than engaging in a sober and reflective analysis of it.
It is this chapter’s goal to describe in greater detail what was meant by a claim of “violence” in Roman Egypt, to describe what we might mean by such a claim today, and then to attempt to see how these two categories can inform one another, while also trying to avoid this particular impasse. I will defend in some detail the claim I made earlier, namely, that violence is not a thing or an act (though acts can indeed be termed violent), but instead an ethical label, one that is located within matrices of power and of what one considers acceptable and unacceptable. As with all categories of ethical and moral evaluation it is subject to contest. It is therefore also political, insofar as concerns of power will adhere in the contest over whether the label of “violence” applies. But this is not merely a question (as it is in modern society) where what is at stake is the exclusion of the perpetrator of violence from society as a whole. Instead, in a world that was largely reluctant to criminalize interpersonal acts of harm, what was at stake in calling someone’s behavior “violence” was the nature of the obligation that he or she had incurred by the act of violence, and by extension, also the nature of personhood inherent in such concepts of obligation. I will unpack this idea in greater detail below.
To claim that violence should be treated soberly and analytically by scholars is not to say that it can be trivialized, or to claim that there is not something unique about it: violence does retain something distinct from other relational categories and ethical labels, since by moving into the world of inchoate emotions such as pain it also intersects with two other important categories, namely, language and subjectivity. It is related to subjectivity at least in the sense that the experience of personal violation (about which more specificity in what follows) challenges the boundaries of the self and causes those boundaries, often taken for granted, to become an object of reflection;2 it is related to language in the sense that language provides a highly imperfect vehicle for the expression of pain, a condition that in turn affects the making of claims about pain and the forging of intersubjective bonds between the one who suffers and the one who sympathizes, or who comes to be convinced that he must sympathize.3 Violence runs up against subjectivity and language in important and fascinating ways, and any appreciation of how violent acts come to “mean” things—in the ancient world or the modern—must take account of this dynamic, for only with this relationship in mind can we return to the world of the papyri, and the importance of the power of narration for petitioners, governors, and the law.
What follows proceeds in three parts. First, I proceed philologically and terminologically, and try to map the semantic range of the vocabulary of violence in Roman Egypt. This leads to a particular problem, namely, the question of the “authenticity” of this language, and the problems posed by the fact that such language was mediated through a scribal tradition. Petitions concerning violence were obviously mediated, but historians, I argue, have erred in taking this mediation to be a methodological problem, rather than an opportunity. This mediation gives us opportunities for understanding what is “at work” in the language that petitioners use. Still, knowing the words for violence is only a part of the equation; it does not help us to piece together the kinds of claims that are being made when someone declares someone else’s actions to be “violence.” This leads to a question of whether we know what we mean when we identify something as violence. In the next part of the chapter I move to the problems that contemporary historians encounter in writing about violence, and the challenges that modern understandings of violence pose for understanding ancient violence. Key in the modern historiographical tradition, I argue, is a divide between two traditions that follow the path of Max Weber: one group which prefers to write about violence as something ethically neutral (force), and another which writes about it as ethically problematic (violence). The distinction is valuable, I argue, because by reappropriating the violence/force distinction as a tool for understanding the claims made in the papyri we gain additional insight into the negotiations about the nature of violence, its connection with concepts of personhood, and the ways in which that personhood is redeemed through petitions once it is violated. I close by returning to my initial point, namely, about how the language of petitions—stilted, formulaic, and mediated—can come to be meaningful, and then go on to introduce a concept that will structure Part II of this book: translation.
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It is best to begin with terminology. There is a relatively compressed vocabulary that can be mustered by a petitioner (or the scribe helping him or her compose) to describe a violent act. There is a good deal that is historically interesting about this vocabulary. Most important, “violence” is always understood to be prima facie wrong. That is to say, insofar as I can tell, there is no concept, in the papyrological material or in the literary or the legal evidence, of a “sufficient amount of” violence, “justifiable” violence, or “deserved” violence. There are, of course, gradations of wrong, but they never at any point blend into gradations of right. This is not to say that there was no understanding of justifiable force. There were plenty of situations in which force was deployed, in which it was understood to be explicitly or implicitly acceptable, and in which it could be either defensible by legal standards or tolerated (or approved of, or even celebrated) by society at large. It just could not, and would not, be called violence. It is a peculiarity of the words—hybris in Greek, iniuria or contumelia in Latin—that they simply cannot receive a positive valence.4 Iniuria can be qualified as atrox (“heinous” or “aggravated”); hybris as ἀνήκεστος (“heinous,” translating Latin atrox), or οὐ τυχοῦσα (“uncommon,” “inappropriate,” “unconscionable”). That is to say, when people sought to use adjectives to qualify these terms, the adjectives they used only made them worse, not better. For the Latin term, this is simply a feature of etymology: in-iuria, “not lawful,” or broadly “not acceptable.” If something is ius, it is broadly right. It would therefore make no sense to have something like bona iniuria—it is intrinsically illogical. The Greek word hybris, as every student of tragedy knows, is likewise never a positive thing. It is only a modern notion that recognizes that the idea of hybris, in its broader, fifth-century B.C. formation as something like “failing to be mindful of one’s station in the world” might, in fact, be connected to a certain quality that can make a person successful. For lack of a native term we call this quality chutzpah. It is also a notion that is fundamentally foreign to the ancient world.
In addition to “violence” having a thoroughly negative valence, it also has a relatively restricted scale. Specifically, in Roman Egypt, all violence is personal. There is nothing, at least in the papyrological evidence, that resembles Paul Farmer’s “structural violence”—an agent-less but nevertheless statistically visible suffering produced by inequality and unevenly distributed across a population.5 This has certain consequences: Government cannot be violent; an individual magistrate can. The fact of inequality is not in itself violent; but a very wealthy individual may, as a result of this wealth, be prone to act violently (a common theme in complaints). They key term, as I indicated earlier, is hybris, though some petitions speak more specifically of “blows” (plegai), or refer simply to “nastiness” (aedia, a term which I will translate simply as “violence” as well, avoiding the euphemism).6 In Roman Egypt, hybris has a narrower sense than it did in fifth-century Athens.7 Hybris can refer to violent or offensive conduct against a person’s body (a beating or cudgeling, for instance), or against a person’s reputation (insults, threats, or public abuse, Loidoria). Some have mistakenly understood these terms as two different types of violence, which they are not. Rather, they are based on a different concept of personhood—a concept that encompasses a wider territory than the modern definition, being both corporeal and incorporeal, or more accurately, both physical and social.8
Violence appears in the papyri in several contexts. It can be used in the context of a petition asking for redress for crimes against persons in a petitioner’s family (such as spouses and children), or immediate kin (such as parents or grandparents), or people in any given
