because of their status as “classics,” and copied and read in the Renaissance and thereafter as sources of humane value. “Literary,” here, refers primarily to sources existing within this chain of preservation, not to sources of a particular genre (thus literary sources include poetry, but also history, epistolography, rhetoric, and technical manuals, for example). Though it is important not to paint with too broad a brush, the basic conclusion of many ancient historians is that these sources are frequently very useful for reconstructing political and military narratives and of mixed utility for reconstructing the cultural world of male elites, but they can be made to do little work for telling us about the lives of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the ancient world, Roman or otherwise. The reason given for this is that the literary sources do not tend to reflect reality, but rather to make tendentious and normative claims about it; their purpose was not to provide a record of sober analysis, but to position our largely aristocratic ancient authors within their societies. Phrased differently, literary sources are artifacts of elite “self-fashioning”—a term I am uncomfortable with. (All it seems to tell me is that language is positioned and performed—but when is language not a matter of speaking from somewhere? In what sense then would someone ever not be self-fashioning? And if all texts are only self-fashioning, then does the historical project not collapse into the study of comparative narcissisms?) Still, as a diagnosis of what the literary sources do say about non-elites, this assessment seems fair. Romans writers were, unsurprisingly, not great fans of their social inferiors; they tell us little about them, and what they do tend to tell us is that their inferiors were, well, inferior.
“Documentary” sources provide one way around this problem. (It is conventional, in ancient history, to distinguish literary sources from “documentary” ones—namely, inscriptions and papyri.) Inscriptions record massive amounts of information regarding administration, official careers, and burial practices, to name but a few categories. Making history from inscribed documents is still very much a work in progress, despite huge advances over the last two hundred years. This progress has improved substantially our knowledge of the ancient world, and given insights into the precise ways in which the literary tradition distorts matters. But inscriptions were an expensive technology. While they served to monumentalize things that individuals thought important, they are hard to use to write non-elite history.
It is papyri that provide the greatest promise for this sort of project. While they are found in a variety of parts of the Roman Empire, Egypt provides our greatest concentration of them. Starting in the late nineteenth century, they began to be published by generations of careful scholars, on whose work and expertise this study rests. Still, they are not an “even” data set, even within Egypt. Recovered papyri tend to come from two main areas, the Fayyum basin and the excavated cache of documents preserved in the garbage mound of the city of Oxyrhynchos. A few come from other places as well: the western Oases, for example. They come primarily from concentrated areas of population—towns, cities, and villages, not predominantly agricultural areas. Their preservation is also chronologically uneven—the second and fourth centuries are well represented, whereas information for the fifth century, for example, is spotty. Chronological preservation also varies geographically. Additionally, while many thousands of papyri have been preserved, large numbers remain unpublished. What publications there are (and there are many) are the product of shifting editorial interests, from the earliest phases in which social history was subordinated to literary and legal history, to the more recent editorial interests in archives and record-keeping. As for the content of the documents themselves, what is published is rarely a straightforward record of personal beliefs, but is almost exclusively mediated through scribes and literate professionals composing on behalf of a largely illiterate society. Additionally, though papyri initially were considered to have much promise for social historians, they are not representative of the population as a whole. Though all who work with papyri will concede this point, it is still largely unclear and hotly debated what segment of the population they do represent.
These difficulties aside, papyri in general, and petitions concerning violence more specifically remain an important data set. The people writing them were significantly different from the writers of the literary tradition. They were non-elites in any meaningful sense of the term. Here, for reasons that will become apparent, I have focused on petitions from the first six centuries of Roman rule in Egypt: a period from the Roman acquisition of Egypt in 30 B.C. until, more or less, the age of Justinian in the sixth century A.D. Justinian is formally my endpoint, but I have resisted treating the sixth century in a rigorous fashion: this is because one major cache of sixth-century papyri, the papers of Dioskoros of Aphrodito, are currently being reedited by the able hands of Jean-Luc Fournet and his team of students. But the pre-Justinianic papyri are important in a different sense: they come from a period before the introduction of the first properly comprehensive promulgation of Roman law, Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis—that is, they come from a period in which law was largely uncodified and, despite imperial queasiness with this fact, also still developing. I have little to say about the preceding Ptolemaic period. There is certainly a story to be told here, but since I lack the linguistic capacities to deal with the demotic evidence, someone else will have to tell it. And for the purposes of preserving my already limited sanity, I have restricted myself to material from Egypt, though we have petitions concerning violence from other places as well.
PART I
The Texture of the Problem
CHAPTER 1
Ptolemaios Complains
Sometime between A.D. 145 and 147, Ptolemaios, son of Diodoros, sent a petition to Lucius Valerius Proculus, prefect of the province of Egypt (praefectus Aegypti), the highest magistrate in the land and a man appointed directly by Emperor Antoninus Pius. His complaint recounted a violent incident with a man named Ammonios, also named Kaboi. According to Ptolemaios, Ammonios was sent to attack him by another man, Isidoros, son of Mareis. This Isidoros held a privileged position in the area, being one of the nautokolymbetai (“sailor-divers”)—apparently (since we only know the term from Ptolemaios’ complaint) a group of people in charge of the administration of water in the Fayyum—no unimportant task in an area where careful management of water could mean the difference between security and starvation. In recompense for this important service, Ptolemaios goes on to explain, Isidoros and his fellow nautokolymbetai were excused from liturgies (compulsory public services—a redistributive scheme of mandatory “gifts” of public goods by the wealthy, and increasingly in the Roman period, by anyone foolish enough not to produce an excuse to avoid paying for them). Because of the nature of his position, Isidoros was excused as well from the burdensome poll-tax. Lest we be misled into treating Isidoros’ services to the community as an index of a magnanimous character, Ptolemaios explains further: Isidoros is personally a nasty individual who makes money on the side by forging official leases for personal gain. Ammonios, Isidoros’ subordinate, is no better: a man incapable of living moderately, his behavior had brought him to public attention on a previous occasion. Ptolemaios, by contrast, is a quiet person. He holds an official lease, for which he has given security, and in addition he pays his taxes—great sums of them, at that. He is a model inhabitant of Rome’s empire: a landholder, a stakeholder; presumably in general he is resistant to raising a fuss, but who could abide officials acting illegally? When he was violently treated by Ammonios and Isidoros, when he was thrown out of his house by them, and when they beat him until he paid them money to stop, he had no choice but to avail himself of the intervention of their superiors. The emperor would have guaranteed it, and Ptolemaios knew that the prefect himself would have wanted as much as well.
Accordingly, Ptolemaios went to the scribe of his local village, and through a combination of stock phrases and idiosyncratic rhetoric detailed his complaints against his local enemies. We know that in other cases
