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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 he drafted his own petitions, since we can match the signature at the bottom of this particular complaint with the handwriting on some of his other documents; in this case it is unclear if he drafted an initial version, but certain (because of the distinct handwriting) that a scribe wrote this version for him, not least because of the necessity of making several copies—probably three or four in total.¹ Once these copies of the original complaint were made (and likely after a process of negotiation that would produce the final version), the scribe would have given the copies back to Ptolemaios to submit on his own behalf—generally in person at the prefect’s annual assizes, though in this case we know they were sent, since Ptolemaios tells us that the assizes for this year were delayed due to the upcoming Nile flood.² Of the copies one has survived; it was purchased by B. P. Grenfell and F. W. Kelsey in Egypt in March 1920, and brought by Kelsey back to the University of Michigan, where it is now housed in a temperature- and humidity-controlled room on the top floor of the Hatcher Graduate Library. Other documents relating to Ptolemaios have come to light as well, and reside in locations as diverse as Cairo, Florence, Geneva, Hamburg, New York, Oslo, and Madison.

This particular papyrus, published according to standard papyrological notation as P.Mich. III 174 (document number 174 contained in the third published volume of documents from the Michigan collection), is, if nothing else, a model of good preservation. From the annotations on the bottom of the papyrus, we can tell which copy this was: it was one of those that he had sent to the prefect. A copy would have remained in the prefect’s archives, and another would have been returned to Ptolemaios, bearing two bits of text. One is that of whichever member of the prefect’s staff was in charge of handling this particular petition. He instructed Ptolemaios to present his petition to the strategos, the chief magistrate of the Arsinoite nome, the administrative division which included the Fayyum and Ptolemaios’ home town of Theadelphia. Finally, there is a fourth hand which might be that of the prefect himself.³ This fourth hand provides the six crucial letters in this document: apodos: “return it”—that is, give the subscribed petition back to the petitioner, and let him bring it himself to the strategos who would ultimately be responsible for handling Ptolemaios’ lawsuit. It was this phrase that represented the moment in which the state acceded to the demands for justice from its subjects, and this small Greek word was responsible for setting the institutional mechanism of justice in motion:

Λ̣ουκίωι Οὐαλερίωι Πρόκλωι ἐπάρχωι Αἰγύπτου π̣αρὰ Πτολ̣[ε]μ̣αίου Διοδώρου τοῦ καὶ Διοσκόρου τῶν ἀπὸ τοῦ Ἀρσινοείτου νομοῦ. τῆς ἐ̣μ̣φύτου σ[ο]υ, ἡγεμὼν κύριε, εὐεργεσίας εἰς πάντας φθανούσ̣ης καὶ αὐτὸς τυχεῖν δέομαι. εἶδός τί ἐσ̣τ̣ιν ἐν τῷ νομῷ ἐν ἀριθμῷ ἀνδρῶν οἳ καλοῦνται ναυτοκολυμβηταί, οὗτοι δημ[ό]σιοι ὄντες καὶ τῇ τῶν ὑδάτων διοικήσει ὑπηρετοῦντες προσμένοντές τε τοῖς κατ[ὰ] καιρὸν αἰγιαλοφύλαξι καὶ κατασπορεῦσι, διὸ καὶ ἀφίονται παντὸς ἐπικεφαλαίου καὶ πάσης ̣ λ̣ειτουργίας ἔτι δὲ καὶ ἐκ τοῦ δημοσίου σιτοῦνται καθʼ ὃ οὐκ ἐξὸν αὐτοῖς καθόλου ἑτ[έ]ρ̣ᾳ̣ τινὶ πραγματείᾳ παρενχειρεῖν. τούτων εἷς τις Ἰσίδωρος Μαρεῖ ἀνὴρ π̣ά̣νυ το[λ]μήεις καὶ αὐθάδης τῷ τρόπῳ διʼ ὑποβλήτων νοθεύων τὰς κυριακὰς μισθώσεις χάριν τοῦ διασεί<ει>ν καὶ ἀργυρίζεσθαι καθʼ ὃ καὶ ἀποδείξω ἐπὶ τοῦ ῥητοῦ ἐπῆλθεν ̣ καὶ ἐμοὶ διʼ ἑνὸς τῶν ὑποβλήτων Ἀμμωνίου τινὸς ἐπικαλουμένου Καβοι ἀνδρὸς ἐπιμέμπτου καὶ διὰ τὸ ἀκόσμως βιοῖν προγραφέντος τυγχάνοντι οὐσιακῷ μισθωτῇ καὶ ἱκανοὺς φόρους διαγράφοντι εἰς τὸν κυριακὸν λόγον καὶ πρὸς τὴν μίσθωσιν̣ ἱκανὰ ὑπαλλάξαντι οὐκ ἐῶν προσευκαιρεῖν τῇ μισθώσει ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῦ οἴκ̣[ου] ἐκκλείων καὶ ὕβρεις παρέχων μέχρι καὶ διέσεισέν με ἀργύριον. ὅθεν ἐπὶ σὲ τὸν π̣άντων ἀντιλήμπτορα κατέφυγον καὶ ἀξιῶ ἐπειδὴ τοῦ παρόντος παρῃτήσ̣ω τὴν εἰς τὸν νομὸν ε̣ἴσοδον κελεῦσαι γραφ̣ῆναι τῷ τῆς Θεμίστου καὶ Πο̣λέμωνος στρατηγῷ διακοῦσαί μου πρὸς αὐτ[ὸ]ν διὰ τὸ τὰς ἀποδείξεις δύνασθαί με ̣ ἐπὶ τῶν τόπων παραστῆσαι ὑπὲρ το̣ ῦ̣ ̣ ὑβρίσθαι καὶ διασεσεῖσθαι ἵνα δυνηθῷ ἐν τοῖς εὐτυχεστάτοις τοῦ μεγίστου Αὐτοκράτορος καιροῖς καὶ ἐν τῇ ἐπαφρο[δ]ίτῳ σου ἡγεμονίᾳ ἀνεπηρεάστως ἐν τῇ ἰδίᾳ διαζῆν καὶ ὦ βεβο[η]θημένος. διευτύχει.

(hand 2) Πτολεμ̣α̣[ῖο]ς Διοδώρου ἐπιδέδωκα καθὼς πρόκιται.

(hand 3) ὁ στρατηγὸς τοῦ νομοῦ τὰ δέοντα ποιήσει.

(hand) ἀπόδος

To Lucius Valerius Proculus, prefect of Egypt,

From Ptolemaios, son of Diodoros, also called Dioskoros, one of those from the Arsinoite nome. Your inborn benevolence, lord prefect, reaches all, and I ask to receive it as well. There are a certain number of people in my district who are called nautokolymbetai. These men are public officials and are in charge of the administration of water, and are attached to the shore-wardens and cultivators, and therefore they are also relieved of the entire poll-tax and exempt from every compulsory public service. They are even fed at public expense since they are completely prohibited from engaging in any other sort of work. One of these men is Isidoros son of Mareis, a truly reckless man with a surly character, who through his henchmen counterfeits official leases for the sake of extortion and profit—all of this I will prove to you at trial. Isidoros attacked me as well, by sending one of his henchmen, a man named Ammonios also known as Kaboi, a man who is worthy of blame and who has been proscribed on account of his immoderate lifestyle. He came after me despite the fact that I am the holder of an official lease and that I pay a great deal of money into the official treasury, and that I gave security for my lease. But this man does not allow me to enjoy my lease, but instead he shut me out of my house and beat me until he extorted money from me. Therefore I flee to you, the protector of all, and I ask you, since for the moment you have delayed your assizes in our nome, to order a letter to be written to the strategos of the division of Polemo and Themistes telling him to hear my case against him, since I am able to bring proofs before him of the violence and extortion, so that I can continue to live unmolested in my private property, enjoying the most happy times of our great emperors and of your gracious governorship, and so that I may be helped. Farewell. (hand 2) I, Ptolemaios son of Diodoros, have submitted the aforementioned petition. (hand 3) The strategos of the nome will do what is fitting. (hand 4) Return it.

Ptolemaios is an odd character, even by the standards of authors of Egyptian papyri. Because we have a number of his papers, and—equally important, for this context at least—a number of his petitions, we can recognize both an idiosyncratic style of complaint and an inability to live peacefully with his neighbors. In two other roughly contemporaneous petitions, we find Ptolemaios in trouble with a man he describes as the local loan shark; he complains about the violence the man’s assistants use against him, but also admits that he owes them the money and requests only that he not be made to pay a penny more interest than what is legal.⁴ He also complains that this loan shark—who it turns out, from another of Ptolemaios’ petitions, is also the son of a former gymnasiarch,⁵ a position of honor in the community—is keeping his case from being heard by the local court (that of the strategos), which may indicate either paranoia on Ptolemaios’ part or a probably reasonable policy of avoiding him on the part of the other villagers. In a different case, he complains that another of his enemies, a man named Sarapion, had insulted the nome strategos (why Ptolemaios chose to complain about this is, of course, obscure).⁶ One is tempted to imagine that he grated more than just a little on the other members of his village.

Figure 1. P.Mich. III 174. Digitally reproduced with the permission of the Papyrology Collection, Graduate Library, University of Michigan.

In addition to his habit of complaining to high authorities about the unacceptable behavior of his neighbors, it appears that Ptolemaios also fancied himself a bit of a litterateur: this petition—like his others—is marked by odd syntax and a general bombast largely absent from petitions of the second century, though somewhat more common in late antiquity (that is, from the fourth century on).⁷ He enjoys odd words: when describing Isidoros as “reckless” Ptolemaios prefers an archaism (τολμήεις, rather than the more typical τολμηρός); Ammonios is not just an attendant or a subordinate (ὑπηρέτης) but a “henchman” (ὑπόβλητος), a term which also—and probably this is intentional—means “suppositious child,” and which therefore also constitutes an insult to Ammonios’ family.⁸ “Goon” would capture it well in English. In other petitions, he is prone to clichéd platitudes: “Of all the horrid things in life, the worst is for free men to suffer violence”—a sentiment repeated, with only minor variation, in two of his petitions.⁹ Whatever he was, Ptolemaios was not a simple peasant suffering under the weight of official venality, begging abjectly to retain a shred of rights in his person and property.

It is harder, however, to decide where to place Ptolemaios on a social scale. The editor of one of his other petitions had originally concluded from a fragmentary line that he was a veteran, or at least a child of veterans settled in the Fayyum, but this has become doubtful, and others suspect that the papyrus in question has been misread.¹⁰ This, unfortunately, leaves us with little. It is probably of some significance that his petition was answered in the first place. Of the many petitions presented to the prefect in the first five centuries of Roman rule, probably only a minority ever received any sort of decisive action; the rest were shuffled to the desks of other officials in an ancient ritual of buck-passing.¹¹ Even to get access to the prefect (or even a member of his staff) to deliver a complaint usually meant lining up with what must have been a loud, unruly throng of people once a year when the prefect made his annual assizes (an event known by its Latin name conventus; the Greek inhabitants of Egypt called it the “settling of accounts”—dialogismos—or, in Ptolemaios’ case, simply his “entrance”—eisodos). Within several days of work at the conventus, many hundreds of petitions would have been reviewed and processed. One crucial papyrus gives a number: more than 1,800 petitions were submitted over three days at a stop in the conventus of 209.¹² The prefect would not handle most of them in person, though members of his staff would, provided that the petitioners got the documentation right and brought the relevant supporting evidence, and that they were heard before the Nile began to flood (it being considered sacrilegious for the ruler to travel along it during that time).¹³ In this case, Ptolemaios’ complaint had reached the prefect despite (or because of?) this lack of attendance in the nome.¹⁴ Special cases—that is, those of great importance or, perhaps more likely, those of important people—might be heard at this time, but more likely would be passed down the chain of command, as was the petition of Ptolemaios.

The prefect was not the only individual who would receive petitions. Some could be sent to the epistrategos, another Roman official, whose reply was probably as likely as that of the prefect himself. Most often petitions were sent to the strategos, the chief magistrate of the nome. However, individuals could also petition centurions, especially if they lived in out-of-the way places; certain high-ranking soldiers if their cases concerned abuses by military officials; officials of the church (in late antiquity); and a number of other individuals (such as the eirenarch, riparios, or nyktostrategos) who composed what I will simply refer to as the “legal system” in Roman and late antique Egypt.¹⁵

With the endorsement from the prefect’s office on his petition, Ptolemaios could then go to the strategos of the nome, who would be under pressure to hear his case. He could have gone to the strategos in the first place, and possibly have received the same thing, but given his evident dissatisfaction with the structures of local government it makes a certain degree of sense that he would seek to go to the top first. If the local strategos was in fact sympathetic to those who felt that they were being harassed by him and his constant petitions, the prefect’s signature was a meaningful goad. If the strategos ignored Ptolemaios (again), Ptolemaios might choose to complain again to the prefect, though this time not about Isidoros, but about the state of the administration of justice in the nome. Going directly to a higher authority would, most likely, make sure that the local officials had an extra incentive to pay attention to his complaint.

If Ptolemaios succeeded in getting the attention of the strategos, this would have been the beginning, rather than the end of his legal headaches. Isidoros and Ammonios might have been “summoned” to appear before the relevant magistrates; they may also have been arrested and confined before trial.¹⁶ But what this process might have actually achieved at the end of the day is remarkably unclear. One of the most frustrating aspects of the papyrological record is that, while we have numerous papyri that preserve complaints, we have little in the way of evidence for how the process was subsequently handled, and even less that might tell us how, or even if, conflicts and disputes were brought to a close.

For the present purposes, however, it is sufficient to speculate on the possibilities, even if this means pushing beyond the limits of what Ptolemaios’ petition actually tells us. On the assumption that the strategos chose to bring the relevant parties in for a hearing, there may have been some sort of a trial. There are a fair number of these “reports of proceedings” preserved on papyrus, but none that can be shown to be the outcome of a specific petition.¹⁷ If there were proceedings, Ptolemaios’ assailants could choose not to show up, which would complicate things further, or the relevant magistrate might choose to send the petition to other officials—perhaps even back to the prefect. But if by some fortuitous accident all went as planned—the strategos chose to hold a hearing, and the assailants attended—what might have come of this is still somewhat obscure.

The position of strategos was an unenviable one. His title was a relic of the Ptolemaic period, but in the Roman period he was in charge of a number of things, not least of which was that he had to oversee the payment of taxes, as well as being the magistrate of both first and equally often final resort for civil cases (such as interpersonal violence, which was classified as a private relationship of obligation between two people, rather than a crime). He was usually an urban Greek-speaker, drawn from the ranks of a local ruling class, serving a term of roughly three years. He would have been, until probably the start of the fourth century when he ceases to be attested in the papyri, appointed by the prefect and epistrategos to serve in a nome other than the one from which he came.¹⁸ This was a reasonable policy designed to prevent favoritism. But the end result was probably that the strategos worked in a vacuum.¹⁹ This would have had the effect of making the administration of justice risky, not least because it would necessarily be grounded in a policy of mollifying the local bigwigs on whom he was dependent for the collection of taxes. Most likely, he would have been tempted to ignore certain people; still, if pushed to decide a case, or even to punish, the strategos could be brutal.²⁰ Ptolemaios himself knew this, and in another petition makes clear that the strategoi were capable of applying whippings and beatings.²¹ It would be rare, however, and probably counter-productive, to use corporal punishment on a man like Isidoros—at least if we trust Ptolemaios’ description of his position. Ammonios—again, if we choose to believe Ptolemaios—would likely have been beatable—if he was not under Isidoros’ protection. The attackers might alternatively be forced to pay a monetary penalty to Ptolemaios, or they might have been let off with a warning, after being forced to make a humiliating statement that they would no longer bother him—essentially an ancient version of a restraining order, accompanied by an oath to the emperor for good measure.²² Nevertheless, and this cannot be emphasized enough, the kind of interpersonal violence that Ptolemaios describes was a private or civil wrong (a “delict” in Roman terminology), rather than a public or criminal wrong. As such, it was not of primary interest to the state, and there is no evidence that the kinds of increasingly brutal penalties that were so typically attached to public or criminal cases—such as deportation, condemnation to the mines, or being thrown to animals—would have been at stake in his case.²³

* * *

Knowing these things—or more accurately, reasonably suspecting them—only leaves us with a package of problems, both interpretive and epistemological. We could frame the inquiry at several levels.

• We could use this document as a source to evaluate the performance characteristics of an ancient empire. Is Ptolemaios’ petition an angry and petulant letter of complaint from a cantankerous man—something not worth reflecting on except as a vignette, a source of occasional “color” in our otherwise serious accounts of economies, identities, and armies? Is it instead a righteous protest against a broken system, evidence of a growing level of corruption in the running of the Roman provinces? Or conversely, could we assume that in any system things will go wrong, and that what this document tells us is that the system was functioning well in the second century?—After all, the prefect did accept the complaint, and allow official measures to be taken.

• We could similarly ask questions about that nature of rhetoric in the ancient world. Does Ptolemaios’ complaint preserve a local rhetoric? Is this the authentic voice of an injured man relatively low on the social scale (at least compared to our extant literary authors)? Or does the intrusion of formal legal language through the hand of a scribe leave us with something more approaching a form letter—a document, embellished to be sure, that is fundamentally no different from the many other petitions that were filed in the Roman Empire and that have been preserved on papyrus? If we could do the philology carefully and comparatively enough, could we excavate some sort of “true” or “authentic” feeling from this complaint? Does the fact that Ptolemaios wrote in an idiosyncratic style make it more or less likely that he sincerely believed the claims in his petition? If, on the other hand, we choose to avoid these questions of truth and authenticity, is it nonetheless significant that formal legal vocabularies have interpenetrated the languages of towns and villages on the margins of a vast administrative state? Should we treat Ptolemaios’ complaint, in other words, primarily as an artifact that preserves or presents evidence of linguistic and bureaucratic hegemony and ideology—or as an artifact that does not?

• We could also ask a group of questions about law, and about the operation of law in society. Did Ptolemaios’ complaint succeed in getting the prefect’s attention because he followed all the rules, requirements, and formalities of the legal system in Roman Egypt? Is there any evidence that he knew the rules in the first place? Did the scribe who made copies of the petition know the rules? Did the governor know them? What were these rules anyway, and did they change over time? Does the fact that Ptolemaios wrote a petition to Roman authorities indicate that he violated the rules and requirements of village life—a sort of ancient “code of the street” that ensured everyday cooperation and dispute-containment so that the collective did not starve? Or does the existence of his petition testify to the irrelevance or nonexistence of these rules in the first place?

These are all important questions, and the list is far from exhaustive. They also tend to be the questions that are asked of these documents by papyrologists and historians. In what follows some of them will be addressed; others, I fear, we have no possibility of answering—or at least, I have not figured out answers to them yet. But they are also, in my view, second-order questions. They use individual documents like Ptolemaios’ petition to speak to larger, preexisting questions; they attempt, in other words, to use the particular as a way of confirming or refuting the general: either Ptolemaios knew the rules or he did not, either the Roman government showed signs of corruption in second-century Theadelphia or it did not, either we can use his petition as the source of an authentic voice or we cannot.

This book, however, tries to come at these questions from a somewhat different angle. Instead of trying to use papyri such as Ptolemaios’ complaint as a source for hypothesis-testing, I want instead to try to treat these complaints as being potentially theory-generating. We cannot forget what we already know about history, rhetoric, or sociology, of course, and this is not the point. Nonetheless I hope to show that it is worth starting from the bottom and building outward, writing a largely subjective, perception-based history from the papyri.²⁴ From reading these complaints closely, what can we learn about individuals living in a premodern Empire and how they perceived their world? What do these people tell us about what it means to live in (or run) an imperial system in which people are entitled to complain about their friends and neighbors, officials and rivals? What contribution do these complaints make towards the creation of a common culture, to the rule of law, and to imperial governance? And why is violence—and its accompanying narratives of wounded bodies and reputations—so central to all of this?

Building an interpretive framework for answering these questions, a methodological place to stand, is the central goal of this book. It involves work from the bottom up, reconstructing local worlds as they interact with imperial rules and realities of power. As such it is an exercise in the microhistory of ancient empires. But where microhistory has responded effectively to the challenges of “master-narrative” and “big” history, it has a tendency of slipping into antiquarianism at its worst, and occasionally, even at its best, into what can only be called “But-ing”: a practice whereby microhistorians insist that every narrative is surely more complicated than what a historian presents, and as such, imperfect or limiting.²⁵ While I am sympathetic to a desire to complicate problematic master narratives, that is not the only goal of this book. The goal is to work from the bottom up and the top down, to generate a genuinely dialectical model of social interaction in a Roman province. This involves a process of reconstruction, but also an explanatory model of how individual perception and claim-making can come to interact with ruling institutions, contributing to the realities of a premodern empire and the forging of a common, tolerable—if also shifting and contested—nomos.²⁶

* * *

This book is about violence, and, in particular, interpersonal violence, and the narrative complaints that emerge from instances of it. It is therefore also about fighting, bruising, complaining, whining, negotiating, and lying; the main characters are petitioners and their friends, enemies, families, henchmen, audiences, bureaucrats, and rulers; its main goal is to move from bruises and black eyes to larger claims about law, politics, justice, power, and empires—and especially to make claims about how these powerful ideas and structures were activated by, altered by, and imposed on individual people. I start from the assumption, which I will defend in greater detail in what follows, that violence offers a privileged territory for these explanations. For now, it will suffice to say that violence is a category that is unique in that everyone agrees that (a) it exists, in the sense that it was and it remains a meaningful way of categorizing behavior, and (b) it’s always wrong when it happens to you (whether it is wrong when it happens to someone else is another matter entirely). Nobody, however, agrees what precisely it consists of, and this is what makes it interesting.

I also assume—for reasons I also hope to justify—that there is something special about the act of complaining, whether about violence or, for that matter, anything else. A complaint is, at its core, a claim on someone else’s attention. It is a demand that somebody else recognize and respond to your pain, and if not respond, then at least acknowledge the feelings of another person—someone, by definition, who is at a different place on the hierarchy of power.²⁷ As a genre, it demands that a petitioner articulate, if only in bare outlines, a normative vision of his or her own world, and link that vision to a particular package of lived experiences. Sociologically speaking, certain institutions and relationships have to prevail in order for people to complain, and others for their complaints to be acted on; when these categories, relationships, and institutions do not exist they have to be invented. In short, complaints about violence are not just a source for realia of the ancient world that we can suppose to have existed anyway—that neighbors fight, that people do not enjoy pain, that the strong will sometimes take advantage of the weak. They give us, instead, a privileged perspective on an institutional world and the relationships it generates, tolerates, and sometimes invalidates. We can learn a great deal from these relationships, and how they adapt, change, and, in some cases, are reinvented when people avail themselves of them. And it hardly needs to be added that the act of complaining is interesting because it is political, both in the narrow sense that it involves a process of making claims on others, but also in the wider sense that complaints can change the balance of power in a given society—usually only at the margins, but sometimes in a much broader sense. As I write, young, unemployed people, having come to perceive themselves as disadvantaged and disenfranchised, have decided to complain. The people to whom and about whom they are complaining are justifiably terrified.

These two categories—violence and complaint—are a combustible mix, and as such they offer an unparalleled opportunity for historians. Conflict in general, and violent conflict in particular, forces individuals to articulate what they think they deserve, and forces them to transform notions of right and wrong into discernible rights and obligations. Complaining about violence was a meaningful act, a refusal to tolerate what someone else thought was deserved, a positive assertion of personal agency that sought to preserve dignity and redeem a victim in the eyes of those around him or her. The ability to call another individual’s actions “violence” must not be dismissed as inconsequential or trivial, and if at the end of the day little was actually achieved through the act of petitioning, then it is therefore no less important to ask why individuals continually availed themselves of it. There are many hundreds of petitions preserved from the six and a half centuries of Roman rule.²⁸ Of these, there are roughly one hundred thirty that discuss violence.²⁹ Each represents, in its own way and through a stylized, bureaucratic, yet idiosyncratic vocabulary, a vision of the world as it should be.