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CHAPTER 2

Violent Egypt

The Romans took over Egypt from the preceding Ptolemaic monarchy in 30 B.C., inheriting a developed and legally plural society with a strong bureaucratic infrastructure. They held Egypt as a province—or a group of provinces—until the Arab conquest in A.D. 640. The question that guides this chapter is, “What precisely does that mean, and what does the fact of empire contribute to a history of violence?” This question can be answered at several levels: culturally (by asking how Egypt fit within a Roman conceptual geography of the peoples that populated its empire), institutionally (by describing the governmental offices and bureaucratic arrangements that preceded Roman conquest and documenting how they shifted and transformed over time), and politically (by identifying the loci of power in provincial society and mapping them in an imperial hierarchy). These levels of analysis do not exhaust the possibilities: legal structures, which I take to be a privileged field, are also central, but as I will explain in greater detail further on, should not be described in the same way as cultural, institutional, or political structures, since one of their peculiarities in imperial contexts is that they can also serve to alter such structures. In addition, the challenge of locating Egypt in its imperial context is complicated by the unique climatic conditions that have allowed for the preservation of a large quantity of papyrological material; accordingly, it is possible to “check” in greater detail than in other provinces claims from Roman literature about the style of administration in Egypt. This ability to check and evaluate the literary sources has had two major historiographical consequences. First, it has often forced historians into falsifying, modifying, or (very rarely) affirming the claims of literary sources (the traditional, privileged canon of evidence from which ancient history is written) on the basis of papyrological documentation. At its best this can be an enlightening exercise, but in some cases it results in the history of the province being written either as tragedy or apology, instead of detailed and dynamic social analysis. Second, when attempts to make sense of both these conflicting bodies of evidence fail, it has resulted in scholars appealing to the notion that Egypt occupied some sort of “special place” in the Roman world.¹

This chapter describes some of the basic institutional arrangements that prevailed in Egypt, while trying to avoid this sort of methodological impasse. Important to my central claims is a sub-thesis, namely, that while there is a convenient disciplinary division of labor between traditional historians of the Roman Empire and papyrologists, the papyrological and literary material—as well as evidence for the institutional arrangements generated by Roman provincial governors serving short (usually three-year) terms—do not constitute independent traditions that need to be checked against one another. They are, each in their own way, responses to the transformation of imperial governance and society in the first centuries A.D., and as such are differing sides of the same coin. That is, while they do periodically make claims that can be falsified or checked, they are also traditions that encapsulate ideas about what it means to govern and be governed, to rule an empire and to live in one. Both traditions therefore evolve pari passu, as part of a conversation on governance. It is, of course, a conversation between unequal partners, but as I hope to show, the gradation of inequality is less steep that some might imagine, since these inequalities were complicated, rather than reinforced, by legal arrangements.

Before moving to this analysis it is important to offer a disclaimer. The majority of this study is written from a synchronic perspective, since this seems to be the most profitable way to approach a genre of document that persists over a long period of time and is found in multiple parts of Egypt. Yet although this study will assess evidence from a broad chronological spectrum (from Augustus to the reign of Justinian, more or less), it is worth noting at the outset that Egypt was—and remains—a historical place, and as such has never been a stable entity, either “on the ground” or as part of a conceptual framework. It is true that some stereotypes die hard, and over the course of their long lives they serve to structure institutions in a particular way. The idea of a “violent Egypt” is one of these stereotypes, although I hope to show that even this one had a complex history. Accordingly, I will begin with how an imperial power came to understand its subject peoples and what role interactions with subject peoples played in the creation of these stereotypes. I will move from there to the question of institutions, and then to the role of papyri in writing the history of Egypt under the Romans. I close with reflection on the problems raised by the question, “was Egypt a particularly violent place?”

* * *

If we were to begin to understand Egypt from the perspective of an elite Roman living in the high Empire—say, from the period after the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the civil wars of A.D. 69 through the middle of the third century—we would begin with literary sources, and conclude, after sorting through a variety of obiter dicta (since Egypt is not the subject of a extant “ethnographic” analysis or monograph after the early first century A.D.²), that it was a strange and violent place. Given that it was both strange and violent, other elements of its governmental infrastructure would seem to make more sense. It was governed in a practically unique way as compared to other provinces, namely, by a prefect of the equestrian rank who answered directly to the Emperor.³ Senators (or even other powerful equestrians) were banned from visiting the province without special permission (the unexpected visit of Germanicus in A.D. 19 being a source of chagrin for the Emperor Tiberius).⁴ The population as a whole was carefully structured into discrete “ethnic” groups (a problematic term, to which I will return): Alexandrian citizens, citizens of a few special “Greek” cities, Jews, and “Egyptians” (everyone else, irrespective of descent). This political and geographical isolation had consequences for social mobility into the highest echelons of Roman society (social mobility at other levels being a far more vexed issue): Egypt produced no senators until late antiquity, and relatively few equestrians. Even acquisition of Roman citizenship was difficult: Alexandrian citizenship, it appears, had to be obtained first. No colonies or municipia were located in Egypt. Symbolically important organs of local government and autonomy—town 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, the members of each village spend their time assaulting their neighbors on feast days: while their neighbors drunkenly revel (since the Egyptians, according to Juvenal, are particularly adept at this), the opposing village sneaks in and attacks. Noses get broken, cheeks scratched to the bone, eyes lacerated. But the fun of inter-village brawling could potentially be dismissed, were it enough to satisfy the malefactors. It was not:

terga fugae celeri praestant instantibus Ombis

qui uicina colunt umbrosae Tentura palmae.

labitur hic quidam nimia formidine cursum

praecipitans capiturque. ast illum in plurima sectum

frusta et particulas, ut multis mortuus unus

sufficeret, totum corrosis ossibus edit

uictrix turba, nec ardenti decoxit aeno

aut ueribus, longum usque adeo tardumque putauit

expectare focos, contenta cadauere crudo.

Those who inhabit neighboring Tentyra with its shady palm trees turn back, fleeing quickly from the charging Ombites; but one of them, running too fast and afraid, slips, falls, and is captured. He is sliced into a multitude of bits and pieces, so that one corpse will serve many. The victorious crowd devoured the whole thing, gnawing down even his bones—they didn’t cook him down in a stew pot, or even make kebabs of him, thinking it too long even to wait for a fire. Instead, they were happy with just his raw corpse.¹⁸

Conflict over strange gods that are not even gods leads to the joy of pointless violence, which even then does not satisfy until it ends in an orgy of cannibalism. Devouring enemies raw, of course, involves violating two basic elements of humanity: violation of the taboo on cannibalism, but also the rejection of minimally dignified modes of preparation (cooking).¹⁹ In this, the Egyptians are worse than the other uncivilized members of the Empire as a whole, who are at least capable of being taught civilized habits.²⁰

Satire is meant to be funny, and this one undoubtedly is. Going farther than that, however, is perilous. It is unclear, to begin with, whether Juvenal’s poem is a hateful slander or a learned joke (or both): Ombo and Tentyra are not neighbors, which may be a sign that the poet speaks tongue-in-cheek. Divining any sort of truth about Juvenal and his beliefs (or the beliefs of those he satirizes) from his poetic persona is a fraught exercise.²¹ But bracketing the question of belief, there is nevertheless a commonality between Tacitus’ characterization of the Egyptians and Juvenal’s abuse: the Egyptians are violent and irascible, hard to control. They are crazed about religion. They are hard to assimilate. Moreover, they have no interest in these processes, feeling no sort of self-critical shame about their penchant for violence. Accordingly, in the Roman tradition the Egyptians are also famous bandits (or famous for their bandits), who play a feature role in Lucian’s Toxaris and a bit part in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius (3rd cen. A.D.).²² The author of the Historia Augusta (like Juvenal, a complex and satirical text) sums up the tradition well: “the Egyptians, as is well known, are fickle, raving mad, boastful, violent; they are also liars, children, always striving after revolution even in their public gossip, makers of verse, writers of epigrams, astrologers, soothsayers, and folk-healers.”²³ As proof, the author introduces a (phony) letter of Hadrian, supposedly written to a certain Servianus, in which Hadrian accuses the Egyptians of multiple perversions, ranging from religious confusion (the Christians are actually worshippers of Serapis, and the priests of Serapis are actually Christians; but it does not matter, since what they in fact all worship is money) to unusual and shameful ways of impregnating their chickens.

What seems most striking is the relative consistency of this tradition of violent seditiousness over time: once it appears, it canonizes quickly and with a minimal degree of meta-commentary. While other members of Rome’s empire eventually come to be integrated, and their elite classes taught to blend, if sometimes imperfectly, into the broader culture of civilized men, Egyptians still belong to a rough and nasty part of the world. This tradition persists at least into the late fourth century. Roughly contemporary with the Historia Augusta, Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Egyptians as “mostly darkened, with a look that is more gloomy than mournful; skinny and dry, they get heated up at any disturbance; they are quarrelsome and they are the bitterest debt-collectors. It is shameful among them if they cannot show whip marks on their bodies acquired from not paying their taxes. No torture has yet been invented harsh enough to get a hardened bandit from that region to give up his true name unwillingly” (22.16.23). More of the same, perhaps, but nevertheless intriguing in light of a vignette from earlier in the same book of Ammianus’ narrative:

Per hoc idem tempus rumoribus exciti variis Aegyptii venere conplures, genus hominum controversum et adsuetudine perplexius litigandi semper laetissimum, maximeque avidum multiplicatum reposcere, si conpulsori quicquam dederit, ut levari debito possit, vel certe commodius per dilationem inferre, quae flagitantur, aut criminis vitandi formidine, divites pecuniarum repetundarum interrogare. hi omnes densati in unum, principem ipsum et praefectos praetorio graculorum more strepentes interpellabant incondite, modo non ante septuagensimum annum extorquentes quae dedisse se iure vel secus plurimis adfirmabant. cumque nihil aliud agi permitterent, edicto proposito universos iussit transire Chalcedona, pollicitus quod ipse quoque protinus veniret, cuncta eorum negotia finiturus. quibus transgressis mandatum est navigiorum magistris ultro citroque discurrentium, nequis transfretare auderet Aegyptium, hocque observato cura perpensiore evanuit pertinax calumniandi propositum, et omnes spe praesumpta frustrati redierunt ad lares. unde velut aequitate ipsa dictante lex est promulgata, qua cavetur nullum interpellari suffragatorem super his quae eum recte constiterit accepisse.

At the same time a large number of Egyptians arrived (at Constantinople), roused up by a number of rumors. Egyptians are a difficult race of people, who customarily take the greatest pleasure in complicated litigation. If they have ever handed something over to a debt collector, they are particularly eager to ask back many times what they paid, so as to lighten the debt if they can, or to do better through stalling. And they summon rich men to court for extortion, since due to fear they are eager to avoid the charges. All these people came into the city as a crowd, interrupting the emperor and the praetorian prefects as they whined like jackdaws, trying to get back money that they swore that they had paid, rightly or wrongly, to all sorts of people some seventy years ago. Since nothing else could be accomplished at the court, the emperor posted an edict demanding that they all cross over to Chalcedon, and promised that he would come over as soon as possible and take care of their claims. Once they had crossed an order was given to the ferry captains who crossed back and forth over the strait not to carry any Egyptian passengers. This law was carefully observed, which put an end to their attempts at blackmail, and they all went back home with their hopes dashed. As a result, a law was passed almost as if justice herself had declared it, that no patron could be harassed on account of sums that he had lawfully accepted.²⁴

In this case, the problem, it appears, is not that the Egyptians are allergic to government, but rather that they complain too much. This is a telling detail: though Ammianus thinks that they have made up all of the charges, there is something ironic in that at the heart of his complaint is the claim that the Egyptians are now doing precisely what they are supposed to be doing: filing petitions and relying on the imperial legal system. On one reading, then, it would appear that the Romans are hateful bigots, and the Egyptians cannot catch a break.

At the same time, however, Ammianus’ emphasis on litigiousness might provide some insight into the genesis of the stereotypes of Egyptians in the Empire. As I have noted above, the stereotype of the ungovernability of Egypt seems to arise in the late first century A.D. One place to locate the source of the stereotype could be found in the riots between Alexandrians and Jews in A.D. 38—riots that were continuous, in some sense at least, with a Jewish revolt that lasted well into the second century. These riots were certainly brutal, leading to embassies to Emperor Claudius and famously documented not only by Philo of Alexandria’s In Flaccum and Claudius’ response to the Alexandrian and Jewish embassies, but they also led to the creation of a difficult and problematic literature, the Acta Alexandrinorum, a body of literary texts masquerading as legal documents and claiming to demonstrate the bravery of the Alexandrian ambassadors who end up confronting the emperor and being put to death.²⁵ At the same time, there is reason to place this discrete episode of violence in a broader historical context. Historical events, no matter how violent, do not automatically lead to particular stereotypes; there has to be reason to read them in particular ways. I would suggest that the historical context for this reading of Egyptian violence is to be found in political and conceptual sea-changes in the nature of imperial government and society.²⁶

The dynastic watersheds of the late first century marked a series of changes in the ways in which the Romans began to think of the imperial project, and the role of discrete peoples within the project. While the Flavian dynasty had begun a process of installing a new aristocracy and marking off conquered peoples from Rome as a whole, these processes of reinterpreting the provinces come to a different sort of fruition under the Antonines.²⁷ These cosmopolitan emperors took an increasing interest in the provinces in a different sense: first, in the promotion of a common urban culture within the provinces;²⁸ second, by analogy, by marking off distinct and homogenous “urban” cultures from their native surroundings (such being the case, for instance, with Hadrian’s foundation of Antinoopolis).²⁹ It should be added that this urban culture—or at least an idealized version of it—frowned on lower-order people taking their cases to court, preferring that these people stay in what the imperial powers imagined to be their proper places in the social hierarchy.³⁰ At the same time, it is reasonable to suspect that this transformation of provincial culture took place against a complex backdrop of social mobility in the Empire, of the sort that was emphasized in a seminal article by Greg Woolf on the “epigraphic habit” in the western provinces. For my argument, the most important of Woolf’s points come in his emphasis on provincial agency: provincial participation in the epigraphic “culture” of the Roman world, he emphasized, was not simply a matter of provincials copying metropolitan practices. It was instead a means of asserting a stable identity in a rapidly shifting world.³¹

Woolf’s argument can be expanded, mutatis mutandis, and used to explain the complex dialectic that I suggest led to the crystallization of these Roman literary stereotypes in the high empire. Ammianus provides the clue by making the link between violence and litigiousness, which is then racialized through the description of the Egyptians’ bodies as skinny, dark, dry, and prone to overheating. Even if we reject Ammianus’ judgment that litigiousness is a sign of a violent character, his emphasis is interesting, and seems to correspond to certain realities in the province itself. If we track the number of petitions submitted in Egypt over the first three centuries A.D. (for Ammianus an index of litigiousness, and therefore ungovernability) we see a significant uptick in the late first century. (We similarly see strategies for keeping people out of the courts run by imperial powers: the introduction of new systems of local jurisdiction in the form of “The Law of the Egyptians,” for example.³²) The charts below give a sense of the concentration of legal activity across time: the first is the total count of petitions from the first three and a half centuries of Roman rule in Egypt from the appendix of the recent monograph of Benjamin Kelly. The second counts the petitions in the first twenty volumes of the Sammelbuch griechischer Urkunden aus Aegypten. The Sammelbuch (SB) collects documents published internationally in unindexed journals; it is presented here in order to correct for editorial biases that might have gone into forming a particular collection represented in the aggregate count, or for “clumps” of relevant data that emerge from counting a particular archive (such as the large archive of petitions from firstcentury Euhemeria). The data have been “smoothed” in one important way: for petitions that are datable only on the basis of paleography, the “middle” date has been entered into the database (so for a papyrus of the third century, a date of 250 has been entered; for a papyrus of the second or third century, 200). The third chart is an aggregate count of published documents of all sorts that have been entered into the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der Griechischen Papyruskunden Ägyptens, a comprehensive database of papyrological sources.

Table 1. Petitions by Year—Sammelbuch

Year	Number of petitions
30 B.C.–1 B.C.	5
1 A.D.–50 A.D.	12
51 A.D.–100 A.D.	12
101 A.D.–150 A.D.	16
151 A.D.–200 A.D.	27
201 A.D.–250 A.D.	26
251 A.D.–300 A.D.	3

Table 2. Petitions by Year—Kelly 2011

Year	Number of petitions
30 B.C.–1 B.C.	20
A.D.1–50 A.D.	103
51 A.D.–100 A.D.	45
101 A.D.–150 A.D.	129
151 A.D.–200 A.D.	143
201 A.D.–250 A.D.	96
251 A.D.–300 A.D.	31

Table 3. Documents by Year—HGV

Year	Sum of quantity of documents
50 B.C.–1 B.C.	579
1 A.D.–50 A.D.	1,334
51 A.D.–100 A.D.	1,982
101 A.D.–150 A.D.	5,099
151 A.D.–200 A.D.	4,355
201 A.D.–250 A.D.	2,326
251 A.D.–300 A.D.	1,655

Charts like these, of course, are clumsy instruments. In many ways they compare apples to oranges: the HGV count includes not only papyri, but also ostraca. They cannot represent geographical distribution. The relative quantities of material in the three charts are radically different. They cannot account for generic variation in the aggregate data (the HGV count). They cannot account for subjective changes in the quality of the documentation—differences in the tone of a petition, for example. But in spite of these flaws they give some sense of how the quantity of petitions varies according to the quantity of our published material as a whole. The uptick in petitions in the second century would seem to have some significance in light of the shifts in the discourse about Egypt among elite Roman authors.

The stereotype of lawless, violent Egyptians, it appears, was being generated at roughly the same time (late first and early second centuries A.D.) as the inhabitants of Egypt began using the courts regularly, that is, when they began to integrate themselves into the Empire by refusing to settle their own problems privately. The claims of a violent Egypt are therefore more plausibly a reaction to the solidification and regularization of Roman rule over others and the responsibilities that this entails for a ruling power rather than a set of stable generative stereotypes. And as the Egyptians became more entangled in imperial systems of government, the stereotype was able to retain its currency. As I will argue in greater detail in the chapters that follow, the use of courts is somewhat analogous to the situation that Woolf describes for inscriptions: courts (and the judgments that they produce) were ways of bringing temporary stability to dynamic and complex interpersonal relationships. While the chronologies of these two different moves toward stability are slightly different (the process Woolf describes takes place over the course of the first century, whereas the evidence from the papyri begins to pick up in the late first and continues to rise in the second), they are nevertheless part of a single, dialectical process that emerges with the transition from the charismatic Julio-Claudian dynasty to the newer, stable, and increasingly bureaucratic world of the Flavians and Antonines. The stereotypes that emerge from writers like Tacitus grappling intellectually with the development of empire are as telling as the actions of Egyptian litigants.

* * *

While potentially useful for explaining the nature of imperial stereotypes, this sort of analysis has its limits. First and foremost, it leaves vague the precise definition of “Egyptian” and gives no clues as to what that designation might have meant to someone living in the Egyptian countryside (the chora, the main source of papyri). Second, while stereotypes are easy enough to identify, there is not necessarily a correlation between a particular stereotype and the institutional framework that an imperial power sets up “on the ground,” much less a direct correlation between an idealized institutional flow chart and the way that these institutional relations actually worked.

We can begin with the question of the relationship between “Egypt” and “Egyptians.” As mentioned above, four distinct “classes” of people inhabited Egypt: Alexandrian citizens, citizens of a few select Greek cities (Naukratis, Ptolemais, and eventually Antinoopolis), Jews, and everyone else (Egyptians), which would have included descendants of “Greek” colonists who did not have a privileged citizenship.

There is reason to think that this system of classes/citizenships was meaningful for the ways that people interacted with the imperial government, at least in some respects. Philo of Alexandria records, for example, that Egyptians were subject to harsher forms of corporal punishment than non-Egyptians, in this case, both Alexandrians and Jewish elders.³³ One advocate in a case in the first century thinks that the Egyptians are in general supposed to be treated harshly by the law.³⁴ Egyptians were famously singled out for harsh treatment by Caracalla, who expelled a number of them from Alexandria (the expulsion edict is ironically found on the very papyrus that documents the grant of citizenship in 212).³⁵ These brief mentions aside, the main source of evidence concerning relations between groups is a papyrus relating to the office of the Idios Logos, the representative of the emperor’s accounts in Egypt. Since the province was treated, from conquest onward, more or less as the personal possession of the emperor, this official would have been his chief financial representative on the ground. The papyrus in question, the Gnomon or “guide,” lists the rules accumulated from the age of Augustus onward. A number of these rules penalize crossing status-boundaries: various forms of intermarriage are forbidden; Egyptians who “pick children up from the dung heaps” (illegally adopt or enslave their potential social betters?) are fined a quarter of their property at death; Roman soldiers acting as citizens when not properly discharged are fined a quarter of their property; Egyptians who try to register as citizens of the Greek cities are fined; and so on.³⁶

At first glance the mere existence of such a list of rules seems to indicate a harsh and oppressive regime bent on keeping people of differing social status carefully separated according to rank. These classes, however, are fundamentally juridical ones, and as such, they are suspiciously neat. The realities were more complex. Putting aside, for the moment, the complex problem of how status was inherited and transmitted (in practice rather than in theory), it is to begin with unclear how these distinctions were maintained: the Roman army (lightly staffed, according to Strabo) was never intended to be a proactive internal police force, and the Roman government (also lightly staffed) would have been ill suited to policing the choice of domestic sexual partner or the transmission of an inconsequentially small inheritance unless someone actively complained about it.³⁷ The attempts of the Roman governors to get parties to register their inheritance documents were notoriously unsuccessful.³⁸ Yet even accepting that the rules contained in the Gnomon were well enforced (and I think this is doubtful, for reasons I will explain in a moment), and therefore that these juridical distinctions were meaningful parts of lived reality for the ways in which people interacted with their neighbors or with their government, there is nevertheless very little evidence that these juridical categories can be mapped to a sense of identity, and if they can, it remains unclear under what circumstances a concept like “identity” might be a meaningful analytical category for the study of violence or of social relations in general. I will return to these questions in Chapter 4, but for the present it will suffice to note a few things. First, while there is sometimes a temptation to think of these juridical classes as living in completely separate spheres, this is highly doubtful: in light of the papyrological evidence, we should instead imagine a high degree of intermixing of populations, even when such a mixture was incapable of being represented through juridical language.³⁹ Thus papyri amply document newly discharged veterans (Roman citizens), as well Antinoopolite citizens, interacting in the countryside with Egyptians,⁴⁰ or Egyptians living in Alexandria.⁴¹ This does not, of course, mean that these people liked each other, or were interested in overlooking a degrading legal status to focus on the content of their neighbors’ characters.⁴² It means that they did not conscientiously move in separate geographical, political, or social spheres, and, in light of what we know about mobility in other imperial/colonial contexts, there was likely to be the kind of cross-pollination of ideas, language, and culture that makes for situations that are also juridically complex. The evidence of onomastics points similarly to overlap: a Greek ephebic inscription, for instance, lists new citizens with names like Sarapammon, Sarapion, and Aphrodisios son of Annoubias.⁴³ Second, while there are a few statements from the papyri that we might classify as “politically incorrect” slurs directed at Egyptians,⁴⁴ there is very little to give us insight into each community’s (if this is indeed the right word) self-perception.

This gulf between imperial administrative rules and local realities is indicative of some larger issues about what it meant for Egypt to be a province, and therefore relevant to how we should imagine the relations between empire and subject in the Roman period. The Roman government’s desire to keep the population distinctly ranked by ethno-juridical status was in tension with its ruling ideology, namely, that it was a responsive and rational empire that was accountable to its citizens.⁴⁵ And in Egypt, this claim was particularly meaningful, since Egypt had a long tradition, particularly under the preceding Ptolemaic monarchy, of allowing its subjects the right to complain and giving them officially sanctioned avenues to obtain redress. It is at the intersection of this ruling ideology and this preexisting tradition of complaint and response that we can best understand why the segregated, carefully demarcated world of the Gnomon of the Idios Logos looks so different from the lived experience of a petitioner in Egypt.

* * *

It is from here that we can move to the actual administrative practices that characterized Egypt under the Roman Empire, and come to understand in a more robust way why complaint is such an important category of social behavior for revealing the dynamics of an ancient empire. There are two threads to this story, and both of them involve giving an account of the position of the Roman governor.

Like the strategos mentioned earlier, the governor of Egypt had a difficult job. He was ultimately responsible for extracting grain from Egypt to feed Rome (and later, Constantinople). This involved a delicate process of calibrating the extraction at the proper level to enable feeding the population in one area and to avoid starving the population in another. The management of grain also involved the proper management of water, as the Nile flooded only once a year and had to be properly distributed through an intricate series of canals lest everybody starve. The system of corvée labor that dug and maintained these critical veins and arteries needed to be overseen and managed, and the whole process had to be documented and accounted for. In other words, the simple task of extraction could easily be a full-time job in itself, and depended on managing the participation of individuals at many levels of the imperial hierarchy (and some who were not on this hierarchy at all), with substantial local knowledge of how to run large-scale agricultural production in geographically diverse regions (such as the Fayyum basin), without permanently and irreparably irritating any particular constituency.⁴⁶ Given that the governor’s means of enforcement resembled more a sledgehammer than a scalpel, and given the scope of the challenges of extraction,⁴⁷ “best practices” probably involved trying to make as many people happy as much of the time as possible while simultaneously, if infrequently, applying spectacular levels of brutality to particular malefactors. Governors often failed (like Aulus Avilius Flaccus, at least in Philo’s description), leaving their successors to clean up their messes. Such seems to have been the case when Tiberius Iulius Alexander, himself a rare example of an Egyptian governor with extensive local knowledge (and a nephew of Philo of Alexandria) acceded to the governorship of Egypt in A.D. 66:

Tiberius Iulius Alexander declares: since I care very much about preserving the city in its fitting condition in which it enjoys the benefits which it has received from the Emperors, and in keeping Egypt in good health so that she may happily serve both the annona and the greatest flourishing of our present times, without being burdened by new and unjust exactions:

Scarcely had I left the city (Alexandria) when I was shouted down by petitioners in both large and small groups, and from both the wealthy classes and the country farmers, who complained about the recent offenses; accordingly, I have wasted none of my efforts in setting the situation straight. So that you might have a more confident hope in all these matters concerning your salvation and profit because of the shining example to us of our safety, the benefactor of the entire race of men, Imperator Caesar Galba, and so that you know that I have concerned myself with the matters that pertain to your benefit, I have therefore made public notice concerning each of the things that I have inquired into, and I have done those things which it is allowed to me to do or to decide; and those things which are more important and which need the power and greatness of the Emperor, I will present to him with all frankness.⁴⁸

A list of concessions to good governance follows: the elimination of compulsory service as a tax collector, the regulation of immunity, limitations on litigation concerning financial matters, among other things. The extensive text was circulated through the land on papyri and was inscribed on stone (copies of both exist), proclaiming that the governor would, henceforth, attempt to achieve a level of fairness in his extractions.

Tiberius Iulius Alexander’s proclamation is fascinating, not only because it shows a detailed awareness of a series of local issues, but also because it points to the complex situation of the governor of Egypt in managing a series of constituencies who were particularly vocal in their demands. Not quite in the “place of kings” (in Tacitus’ vision), Alexander had to make certain to refer issues of particular import to the Emperor himself; nevertheless, he retained a significant amount of agency. Similarly important is his relationship to the local peoples: in his inscription he presents himself as caring not at all whether the people who “shout him down” with their petitions are Greeks or Egyptians, but only that they represent both the local men of importance and the farmers who tilled the land. Both groups, he declares, have legitimate complaints, and, more important, both, he assumes, have rights that deserve to be respected.

This, then, is the second thread of the story: the idea that a ruler, to be legitimate, had to be responsive (rather than merely imposing his will by force) opens up a series of crucial possibilities for his subjects. To be legitimate meant to be a fair judge, and while it is likely that the Roman governors of Egypt (or any other province) felt this adjudication of cases to be an irksome chore, they nevertheless created an institutional framework that encouraged people to avail themselves of Roman justice.⁴⁹ This meant treating people as if they had rights by extending to them remedies that we may think of as procedural, but which were in fact substantive (since this distinction, as Alan Bowman has pointed out, would have made no sense in the Roman world).⁵⁰ It meant, above all, responding to their petitions, and finding workable solutions to numerous problems, social and economic.

What this also means is that every time the prefect, the epistrategos, the strategos, or any other official in Egypt received a petition, they were deciding what the law of the land was, and whether it should be applied, extended, or altered to fit the facts of a particular case. When these officials subscribed a petition and set the wheels of justice in motion, they were then—in a peripheral but critical sense—making law, and they were making it on the basis of people’s narratives and normative claims. In the face of such diversity and colonial cultural, linguistic, and economic overlap and indeterminacy, they also ended up making law in ways that undermined the ideal of stable, discrete populations living separately from one another.

In a system that is primarily founded on local initiative (that is, when problems are brought into the legal sphere only through the choice of nonstate actors),⁵¹ this process of law-making necessarily moves in two directions. On the one hand, there is a requirement that certain aspects of the formal law be followed: complaints must fit into a certain legal form, and certain kinds of language must be exploited to make one’s case. This can be crudely categorized both as a “top down” process, in that the language and style of complaint are determined by the state, and as a “bottom up” process, in that it depends exclusively on individual initiative to bring the matter to the attention of authorities. On the other hand, formal aspects of complaining (of translating a complaint into law) were counterbalanced by the Roman state’s financial need to maintain order and peace, as well its ideology of responsiveness. This counterbalance necessarily involves making pragmatic compromises which, while they were capable of being imagined as exceptions that fell outside the letter of the law, were in fact contributing to the shape of the body of rules as a whole. That is, these compromises often set precedents for future decisions. While there was no formally articulated doctrine of stare decisis in Roman law, people noticed precedents, and soon began to invoke them in new contexts.⁵² Making a legal decision, even if it was a pragmatic compromise, nonetheless involved declaring what was justice; invoking a precedent was a way of demanding that the government, which prided itself on making just decisions, live up to the reputation it claimed for itself—namely that the individual magistrate was a moral agent.⁵³ That this process moves in several directions at once is a prime source of scholarly confusion.⁵⁴ While an account of the role of the legal system is of major importance for contextualizing the documents through which we understand violence, any attempt to view this dynamic system as a static, coherent, or rationalized whole (on the analogy of a “constitution” or a “basic law”—or from the perspective of the Gnomon of the Idios Logos) is bound to be frustrated.⁵⁵

* * *

One important question, however, concerns the peculiar situation of Roman law. Roman law was famously a law for Roman citizens, to the exclusion of others. The majority of people living in Egypt (or in most other places outside the Italian peninsula, for that matter) were not Roman citizens before 212. Accordingly, there is a temptation to think the Romans would have spent most of their administrative energy dealing with the problems of Roman citizens, enforcing Roman law in their cases, and doing their best to delegate local matters to local people whenever possible.

At the level of legal technicality this is largely true, but the situation is more complicated for two reasons. One is that, despite the vast amount of legal documentation concerning both violence and other, more mundane matters, the interface between written, positive law and practical law is unclear. I believe, and outline in greater detail in Chapter 5, that there is good reason to believe that whatever the actual, written law of the province, there was in practice a substantial amount of pragmatic muddling through in day-to-day affairs, and provided that certain formal aspects of the law were followed, the Roman governors in Egypt were willing to tolerate petitions from a broad range of individuals. While not all these would necessarily receive justice, the governors attempted to serve the populace in the best way possible—provided certain rules of approach were followed.⁵⁶ The second problem, however, is more difficult, and comes to a larger question of the evidence itself. The problem, posed in its most basic form, is this: if there was a legal remedy for violence extended to all individuals, and if the government was willing to enforce it, who would actually have taken advantage of it? In other words, to whom was the system accessible? Could it be accessible to the defective Egyptians of Tacitus, Juvenal, and the Historia Augusta?

The papyrological evidence provides limited answers to these questions. First, while writing may not have been a prohibitively expensive technology, the papyri do not give us access to the entire socioeconomic spectrum of Roman Egypt.⁵⁷ As usual, the lowest of the low are excluded. This is predictable, of course, but a complicating factor is that we have very little firm evidence which indicates what percentage of the population this might be. We might surmise that it was a segment that was largely agricultural, since most of the extant papyri come from the larger towns and villages and seem to represent a class of people who look at first glance to be far from miserable and destitute. Second, it is exceedingly hard from the rhetorical narratives of petitioners to discern what their precise status was: sometimes they make reference to their citizenship or to offices that they have held, but they were not required to do so. In some ways, as I will argue, this is to be expected: going to court was about seeking to define one’s status in the first place. Finally, when Tacitus and Juvenal refer to Egyptians as being violent, there is nothing that would indicate that they knew (or cared) about the complex system of ranked citizenships, but instead simply spoke in generalities about the land and its peoples. While I will deal with these issues in greater detail in what follows, it is worthwhile for the moment to consider briefly the issue of citizenship, and in particular its connection to legal access.

The legal situation in Egypt after the Roman conquest is difficult to characterize briefly, but in what follows I hope to essay a few conclusions. In Ptolemaic procedure there were two different courts (an “Egyptian” and a “Greek”) in which to judge disputes. The choice of court was based, or came to be based, on the original language in which the supporting documentation was written.⁵⁸ In the Roman period there was no such choice; judicial hearings concerning violence were held in front of magistrates, according to the cognitio procedure—that is, the magistrate (whether a Roman prefect or epistrategos or a Greek-speaker serving as strategos) was both presiding official and judge in legal proceedings. This break from the jury system meant that litigants of all classes would be treated by administrators who were more or less legal amateurs. And while it was a common element of imperial Roman practice to allow individual populations to be judged “by their own laws,” there is little evidence that these administrators would have known what they were in the first place. Accordingly, it would be a mistake to assume that there was a major difference in the type of substantive rules to which each population would be held.⁵⁹ This is particularly true in the case of violence.

This will be a controversial statement for some. Deciphering which of the private law practices that show up in the papyri are “Roman,” “Alexandrine,” “Greek,” or “Egyptian” has been a favorite exercise for legal historians since at least the publication of Mitteis’s Reichsrecht und Volksrecht at the end of the nineteenth century.⁶⁰ There were certainly “Egyptian” legal materials, as the Greek translation of the Hermopolis “Legal Code” makes clear.⁶¹ There were likewise traditional legal practices, especially in certain aspects of private law like contracts and marital property. But it is important to remember that any “local” practice was implicated in the larger administrative superstructure of the Empire itself. Several things follow from this premise: first, and most important, it is dangerous to assume that Roman law simply layered itself on top of local law, providing some kind of legal “veneer” or “superficial varnish.”⁶² Leaving aside the objectionable metaphor of culture-as-bookshelf, it makes sense to note, as scholars are increasingly realizing,⁶³ that once the Romans showed up it was all Roman law, because the Romans were the ones enforcing it. I write this only partially tongue-in-cheek, to emphasize that local law, when it existed (and it had a checkered history), existed only because the Romans either required it to exist or defined it into existence.⁶⁴ Second, it would be problematic to conclude, on the basis of the use of local law, that the Roman governors in charge of provinces knew anything about what its contents were, or were prepared to enforce it.⁶⁵ Additionally, while there might have been divergent legal traditions at the moment of conquest or shortly thereafter, there was a subsequent flood of legal development throughout the Empire as a whole, through the imposition of wide-ranging legal reforms in specific regions (such as can be seen in the Flavian municipal laws from Spain) and through the constant issuing of imperial or gubernatorial edicts and constitutions, processes which likely impinge on one another, if only indirectly.⁶⁶ These developments were based on principles palatable to Romans, sent off by Roman magistrates, and enforced at the local levels. Further, individuals living in the provinces seem to have been conscious of the privileges that this flurry of documentation conveyed. Furthermore, as Gonzalez has noted in the case of the Lex Irnitana, sometimes the Romans themselves imagined people as already living by the same principles as those on which they based the laws in the first place.⁶⁷ Finally, and as a consequence of all these factors, at least so far as the question of violence is concerned, it is a fundamental mistake to draw a clear line between the world of legal practice in Egypt before the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212, with its divergent citizenships and status markers, and after, in a period where everyone is a citizen. This is so not only because there is so little empirical evidence for a change in the formal rules for dealing with violence in the period following the Antonine Constitution, but also because even before 212 there was a marked tendency toward the homogenization of legal culture.

For the question of violence, however, it is in my opinion more profitable to distinguish between private law as it was practiced by individuals and law as it was practiced by magistrates adjudicating between two parties. The Romans no doubt tolerated local legal forms, and permitted individuals to conduct private transactions according to them. They had no interest in preventing people who were not Roman citizens from writing contracts, marrying, buying, and selling. If there were a dispute over one of these things, though, and it came before a magistrate, the legal situation would have been more complicated. Roman magistrates understood local laws to be a disadvantage, and a brutal and inhumane one at that. In Chapter 5 I detail a case of this. Overall, a better way to understand the legal situation in Egypt before the grant of universal citizenship in 212 (and after it as well), especially as it relates to the question of how magistrates sought to judge, is to think of the administrative structure as being populated by a fragile network of administrators with ill-defined and overlapping competencies,⁶⁸ and laws not as coherent systems of rules that need to be followed in their entirety, but as a system of differential privileges and disabilities. These privileges and disabilities were not absolute: in the name of humanity or good governance they could be followed to the letter or ignored.⁶⁹ Roman citizenship offered the greatest number of privileges, Alexandrine fewer, metropolitan yet fewer, and so on.⁷⁰ Petitioners might be treated better or worse according to their legal status, but all had the right to attempt to approach the government for redress, even when their opponents were of a higher status. This did not mean that all people would receive equal justice, but simply that all people had a right to try.⁷¹

* * *

Thus far I have tried to present an outline of how Egypt fitted into the broader world of the Roman Empire at the level of imagination and administrative practice, and argued that the picture is more complex and dynamic than either ancient literary authorities or modern scholars have allowed. In particular, the realities of administering an imperial province allowed for a system that was characterized neither by wholesale, top-down repression and extraction, nor by completely reactive governance. Instead, the administration of Egypt as a Roman province was based on two approaches that were in tension with one another: a desire to mark off discrete groups from one another was undermined, in idiosyncratic ways, by a commitment to Roman self-under-standings of being a just and rational empire as well as by the need to use discretion, precision, and well-calibrated strategies of extraction to manage the needs of two populaces in distinct areas. This tension is particularly evident from the workings of the legal system, which allowed for individual subjects to interact with their superiors in ways that could meaningfully shape future practice. More than a story of oppression and resistance, the realities of imperialism in Egypt made for an administrative regime that was dynamic and productive.

But at this point it is fair to ask, “But was it particularly violent?” That is, no matter how much explanation one gives of imperial stereotypes, the realities of provincial governance, and the dynamism of legal systems, was there some sort of underlying reality that made daily life in Egypt more brutal than life in, say, contemporary Rome or Asia Minor, or modern-day Topeka or Detroit? Depending on what one thinks is at stake in the question, the answers would be “yes,” “it’s unclear,” and “what do you mean by ‘violent’?”

As far as the “yes” answer is concerned, one could note that the Roman Empire, as a whole, was administered by relatively few people, the means of coercion were dispersed, and professional policing was limited—there were town guards, for example, but these were not what a modern person would think of as a professional police force, being recruited, instead, from the population of local inhabitants, and thereby ensconced in village hierarchies.⁷² There is little evidence of them stopping a crime.⁷³ There were relatively few ways, in other words, actually to prevent a violent act—at least at the institutional level. Attempts to wipe out brigandage—obviously a problematic category—had only limited success; attempts to wipe out interpersonal violence in towns and villages were nonexistent.

But the lack of policing institutions does not automatically mean that a particular society is likely to be violent. Levels of violence, presumably, have fluctuated chronologically and geographically before the advent of policing in the early modern period. Even without policing, there were channels through which people could complain about the violence of others. But here things become less clear. Would the possibility that my neighbor would complain to the prefect pose a serious deterrent to my punching him in the face? Would the fact that people could try to avail themselves of justice have actually functioned to make Egypt any less violent? Would the fact that a complaint might not be given a hearing have made it a more violent place?

It is hard to measure deterrence even in modern societies with robust data collection, since one is both measuring acts that did not happen and presuming baseline levels of “violence”—a questionable technique, since violence is a phenomenon for which it is hard to give a robust causal account in the first place, even if we presume that we know what it consists of (and we do not, because, for reasons I will outline momentarily, it is not so much a thing as it is a contestable ethical claim). It also bears reminding that there is no way to approximate something like a “crime rate” from the ancient world: in part, the data are insufficient, but more important, the acts of interpersonal violence about which I am concerned were not, in the first place, crimes—they were delicts, private relationships of obligation between individuals and families, and as such, not of primary interest to the state.⁷⁴ Even if we were to engage in the methodologically questionable exercise of grouping together things that are unacceptable in modern Western society and labeling them as “crimes,”⁷⁵ we would not alleviate many difficulties, since we would often be comparing apples with oranges: robbing a traveler on a public road is different from punching a neighbor in the course of an argument, is different again from breaking into a person’s home to take back something you think is yours, and is emphatically different from when the governor beats you with rods because you’ve failed to pay your taxes or you’ve finally exhausted his limited patience. Accordingly, any procedure of marking off behaviors that a modern historian or sociologist might take to be antisocial and then trying to measure them as an index of civility produces odd results. I am reminded of the line of former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry, spoken during the rash of drug-related murders in the late 1980s, that “outside of the killings, DC has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.” Absurd, perhaps, but also indicative of the problem: the categories by which we measure what counts as a violent place are everything, but they are also extremely hard to define in a way that is sociologically—or historically—meaningful.⁷⁶ This has consequences for comparison, whether with other regions of the Roman Empire or between ancient and modern systems. I suppose that if I were forced to choose between being dropped off in downtown Topeka or downtown Detroit, I would choose Topeka, at least if I were being dropped off at night; but given the choice between Topeka and second-century Oxyrhynchos I confess that I am at a loss to know where I would fare better, in what ways, or at what time of day.

All of which leads to the last possible answer to the initial question, itself taking the form of a question. What is one trying to communicate when one labels something as “violent,” and what precisely is at stake in such a designation? It is here that we have to look to a complex modern historiography on violence, contextualize these academic perspectives in terms of their larger theoretical and political projects, and move from there back to the ancient evidence, attempting to bring these two traditions into conversation with one another.