that was characterized neither by wholesale, top-down repression and extraction, nor by completely reactive governance. Instead, the administration of Egypt as a Roman province was based on two approaches that were in tension with one another: a desire to mark off discrete groups from one another was undermined, in idiosyncratic ways, by a commitment to Roman self-under-standings of being a just and rational empire as well as by the need to use discretion, precision, and well-calibrated strategies of extraction to manage the needs of two populaces in distinct areas. This tension is particularly evident from the workings of the legal system, which allowed for individual subjects to interact with their superiors in ways that could meaningfully shape future practice. More than a story of oppression and resistance, the realities of imperialism in Egypt made for an administrative regime that was dynamic and productive.
But at this point it is fair to ask, “But was it particularly violent?” That is, no matter how much explanation one gives of imperial stereotypes, the realities of provincial governance, and the dynamism of legal systems, was there some sort of underlying reality that made daily life in Egypt more brutal than life in, say, contemporary Rome or Asia Minor, or modern-day Topeka or Detroit? Depending on what one thinks is at stake in the question, the answers would be “yes,” “it’s unclear,” and “what do you mean by ‘violent’?”
As far as the “yes” answer is concerned, one could note that the Roman Empire, as a whole, was administered by relatively few people, the means of coercion were dispersed, and professional policing was limited—there were town guards, for example, but these were not what a modern person would think of as a professional police force, being recruited, instead, from the population of local inhabitants, and thereby ensconced in village hierarchies.72 There is little evidence of them stopping a crime.73 There were relatively few ways, in other words, actually to prevent a violent act—at least at the institutional level. Attempts to wipe out brigandage—obviously a problematic category—had only limited success; attempts to wipe out interpersonal violence in towns and villages were nonexistent.
But the lack of policing institutions does not automatically mean that a particular society is likely to be violent. Levels of violence, presumably, have fluctuated chronologically and geographically before the advent of policing in the early modern period. Even without policing, there were channels through which people could complain about the violence of others. But here things become less clear. Would the possibility that my neighbor would complain to the prefect pose a serious deterrent to my punching him in the face? Would the fact that people could try to avail themselves of justice have actually functioned to make Egypt any less violent? Would the fact that a complaint might not be given a hearing have made it a more violent place?
It is hard to measure deterrence even in modern societies with robust data collection, since one is both measuring acts that did not happen and presuming baseline levels of “violence”—a questionable technique, since violence is a phenomenon for which it is hard to give a robust causal account in the first place, even if we presume that we know what it consists of (and we do not, because, for reasons I will outline momentarily, it is not so much a thing as it is a contestable ethical claim). It also bears reminding that there is no way to approximate something like a “crime rate” from the ancient world: in part, the data are insufficient, but more important, the acts of interpersonal violence about which I am concerned were not, in the first place, crimes—they were delicts, private relationships of obligation between individuals and families, and as such, not of primary interest to the state.74 Even if we were to engage in the methodologically questionable exercise of grouping together things that are unacceptable in modern Western society and labeling them as “crimes,”75 we would not alleviate many difficulties, since we would often be comparing apples with oranges: robbing a traveler on a public road is different from punching a neighbor in the course of an argument, is different again from breaking into a person’s home to take back something you think is yours, and is emphatically different from when the governor beats you with rods because you’ve failed to pay your taxes or you’ve finally exhausted his limited patience. Accordingly, any procedure of marking off behaviors that a modern historian or sociologist might take to be antisocial and then trying to measure them as an index of civility produces odd results. I am reminded of the line of former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry, spoken during the rash of drug-related murders in the late 1980s, that “outside of the killings, DC has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.” Absurd, perhaps, but also indicative of the problem: the categories by which we measure what counts as a violent place are everything, but they are also extremely hard to define in a way that is sociologically—or historically—meaningful.76 This has consequences for comparison, whether with other regions of the Roman Empire or between ancient and modern systems. I suppose that if I were forced to choose between being dropped off in downtown Topeka or downtown Detroit, I would choose Topeka, at least if I were being dropped off at night; but given the choice between Topeka and second-century Oxyrhynchos I confess that I am at a loss to know where I would fare better, in what ways, or at what time of day.
All of which leads to the last possible answer to the initial question, itself taking the form of a question. What is one trying to communicate when one labels something as “violent,” and what precisely is at stake in such a designation? It is here that we have to look to a complex modern historiography on violence, contextualize these academic perspectives in terms of their larger theoretical and political projects, and move from there back to the ancient evidence, attempting to bring these two traditions into conversation with one another.
CHAPTER 3
Violence, Modern and Ancient
At the end of the previous chapter I raised the question of the links between violence and conceptual apparatuses that purport to measure violence—crime rates, for example. The question of what can be learned through the study of something like a “crime rate” leads in turn to another problem: for better or for worse (probably for worse), we inhabit a world that exhibits a strong tendency to criminalize things that are unpleasant, to make political issues into criminal issues, and to organize state resources around the policing and protection of citizens from these criminal acts. In other words, as sociologist Jonathan Simon has argued, we “govern through crime.”1 Crime is a powerful concept in modern society. In contemporary discourse, criminality is juxtaposed to civility; crime is something that is necessarily horrid and bad; it is not supposed to happen, or at least, it is not supposed to happen “over here”—crime is only tolerable when it is on the other side of the line that separates civilization from barbarism. Within the ever-increasing universe of things that are “crimes,” violent crime, however, remains the easy case. Even for those who have substantial doubt as to the effectiveness or morality of modern penal policies, there is instinctive and near-universal agreement that the “real criminals”—the violent criminals—deserve to be removed from society and sequestered elsewhere.
This is not, of course, the place to discuss the ethics of modern penal policy; I dwell on it only because our modern understandings of violence as a category which is primarily criminal have a major effect on the ways in which we understand what is at stake in labeling something an act of violence. Our insistence on treating violence as crime leads us easily to treat violence as something fundamentally other, horrid, or incomprehensible—to treat it as something that challenges the capacity of our analytical categories to describe and understand. Here the fact that our understandings of violence are mediated through our contemporary legal categories has been joined to certain moves in twentieth-century critical thought which I will outline below; this fusion of perspectives (crime and critique) has, I will suggest, led to a complicated and dangerous dead end in contemporary scholarship on violence, namely, a tendency to think that our scholarly categories and forms of disciplinary reasoning cannot possible capture what is “violent” about “violence”—or even what is meaningful or interesting about it. The end result of this is a body of contemporary scholarly literature
