little firm evidence which indicates what percentage of the population this might be. We might surmise that it was a segment that was largely agricultural, since most of the extant papyri come from the larger towns and villages and seem to represent a class of people who look at first glance to be far from miserable and destitute. Second, it is exceedingly hard from the rhetorical narratives of petitioners to discern what their precise status was: sometimes they make reference to their citizenship or to offices that they have held, but they were not required to do so. In some ways, as I will argue, this is to be expected: going to court was about seeking to define one’s status in the first place. Finally, when Tacitus and Juvenal refer to Egyptians as being violent, there is nothing that would indicate that they knew (or cared) about the complex system of ranked citizenships, but instead simply spoke in generalities about the land and its peoples. While I will deal with these issues in greater detail in what follows, it is worthwhile for the moment to consider briefly the issue of citizenship, and in particular its connection to legal access.
The legal situation in Egypt after the Roman conquest is difficult to characterize briefly, but in what follows I hope to essay a few conclusions. In Ptolemaic procedure there were two different courts (an “Egyptian” and a “Greek”) in which to judge disputes. The choice of court was based, or came to be based, on the original language in which the supporting documentation was written.58 In the Roman period there was no such choice; judicial hearings concerning violence were held in front of magistrates, according to the cognitio procedure—that is, the magistrate (whether a Roman prefect or epistrategos or a Greek-speaker serving as strategos) was both presiding official and judge in legal proceedings. This break from the jury system meant that litigants of all classes would be treated by administrators who were more or less legal amateurs. And while it was a common element of imperial Roman practice to allow individual populations to be judged “by their own laws,” there is little evidence that these administrators would have known what they were in the first place. Accordingly, it would be a mistake to assume that there was a major difference in the type of substantive rules to which each population would be held.59 This is particularly true in the case of violence.
This will be a controversial statement for some. Deciphering which of the private law practices that show up in the papyri are “Roman,” “Alexandrine,” “Greek,” or “Egyptian” has been a favorite exercise for legal historians since at least the publication of Mitteis’s Reichsrecht und Volksrecht at the end of the nineteenth century.60 There were certainly “Egyptian” legal materials, as the Greek translation of the Hermopolis “Legal Code” makes clear.61 There were likewise traditional legal practices, especially in certain aspects of private law like contracts and marital property. But it is important to remember that any “local” practice was implicated in the larger administrative superstructure of the Empire itself. Several things follow from this premise: first, and most important, it is dangerous to assume that Roman law simply layered itself on top of local law, providing some kind of legal “veneer” or “superficial varnish.”62 Leaving aside the objectionable metaphor of culture-as-bookshelf, it makes sense to note, as scholars are increasingly realizing,63 that once the Romans showed up it was all Roman law, because the Romans were the ones enforcing it. I write this only partially tongue-in-cheek, to emphasize that local law, when it existed (and it had a checkered history), existed only because the Romans either required it to exist or defined it into existence.64 Second, it would be problematic to conclude, on the basis of the use of local law, that the Roman governors in charge of provinces knew anything about what its contents were, or were prepared to enforce it.65 Additionally, while there might have been divergent legal traditions at the moment of conquest or shortly thereafter, there was a subsequent flood of legal development throughout the Empire as a whole, through the imposition of wide-ranging legal reforms in specific regions (such as can be seen in the Flavian municipal laws from Spain) and through the constant issuing of imperial or gubernatorial edicts and constitutions, processes which likely impinge on one another, if only indirectly.66 These developments were based on principles palatable to Romans, sent off by Roman magistrates, and enforced at the local levels. Further, individuals living in the provinces seem to have been conscious of the privileges that this flurry of documentation conveyed. Furthermore, as Gonzalez has noted in the case of the Lex Irnitana, sometimes the Romans themselves imagined people as already living by the same principles as those on which they based the laws in the first place.67 Finally, and as a consequence of all these factors, at least so far as the question of violence is concerned, it is a fundamental mistake to draw a clear line between the world of legal practice in Egypt before the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212, with its divergent citizenships and status markers, and after, in a period where everyone is a citizen. This is so not only because there is so little empirical evidence for a change in the formal rules for dealing with violence in the period following the Antonine Constitution, but also because even before 212 there was a marked tendency toward the homogenization of legal culture.
For the question of violence, however, it is in my opinion more profitable to distinguish between private law as it was practiced by individuals and law as it was practiced by magistrates adjudicating between two parties. The Romans no doubt tolerated local legal forms, and permitted individuals to conduct private transactions according to them. They had no interest in preventing people who were not Roman citizens from writing contracts, marrying, buying, and selling. If there were a dispute over one of these things, though, and it came before a magistrate, the legal situation would have been more complicated. Roman magistrates understood local laws to be a disadvantage, and a brutal and inhumane one at that. In Chapter 5 I detail a case of this. Overall, a better way to understand the legal situation in Egypt before the grant of universal citizenship in 212 (and after it as well), especially as it relates to the question of how magistrates sought to judge, is to think of the administrative structure as being populated by a fragile network of administrators with ill-defined and overlapping competencies,68 and laws not as coherent systems of rules that need to be followed in their entirety, but as a system of differential privileges and disabilities. These privileges and disabilities were not absolute: in the name of humanity or good governance they could be followed to the letter or ignored.69 Roman citizenship offered the greatest number of privileges, Alexandrine fewer, metropolitan yet fewer, and so on.70 Petitioners might be treated better or worse according to their legal status, but all had the right to attempt to approach the government for redress, even when their opponents were of a higher status. This did not mean that all people would receive equal justice, but simply that all people had a right to try.71
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Thus far I have tried to present an outline of how Egypt fitted into the broader world of the Roman Empire at the level of imagination and administrative practice, and argued that the picture is more complex and dynamic than either ancient literary authorities or modern
