(which can translate to “damage” or “harm,” but which always indicates harm not to full people but to inanimate objects, financial interests, and slaves).10 Bia could also be used to refer to coercive actions that sought to harm an individual’s financial interests (in this sense it maps, albeit imperfectly, to the Roman legal category of metus). What is important to note here, however, is that because of the nature of legal procedures, some (if not many) petitions necessarily concern more than one issue at once. Thus, in the petition of Ptolemaios discussed in Chapter 1, Ptolemaios was complaining both about harm to his financial interests (the extorted money) and about violence (the beatings through which his opponents managed to get him to give up the money). However, though both terms can exist in a single document, they refer to separately actionable issues—for instance, to a crime against property and an incidence of violence. It is also important not to confuse violence (hybris) or harm to property (bia) with the adjectival or adverbial form of bia (βίαιος, βιαίως). This descriptor appears a number of times in petitions to refer to people’s behavior and character (e.g., so-and-so is a violent/harmful/unpleasant person), but so far as I can tell never is used formally to define the action itself.11 There are likewise procedural peculiarities that exist for violence but not for damage/harm, as I will outline in greater detail in Chapter 5.
In addition to the fact that the language used to describe violence is bound up with the language of wrong, the language that surrounds the core legal terms is the language of disdain, hostility, and eventually, of prayer and redemption. When petitioners are “approached” they are also “attacked” (ἐπέρχεσθαι in both cases, which also, and perhaps tellingly, means “to take to court”); they are knocked down (κατακόπτειν); “tortured” or “abused” (αἰκίζειν); and “despised” (καταφρονεῖν), to give just a few commonly recurring examples. People’s opponents are joyfully overbearing: they “take confidence” (θάρρειν) in their power to get away with doing violence; they act “in the manner of thieves” (λῃστρικῷ τρόπῳ), or in the manner of tyrants (τυρρανικῷ τρόπῳ). Petitioners, in turn, wish for “punishment” (ἐπέξοδος) or “revenge” or “judgment” (ἐκδικία). In other words, despite their repetitious nature, petitions still record a rich language of scorn and insult.12
Nevertheless, this repetitiousness of a limited number of tropes over a long period of time should cause some concern. There is no question that these documents were mediated through a scribal tradition. This raises an important question of method: what if we are not, in fact, looking at first-person narratives that reflect an individual’s subjective self-perception and evaluation of self-worth? What if what we have, instead, are various examples of how scribes would have interpreted pain? This leads to a pair of objections that might be labeled, for the sake of convenience, the skeptical position. By this I mean a belief that either (a) all we have in the resulting petition is the voice of the scribe or (b) even if there is more than the voice of the scribe, we can take no methodologically defensible epistemological position through which we could separate the scribe’s voice from that of the petitioner.13 Even when petitions vary, scribes are manipulating formulae to make a “best fit” between formal language and the experience of violence. It is further likely that even outside the bounds of scribal mediation, petitioners are lying, or at least manipulating the truth. They are creating, in other words, what Natalie Zemon Davis has called “fictions”—massaged, rhetorical, well-designed statements that were intended to resonate with broader social ideas about truth and justice.14 They are not delivering the truth about violence; they are winking at the truth, and winking not even at their own truth, but at other people’s truths, at what those other people—those who populate the legal system—consider violence. In other words, these documents tell us very little indeed about violence or how people experience it; they may tell us something about how scribes record it, or at best, how they translate it.15
Phrased in its most strident form, this position leaves the historian in something of a quandary. This is especially so if one thinks that the point of reading petitions is to figure out precisely what happened in X village on Y day—that is, to evaluate the ways in which petitions reflect the truth about a moment in the past. This is, of course, part of the point of reading them. And in this case the answer to the question of “how accurately do these narratives reflect the incident about which the petitioner is complaining?” would then have to be, “probably not so accurately.” But in this form, the problem is overstated. Petitions were not only narratives about the past. They were futureoriented as well. They sought to produce judgments and rearrange social relationships as a result of a past violent act. As such, they were political moves in local dramas, both in the sense that they sought to produce a set of actions, and that they sought to change the contours of a certain balance of power. By making this small change in our historical perspective (that is, by moving from a concern about truth in the past to attention to the ways in which petitions produced truths that would shape the future), scribal mediation of the language of violence comes to look less like a problem, and more like an opportunity to understand in greater detail the intricacies of the political and institutional landscape in which petitions were produced.
Anyone who watches television cop shows knows that the police work with a specific institutional vocabulary. In cop talk, as in Egyptian petitions, there is a relatively limited range of vocabulary used to describe violent occurrences.16 The language used to describe modern situations is the product of an institutional culture that requires reasonable consistency in describing criminal actions: a police report must use this limited vocabulary to convey details that may eventually have legal repercussions. Thus, while the vocabulary itself is sparse, it is used to convey maximum amounts of information. At the same time, police reports are individualized descriptions of events, designed not only for legal purposes, but also for accurate reporting back to a community in the form of crime statistics and police blotters in local newspapers. Because of this, the language must both be a roughly accurate legalistic translation of the “facts” of the event and also be specific enough that quantifiable patterns can be extracted. While it would be silly to claim that in Egypt there was a desire on the part of the government to extract specific data on this aspect of local life, the comparison is still instructive: petitions were the product of a legal tradition, and as such are relatively consistent in their language. Complainants sought to get their point across to authorities forcefully; they used specific language that was laden with meaning to do this. But this does not mean that petitions were merely forms to be filled out. Descriptions of violence had to resonate with a body of institutional presumptions to the degree that they had to be recognized as complaining about violence in order to start institutional processes in motion in the first place. But they also had to tell a particular form of story, and that story had to be individualized.
It is worth arguing from example. The following two petitions come from the Kronion archive from Tebtynis. Both are from the year A.D. 48, both are addressed to the strategos Apollonios, and both are written in what appears to be the same hand. The first dates to the fifth of January, the second to the fifth of February. Furthermore, in both petitions, the name of the assailant, Patynion, is the same (though his patronymic is subtly different). These two documents are the most similar examples that I have found in the petitions about violence. Unlike other documents I discuss in the text, I have printed the papyri below to reflect the original layout of the documents, and preserved the original spellings of the words:17
Ἀπολλωνίῳ στρατηγῷ Ἀρσινοείτου
παρὰ Πετσίριος τοῦ Φουλήμι-
ος τῶν ἀπὸ Ταλεὶ τῇ ε τοῦ
Τῦβι τοῦ ἐνοστῶτος
