and repayment until the issue is settled—if indeed it ever is. The act of giving the label of violence, as in modern discourse, implies that one finds another’s actions to be inappropriate or unpalatable. But unlike modern discourse, the label of violence does not implicitly try to relegate the violator beyond the line that distinguishes civilization from barbarism; instead, the idea is that violence has created a subsequent, albeit inverted, relationship—a new relationship of obligation wherein the violated dominates, albeit only in the sense that his obligation will be redeemed before a judge. This is because one man’s violence is often another man’s force, and the correctness of the label “violence” has to be worked out politically, that is, through public claim-making and contestation.
* * *
The quarrels between slaves and debtors and shoemakers and students lead to another point about violence, one hinted at in the previous section: there is a connection between violence and personhood, and particularly how one perceives oneself as a person (that is, one’s subjectivity), in two senses of the term. One sense is legal, and is reflected in the ways law connects the power to claim things as violence with questions of status, expressed most starkly above in the movement between free and slave, but to one extent or another implicitly in every violent conflict. The ways in which law constructs and impinges upon subjectivities through the language of personal status and obligation is an important part of my narrative, and an element to which I will return below. But for the moment, it is profitable to begin with a wider sense of the term subjectivity, that is, with how people come to understand themselves and their place in the world, and how violence connects with these elements of self-perception.
At one level one could say that, while all people are vulnerable in some way or another, in any given society (and for current purposes we can take this term as being unproblematic) there are differential degrees of vulnerability. How and where one can be injured, by whom, and with what sorts of result to a person’s sense of self and self-worth is a product of culture, though it is in the nature of these cultural categories that they are often precisely what are being contested in the case of a claim of violence. Two examples will again suffice. The first comes from Pierre Bourdieu’s classic discussion of the contested dynamics of vulnerability in Kabyle society in Algeria, in which he describes honor as a game to be played between equals, a dialogue of challenge and riposte in which the worth of both the offender and the challenger was open to public scrutiny. When challenged, a man could reply, presuming himself to be the social equal of his challenger; by the same token, he could choose to ignore the insult, marking the offender as someone not worth responding to while similarly declaring his own person as invulnerable to the hostilities of those who were lower ranked. The ideals, however, were complicated by the realities:
To choose not to reply may have different meanings, even contradictory ones. The offender can, by his physical force, his prestige, or the importance and authority of the group to which he belongs, be superior, equal, or inferior to the person offended. If the logic of honour presupposes the recognition of an ideal equality of honour between the two parties, popular consciousness is nevertheless not unaware of inequalities in fact. He who cries, “I’ve got a moustache too!” is answered by the proverb: “The moustache of the hare is not that of the lion.” In this way a whole casuistry, spontaneous and extremely subtle, may develop.62
The dynamic process of challenge and riposte (or refusal to counter the challenges of another) that Bourdieu describes can be compared with a letter of the younger Pliny, describing the murder of Larcius Macedo, a senator and ex-praetor, but also himself a descendant of slaves (and for this reason, according to Pliny, a harsh and unpleasant master), by his own slaves in the baths. The first part of the letter describes the murder itself (I will return to this part below). After reflecting on Macedo’s death, Pliny pauses to recall another incident in which Macedo had been subjected to violence in the baths, considering it a sort of an omen:
addam quod opportune de eodem Macedone succurrit. cum in publico Romae lavaretur, notabilis atque etiam, ut exitus docuit, ominosa res accidit. eques Romanus a servo eius, ut transitum daret, manu leviter admonitus convertit se nec servum, a quo erat tactus, sed ipsum Macedonem tam graviter palma percussit ut paene concideret. ita balineum illi quasi per gradus quosdam primum contumeliae locus, deinde exitii fuit.
I will offer another detail which just came to mind concerning this same Macedo. When at Rome, he was in the public baths when a noteworthy, and, as his death has proven, ominous incident occurred. A Roman knight was tapped lightly by Macedo’s slave so that he could pass by; the knight wheeled around and slapped not the slave, but Macedo himself, so hard that he nearly fell over. In this way, the baths were for Macedo like a path, leading first to violence (contumelia), and finally to death.63
The contrast between these two texts, both dealing with the ethics of violence and the nature of vulnerability, is striking, to pun just slightly (and, it bears mentioning, yet another good empirical reason for jettisoning the nonsense about “Mediterranean” societies that continues to return, in zombie-like fashion, to scholarly inquiry). The delicate casuistry of Bourdieu’s Kabyle society that provides a commentary on how the game of honor should be played (often with telling mistakes and misunderstandings) is answered quickly by Pliny’s Roman knight, who strikes instinctively and derogatorily at his social inferiors (an open-handed slap possessing the same degrading and emasculating force it has today, it appears). The only accident here is that in this case the open hand lands on the knight’s vast superior in social rank; the assumption remains that the knee-jerk delivery of punishing violence to a slave who had the audacity to invade a superior’s personal space (by his touch, and by his request that the knight yield a way through the crowd) is perfectly reasonable and acceptable. The lesson, for Pliny, seems to be that the baths are dangerous, for when the markers of invulnerability are checked at the door you may well end up violently humiliated by your social inferiors. But in a wider sense, these texts demonstrate how violence is enmeshed in a society’s broader discourse about who can be rightly injured and how, and similarly within notions of who can feel pain and who can complain about feeling it. In this sense, it contributes to a person’s subjectivity, since when people come to notice that they have been victims of violation they reflect, through their written complaints at least, but probably more broadly in ways that we cannot see, on precisely who they are (and how this contrasts with who they think they are, and/or who others think they are) and where they fit into society.
This is so not only in general terms, but in particular ways as well. One of the most important contributions of anthropology in recent decades has been to draw attention back to the physical body, and in particular, to how subjectivity is affected by the physical body, how it is or how it comes to be perceived.64 Violence plays an important role in this process as well. To return to Pliny’s letter on Macedo, this time to the narration of Macedo’s death:
lavabatur in villa Formiana. repente eum servi circumsistunt. alius fauces invadit, alius os verberat, alius pectus et ventrem, atque etiam—foedum dictu—verenda contundit.
He was bathing in his villa at Formiae. Suddenly slaves surrounded him. One of them grabbed his throat while another one beat his face, another beat his chest and belly, and also—horrible to say—pounded his private parts.65
Pliny’s description of the assault on Macedo is presented through the lens of privacy and vulnerability (both literally and figuratively); it is made more horrifying by playing on fears that are endemic in slave systems. The slaves’ violation of Macedo deprives him of certain protections to his body that are guaranteed by his rank, and does this by harming him in places that are off limits to others. The language of the body is central to this, and provides a way into the question of how subjectivity is based upon—and similarly can come to structure—ideas about the body. Throughout petitions—and likewise in the subsequent claim-making process—bodies are on display, being written about as wounded and marked, swollen and bruised, violated and exposed. This is so not only in the first-person narratives of petitions, but, since the power of observation was spread throughout
