not comparative evidence. Bluntly put, I do not believe that the latter category has any meaningful purchase as a method, at least not in the sense that ancient historians have applied it in the last few decades—as a way of coping with the fact that our sources are incomplete and fragmentary by substituting information from “better documented” societies. Comparative method, here, is used in the ways described by Jonathan Z. Smith: as a stance that mistrusts easy analogies and coincidences, and tries instead to develop a rich language of difference.3 Whether I have been successful in this will be judged by what follows.
What follows also tries to accomplish a larger goal, namely, that of outlining a dialectical model of imperial law and governance on the basis of this particular genre of narrative complaint. I attempt this through two main lines of inquiry. First, I try to show how violence “worked” in day-to-day life in Roman and Late Antique Egypt. This involves outlining the ways violence was discussed, how it was acted out in towns and villages, where it fit in disputes between individuals and families, how it served to govern, shape, and alter interpersonal relationships, and how it was transformed, through the language of law, into legal complaints, courtroom hearings, and institutionalized punishments. As I hope to show in what follows, violence has always had a peculiar role in the history of Roman Egypt. The discussions of Egyptian violence in literary sources from the Roman period—which portrayed Egypt as a violent place, a hardscrabble backwater filled with superstitious inhabitants particularly unsuited to civil government, and held in place only by force of arms—has had major historiographical consequences for writing the history of violence in Egypt. Specifically, it has at times forced historians to engage in apologetic treatments rather than close analysis of Egyptian violence.4
An analysis of the style of violence is a central part of this study, but in addition I hope to contribute to the ways we understand the Roman legal system in the provinces, and, at a broader theoretical level, to how we understand the relationship between law and society in general. This involves several related things. It involves outlining what a bottom-up view of the law might have looked like in Roman Egypt, clarifying what we think we mean when we speak of provincials entering the field of legal contest, and giving an account of both the rules and the relationships that were meaningful in a Roman province, as well as what Žižek calls the “metarules” or Searle calls the “background”—the correct system of applying rules in the first place.5 It goes without saying that both of these categories—the rules and the ways to apply the rules properly—were constantly changing and precisely the object of contest. It also involves explaining more precisely why people chose to alter their relationships through the legal sphere in the first place. When we explain these phenomena properly, law begins to look like a rather different creature from what historians (and in particular, ancient historians) often take it to be: rather than a system of rules to be applied correctly or erroneously or a simple imposition of imperial power, law emerges, paradoxically perhaps, as both a field of contested practice and a simplifying language through which individual petitioners can redefine themselves and their universe of personal relationships.
These are perhaps less than modest goals, and if it were possible to achieve them it would probably represent the culmination of a career or a lifetime, rather than the product of a short and restricted study. But I hope that it will be possible to essay some tentative answers to some of these questions, to push the evidence farther than has been done previously, to find ways of making old documents say new things, and to present, through a detailed study of violence, some models through which these larger questions can be pursued. What follows will not be the last word on violence, law, or society in Egypt, but will serve three functions. First, I hope to complement some recent trends in ancient history and papyrology, especially the laudable efforts in the last twenty or so years that have sought broaden the scope of the issues on which papyri can be brought to bear.6 Second and more important, I hope to contribute to some larger discussions of how to write social history from legal documents, especially where the content of the documents reflects actions that are, necessarily, viewed as aberrant, problematic, or contested either by an individual or by the community at large.7 Finally, taken as a whole this work is an attempt to write provincial history from the bottom up, as a series of complicated transactions and conversations, as well as to bring individual choice and agency into the picture.8
The argument proceeds in two parts. Part I is largely an exercise in brushclearing. I begin in Chapter 1 by giving a close reading of one petition, and present some of the questions that will guide what follows. In Chapter 2 I discuss the significance of the fact that our documentation comes from Egypt, and that Egypt was a part of the Roman Empire. Here I deal with the matter of Egyptian exceptionalism, and begin to describe some of the institutional features of government in Egypt which I consider important to understanding what follows. Because one of the stories that was told by the Romans about Egypt was that it was “violent,” in Chapter 3 I turn to a discussion of violence, and the import of such a term within contemporary historical and critical projects. From there I highlight some possible ways these contemporary categories can be reappropriated for dealing with ancient material. In Chapter 3 I also deal with the question of language, since, for reasons I discuss, violence and language are intimately connected. In this particular context, however, the language I am primarily interested in is mediated language, that is, the consequences of our documentation being intertwined with scribal traditions and practices.
Part II turns back to the world of petitioners and their claims. In Chapter 4 I discuss narrative techniques, and begin to outline the ideology that underpins petitioners’ claims. I argue here that the rhetorical moves in petitions point to a world in which personal dignity is insecure and subject to constant evaluation by peers and neighbors, rather than being connected to rigid positions on a clearly delineated social hierarchy. This insecurity is rooted in an equalizing ideology that can be recovered through a careful analysis of the papyri. As a consequence of this ideology, however, social relationships are complex and multifaceted, and no clear patterns of deference emerge from the world that petitioners describe. Chapter 5 continues the argument, providing an explanation of how the narratives did their work in a legal context. Here I address in greater detail a problem raised in Chapter 2, namely, the consequences of pluralism and localism for understanding petitioners’ claims and strategies. Chapter 6 returns to petitioners and their opponents, and presents a model for understanding the role of violence in structuring the dynamics of interpersonal relations in Roman Egypt. A conclusion follows, as do appendices. The appendices contain translations of my primary sources, as well as a brief introduction to papyrology addressed to nonspecialists.
The central concepts that structure the argument are fiction, translation, metaphor, and narrative. These are concepts drawn from literature, not “social science” or “legal science.”9 The format I have chosen is that of a historical essay, not a comprehensive monograph or an edition of texts that treats all remaining extant evidence seriatim. My notes mark intellectual debts, document my claims about papyri, and pick the occasional fight. They are necessarily selective in their citations of secondary literature.
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The question of sources structures nearly all historical projects, but is particularly acute for non-elite social history in the ancient world. For a variety of reasons that take their origins in various disciplinary configurations, the strong spine (if not the entire central nervous system) of ancient history has traditionally been the “literary” sources: works that
