councils (βουλαί)—were absent throughout the Egyptian countryside (with the exception of the Hadrianic foundation of Antinoopolis in 130) until the visit of Septimius Severus in the beginning of the third century.5 Egypt was therefore seen primarily as a fertile area, and, since it was populated by people who were fundamentally defective if not downright seditious, its basic role in the Empire was to be subjected to agricultural strip-mining.6
The story, so told, is a tragic, almost lachrymose history;7 a counter-narrative could be posed, a narrative of resistance, in which the rich stories of individual people that can be extracted from the papyri are marshaled as a critique of the Roman tradition, a rebuke to the racist imagination of the imperial power.8 In this counter-narrative, the Romans would be ignorant of the “true” facts on the ground, wrong about the intrinsic nature of the Egyptians (or the Greeks, or the Jews, or the Alexandrians), and, like all colonizing powers, guilty of having erroneously treated the oppressed as being in some way timeless and without a historical trajectory, and/or as an “other” who served as a textual mirror for imperial self-definition.
There is something slightly ironic about this position: while there is nothing per se wrong with trying to reconstruct distinctive perspectives from the “bottom up” (and indeed this is a central aim of this study), nor with emphasizing a disjuncture between elite literary sources and realities on the ground, to do so at the expense of treating either viewpoint (that of the imperial center or the subject population) as uncomplicated and homogeneous is bad historical practice. And, as with all attempts to smooth over historically dynamic processes, some key elements are lost in the process. While it is true that Roman authors of the high imperial period tended to cast Egypt (and Egyptians) as strange and violent, these claims have a history, and one that is more complex than can be accounted for by a simple accusation of imperialism, racism, Orientalism, or self-defining “othering.”9
The Roman understanding of Egypt from the high Empire onward as strange and violent has, quite obviously, two parts. The “strange” part has a long history, dating back certainly to Herodotus, but probably originating in Hecataeus of Miletus. Herodotus famously saw Egypt as a place of inversion, an opposite of Greece, yet also a place whose very existence was a subtle critique of Greek culture, since many of the things that the Greeks claimed to be special about themselves was equally part of Egyptian self-definition, and furthermore, since a fair number of “Greek” practices had Egyptian roots.10 While interesting commonalities between Greek and Egyptian culture could certainly be found, other aspects of Egyptian culture were harder to reconcile—in particular, the Egyptian preference for theriomorphic deities. It was also largely agreed that the Egyptians were best governed by powerful monarchs.11 This dynamic tension, it seems, was profitably exploited by the Ptolemaic monarchs who ruled Egypt prior to its absorption into the Roman Empire.
This emphasis on difference—and the role of ethnographic writing in crafting difference—is well understood by scholars. What is more interesting for the purposes of this study is the emphasis on “violent”—and this seems to be largely an invention of the Romans, and in particular, of the Romans of the late first and early second centuries.12 While Rome had been in contact, in some capacity or another, with the preceding Greco-Macedonian Ptolemaic monarchy since the third century B.C., it does not seem that it ever took a particular interest in generating detailed knowledge of the peoples of Egypt.13 It is not until the age of Augustus that we have a serious description of Egypt, namely, in the seventeenth and final book of Strabo of Amaseia’s Geography. Strikingly, Strabo is largely neutral on the character of Egyptians, and is in some ways positive (with the exception of a textually problematic passage in which he quotes Polybius).14 If anything, the criticism he levels at Egypt is at the level of the Ptolemaic monarchy, which he presents as degenerate and incapable of governing. Their degeneracy led to Augustus’ intervention to “stop the drunken violence” (ἔπαυσε παροινουμένην) and replace the monarchs with “wise” men (σωφρόνων)—the prefects of Egypt (17.1.12). The Egyptians of the chora or countryside, however, are in Strabo’s account generally peaceful: it takes only three cohorts to maintain order, and even at that these cohorts are understaffed. The warlike nomads surrounding the Nile valley are themselves not a particular threat, either (17.1.53).
It is in the period between Strabo and Tacitus that it seems that the tradition of Egyptian violence comes to play a role in stock descriptions of the inhabitants of the province. The locus classicus is Tacitus’ Histories, describing the state of the provinces during the civil wars which followed the death of Nero:
Aegyptum copiasque, quibus coerceretur, iam inde a divo Augusto equites Romani obtinent loco regum: ita visum expedire, provinciam aditu difficilem, annonae fecundam, superstitione ac lascivia discordem et mobilem, insciam legum, ignaram magistratuum, domi retinere.
Egypt—along with the armies that control it—has since the time of Augustus been ruled by Roman knights who have the role of kings. This seemed a good policy to keep domestic control over a province that is hard to access, full of grain, fickle and hostile because of superstition and wantonness, ignorant of laws, and unacquainted with government.15
The string of complaints about Egyptian character is striking in its pointed delivery. The fact that it comes from a “serious” historian like Tacitus makes it, at first glance, damning to the Egyptians. Naphtali Lewis even elevated these discrete criticisms to chapter headings in his justly famous survey, Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule, a formidable example of the sort of history “against the grain” that I alluded to earlier. But there is a danger in reading Tacitus in a wholly un-ironic manner here. The reference to kings is particularly telling: Tacitus knew well that the Roman equestrians walked a fine line between ruling like kings and being agents of the Emperor. Cornelius Gallus, the famous first prefect of Egypt, came too close to independence, denigrated the Emperor’s reputation, and lost his life. The prince Germanicus, alluded to earlier, riled the Emperor Tiberius when he visited Egypt in A.D. 19. And, as Benjamin Kelly has argued, Tacitus’ narrative of Germanicus’ visit to Egypt in the Annales is pregnant with doubt about the nature of government at Rome, with Egypt (in this case Pharaonic Egypt) again serving as a mirror for the development and trajectory of one-man rule at Rome.16
Outside of the framework of Tacitus’ overarching claims about the politics of kingship and governance, it remains to understand the insults to the Egyptians themselves. These are indeed part of an emerging pattern: the combination of strangeness (expressed here as religious fervor) and violence (inability to be governed) evident from the Histories of Tacitus can similarly be found in the work of his slightly younger contemporary, Juvenal, who combines both in his fifteenth Satire, and who focuses specifically on the inhabitants of the chora (the countryside, or rather, the entirety of Egypt excluding Alexandria). Here, the Egyptians not only worship strange monsters (portenta)—cats, dogs, fish, apes, birds, and crocodiles—they spend their time fighting over whose gods are best. This leads to implacable hatreds between villagers, in the case of this satire, between Ombo and Tentyra:
inter finitimos uetus atque antiqua simultas,
inmortale odium et numquam sanabile uulnus,
ardet adhuc Ombos et Tentura. summus utrimque
inde furor uolgo, quod numina uicinorum
odit uterque locus, cum solos credat habendos
esse deos quos ipse colit.
Between these neighbors, Ombo and Tentyra, there is an old and venerable grudge, an immortal hatred, a wound that cannot be healed, one that still burns. There is the greatest hatred of each people for the other, since each place hates the gods of the other one, since they think that the gods that they worship are the only ones that deserve to be worshiped.17
Accordingly,
