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CHAPTER 3

Violence, Modern and Ancient

At the end of the previous chapter I raised the question of the links between violence and conceptual apparatuses that purport to measure violence—crime rates, for example. The question of what can be learned through the study of something like a “crime rate” leads in turn to another problem: for better or for worse (probably for worse), we inhabit a world that exhibits a strong tendency to criminalize things that are unpleasant, to make political issues into criminal issues, and to organize state resources around the policing and protection of citizens from these criminal acts. In other words, as sociologist Jonathan Simon has argued, we “govern through crime.”¹ Crime is a powerful concept in modern society. In contemporary discourse, criminality is juxtaposed to civility; crime is something that is necessarily horrid and bad; it is not supposed to happen, or at least, it is not supposed to happen “over here”—crime is only tolerable when it is on the other side of the line that separates civilization from barbarism. Within the ever-increasing universe of things that are “crimes,” violent crime, however, remains the easy case. Even for those who have substantial doubt as to the effectiveness or morality of modern penal policies, there is instinctive and near-universal agreement that the “real criminals”—the violent criminals—deserve to be removed from society and sequestered elsewhere.

This is not, of course, the place to discuss the ethics of modern penal policy; I dwell on it only because our modern understandings of violence as a category which is primarily criminal have a major effect on the ways in which we understand what is at stake in labeling something an act of violence. Our insistence on treating violence as crime leads us easily to treat violence as something fundamentally other, horrid, or incomprehensible—to treat it as something that challenges the capacity of our analytical categories to describe and understand. Here the fact that our understandings of violence are mediated through our contemporary legal categories has been joined to certain moves in twentieth-century critical thought which I will outline below; this fusion of perspectives (crime and critique) has, I will suggest, led to a complicated and dangerous dead end in contemporary scholarship on violence, namely, a tendency to think that our scholarly categories and forms of disciplinary reasoning cannot possible capture what is “violent” about “violence”—or even what is meaningful or interesting about it. The end result of this is a body of contemporary scholarly literature on violence that is by turns both shrill and melancholic—a body of literature which frequently ends up apologizing for violence or being awe-struck by it, rather than engaging in a sober and reflective analysis of it.

It is this chapter’s goal to describe in greater detail what was meant by a claim of “violence” in Roman Egypt, to describe what we might mean by such a claim today, and then to attempt to see how these two categories can inform one another, while also trying to avoid this particular impasse. I will defend in some detail the claim I made earlier, namely, that violence is not a thing or an act (though acts can indeed be termed violent), but instead an ethical label, one that is located within matrices of power and of what one considers acceptable and unacceptable. As with all categories of ethical and moral evaluation it is subject to contest. It is therefore also political, insofar as concerns of power will adhere in the contest over whether the label of “violence” applies. But this is not merely a question (as it is in modern society) where what is at stake is the exclusion of the perpetrator of violence from society as a whole. Instead, in a world that was largely reluctant to criminalize interpersonal acts of harm, what was at stake in calling someone’s behavior “violence” was the nature of the obligation that he or she had incurred by the act of violence, and by extension, also the nature of personhood inherent in such concepts of obligation. I will unpack this idea in greater detail below.

To claim that violence should be treated soberly and analytically by scholars is not to say that it can be trivialized, or to claim that there is not something unique about it: violence does retain something distinct from other relational categories and ethical labels, since by moving into the world of inchoate emotions such as pain it also intersects with two other important categories, namely, language and subjectivity. It is related to subjectivity at least in the sense that the experience of personal violation (about which more specificity in what follows) challenges the boundaries of the self and causes those boundaries, often taken for granted, to become an object of reflection;² it is related to language in the sense that language provides a highly imperfect vehicle for the expression of pain, a condition that in turn affects the making of claims about pain and the forging of intersubjective bonds between the one who suffers and the one who sympathizes, or who comes to be convinced that he must sympathize.³ Violence runs up against subjectivity and language in important and fascinating ways, and any appreciation of how violent acts come to “mean” things—in the ancient world or the modern—must take account of this dynamic, for only with this relationship in mind can we return to the world of the papyri, and the importance of the power of narration for petitioners, governors, and the law.

What follows proceeds in three parts. First, I proceed philologically and terminologically, and try to map the semantic range of the vocabulary of violence in Roman Egypt. This leads to a particular problem, namely, the question of the “authenticity” of this language, and the problems posed by the fact that such language was mediated through a scribal tradition. Petitions concerning violence were obviously mediated, but historians, I argue, have erred in taking this mediation to be a methodological problem, rather than an opportunity. This mediation gives us opportunities for understanding what is “at work” in the language that petitioners use. Still, knowing the words for violence is only a part of the equation; it does not help us to piece together the kinds of claims that are being made when someone declares someone else’s actions to be “violence.” This leads to a question of whether we know what we mean when we identify something as violence. In the next part of the chapter I move to the problems that contemporary historians encounter in writing about violence, and the challenges that modern understandings of violence pose for understanding ancient violence. Key in the modern historiographical tradition, I argue, is a divide between two traditions that follow the path of Max Weber: one group which prefers to write about violence as something ethically neutral (force), and another which writes about it as ethically problematic (violence). The distinction is valuable, I argue, because by reappropriating the violence/force distinction as a tool for understanding the claims made in the papyri we gain additional insight into the negotiations about the nature of violence, its connection with concepts of personhood, and the ways in which that personhood is redeemed through petitions once it is violated. I close by returning to my initial point, namely, about how the language of petitions—stilted, formulaic, and mediated—can come to be meaningful, and then go on to introduce a concept that will structure Part II of this book: translation.

* * *

It is best to begin with terminology. There is a relatively compressed vocabulary that can be mustered by a petitioner (or the scribe helping him or her compose) to describe a violent act. There is a good deal that is historically interesting about this vocabulary. Most important, “violence” is always understood to be prima facie wrong. That is to say, insofar as I can tell, there is no concept, in the papyrological material or in the literary or the legal evidence, of a “sufficient amount of” violence, “justifiable” violence, or “deserved” violence. There are, of course, gradations of wrong, but they never at any point blend into gradations of right. This is not to say that there was no understanding of justifiable force. There were plenty of situations in which force was deployed, in which it was understood to be explicitly or implicitly acceptable, and in which it could be either defensible by legal standards or tolerated (or approved of, or even celebrated) by society at large. It just could not, and would not, be called violence. It is a peculiarity of the words—hybris in Greek, iniuria or contumelia in Latin—that they simply cannot receive a positive valence.⁴ Iniuria can be qualified as atrox (“heinous” or “aggravated”); hybris as ἀνήκεστος (“heinous,” translating Latin atrox), or οὐ τυχοῦσα (“uncommon,” “inappropriate,” “unconscionable”). That is to say, when people sought to use adjectives to qualify these terms, the adjectives they used only made them worse, not better. For the Latin term, this is simply a feature of etymology: in-iuria, “not lawful,” or broadly “not acceptable.” If something is ius, it is broadly right. It would therefore make no sense to have something like bona iniuria—it is intrinsically illogical. The Greek word hybris, as every student of tragedy knows, is likewise never a positive thing. It is only a modern notion that recognizes that the idea of hybris, in its broader, fifth-century B.C. formation as something like “failing to be mindful of one’s station in the world” might, in fact, be connected to a certain quality that can make a person successful. For lack of a native term we call this quality chutzpah. It is also a notion that is fundamentally foreign to the ancient world.

In addition to “violence” having a thoroughly negative valence, it also has a relatively restricted scale. Specifically, in Roman Egypt, all violence is personal. There is nothing, at least in the papyrological evidence, that resembles Paul Farmer’s “structural violence”—an agent-less but nevertheless statistically visible suffering produced by inequality and unevenly distributed across a population.⁵ This has certain consequences: Government cannot be violent; an individual magistrate can. The fact of inequality is not in itself violent; but a very wealthy individual may, as a result of this wealth, be prone to act violently (a common theme in complaints). They key term, as I indicated earlier, is hybris, though some petitions speak more specifically of “blows” (plegai), or refer simply to “nastiness” (aedia, a term which I will translate simply as “violence” as well, avoiding the euphemism).⁶ In Roman Egypt, hybris has a narrower sense than it did in fifth-century Athens.⁷ Hybris can refer to violent or offensive conduct against a person’s body (a beating or cudgeling, for instance), or against a person’s reputation (insults, threats, or public abuse, Loidoria). Some have mistakenly understood these terms as two different types of violence, which they are not. Rather, they are based on a different concept of personhood—a concept that encompasses a wider territory than the modern definition, being both corporeal and incorporeal, or more accurately, both physical and social.⁸

Violence appears in the papyri in several contexts. It can be used in the context of a petition asking for redress for crimes against persons in a petitioner’s family (such as spouses and children), or immediate kin (such as parents or grandparents), or people in any given individual’s employ (such as a tenant farmer or shepherd). It probably cannot be used to refer to contemptuous or injurious treatment of slaves.⁹ Slaves were counted as property, and what we might call “violence” against property and financial interests was in Roman Egypt called bia (which can translate to “damage” or “harm,” but which always indicates harm not to full people but to inanimate objects, financial interests, and slaves).¹⁰ Bia could also be used to refer to coercive actions that sought to harm an individual’s financial interests (in this sense it maps, albeit imperfectly, to the Roman legal category of metus). What is important to note here, however, is that because of the nature of legal procedures, some (if not many) petitions necessarily concern more than one issue at once. Thus, in the petition of Ptolemaios discussed in Chapter 1, Ptolemaios was complaining both about harm to his financial interests (the extorted money) and about violence (the beatings through which his opponents managed to get him to give up the money). However, though both terms can exist in a single document, they refer to separately actionable issues—for instance, to a crime against property and an incidence of violence. It is also important not to confuse violence (hybris) or harm to property (bia) with the adjectival or adverbial form of bia (βίαιος, βιαίως). This descriptor appears a number of times in petitions to refer to people’s behavior and character (e.g., so-and-so is a violent/harmful/unpleasant person), but so far as I can tell never is used formally to define the action itself.¹¹ There are likewise procedural peculiarities that exist for violence but not for damage/harm, as I will outline in greater detail in Chapter 5.

In addition to the fact that the language used to describe violence is bound up with the language of wrong, the language that surrounds the core legal terms is the language of disdain, hostility, and eventually, of prayer and redemption. When petitioners are “approached” they are also “attacked” (ἐπέρχεσθαι in both cases, which also, and perhaps tellingly, means “to take to court”); they are knocked down (κατακόπτειν); “tortured” or “abused” (αἰκίζειν); and “despised” (καταφρονεῖν), to give just a few commonly recurring examples. People’s opponents are joyfully overbearing: they “take confidence” (θάρρειν) in their power to get away with doing violence; they act “in the manner of thieves” (λῃστρικῷ τρόπῳ), or in the manner of tyrants (τυρρανικῷ τρόπῳ). Petitioners, in turn, wish for “punishment” (ἐπέξοδος) or “revenge” or “judgment” (ἐκδικία). In other words, despite their repetitious nature, petitions still record a rich language of scorn and insult.¹²

Nevertheless, this repetitiousness of a limited number of tropes over a long period of time should cause some concern. There is no question that these documents were mediated through a scribal tradition. This raises an important question of method: what if we are not, in fact, looking at first-person narratives that reflect an individual’s subjective self-perception and evaluation of self-worth? What if what we have, instead, are various examples of how scribes would have interpreted pain? This leads to a pair of objections that might be labeled, for the sake of convenience, the skeptical position. By this I mean a belief that either (a) all we have in the resulting petition is the voice of the scribe or (b) even if there is more than the voice of the scribe, we can take no methodologically defensible epistemological position through which we could separate the scribe’s voice from that of the petitioner.¹³ Even when petitions vary, scribes are manipulating formulae to make a “best fit” between formal language and the experience of violence. It is further likely that even outside the bounds of scribal mediation, petitioners are lying, or at least manipulating the truth. They are creating, in other words, what Natalie Zemon Davis has called “fictions”—massaged, rhetorical, well-designed statements that were intended to resonate with broader social ideas about truth and justice.¹⁴ They are not delivering the truth about violence; they are winking at the truth, and winking not even at their own truth, but at other people’s truths, at what those other people—those who populate the legal system—consider violence. In other words, these documents tell us very little indeed about violence or how people experience it; they may tell us something about how scribes record it, or at best, how they translate it.¹⁵

Phrased in its most strident form, this position leaves the historian in something of a quandary. This is especially so if one thinks that the point of reading petitions is to figure out precisely what happened in X village on Y day—that is, to evaluate the ways in which petitions reflect the truth about a moment in the past. This is, of course, part of the point of reading them. And in this case the answer to the question of “how accurately do these narratives reflect the incident about which the petitioner is complaining?” would then have to be, “probably not so accurately.” But in this form, the problem is overstated. Petitions were not only narratives about the past. They were futureoriented as well. They sought to produce judgments and rearrange social relationships as a result of a past violent act. As such, they were political moves in local dramas, both in the sense that they sought to produce a set of actions, and that they sought to change the contours of a certain balance of power. By making this small change in our historical perspective (that is, by moving from a concern about truth in the past to attention to the ways in which petitions produced truths that would shape the future), scribal mediation of the language of violence comes to look less like a problem, and more like an opportunity to understand in greater detail the intricacies of the political and institutional landscape in which petitions were produced.

Anyone who watches television cop shows knows that the police work with a specific institutional vocabulary. In cop talk, as in Egyptian petitions, there is a relatively limited range of vocabulary used to describe violent occurrences.¹⁶ The language used to describe modern situations is the product of an institutional culture that requires reasonable consistency in describing criminal actions: a police report must use this limited vocabulary to convey details that may eventually have legal repercussions. Thus, while the vocabulary itself is sparse, it is used to convey maximum amounts of information. At the same time, police reports are individualized descriptions of events, designed not only for legal purposes, but also for accurate reporting back to a community in the form of crime statistics and police blotters in local newspapers. Because of this, the language must both be a roughly accurate legalistic translation of the “facts” of the event and also be specific enough that quantifiable patterns can be extracted. While it would be silly to claim that in Egypt there was a desire on the part of the government to extract specific data on this aspect of local life, the comparison is still instructive: petitions were the product of a legal tradition, and as such are relatively consistent in their language. Complainants sought to get their point across to authorities forcefully; they used specific language that was laden with meaning to do this. But this does not mean that petitions were merely forms to be filled out. Descriptions of violence had to resonate with a body of institutional presumptions to the degree that they had to be recognized as complaining about violence in order to start institutional processes in motion in the first place. But they also had to tell a particular form of story, and that story had to be individualized.

It is worth arguing from example. The following two petitions come from the Kronion archive from Tebtynis. Both are from the year A.D. 48, both are addressed to the strategos Apollonios, and both are written in what appears to be the same hand. The first dates to the fifth of January, the second to the fifth of February. Furthermore, in both petitions, the name of the assailant, Patynion, is the same (though his patronymic is subtly different). These two documents are the most similar examples that I have found in the petitions about violence. Unlike other documents I discuss in the text, I have printed the papyri below to reflect the original layout of the documents, and preserved the original spellings of the words:¹⁷

Ἀπολλωνίῳ στρατηγῷ Ἀρσινοείτου

παρὰ Πετσίριος τοῦ Φουλήμι-

ος τῶν ἀπὸ Ταλεὶ τῇ ε τοῦ

Τῦβι τοῦ ἐνοστῶτος η̣ [ἔτους]

Τιβερίου Κλαυδίου Καίσαρος

Σεβαστοῦ Γερμανικοῦ

Αὐτοκράτορος. ἐμοῦ ὄντος

ἐργασζομένου ἐν ᾧ μεμίσ-

θωμε παρὰ Ἰσχυρίωνος

τοῦ Πτολεμαίου περὶ Ταλὶ

ἀμπελῶνος, εὗρον ἐπʼ αὐ-

τοφώ̣ρωι Πατυνίωνα

Ἡρακλίδου καὶ τὸν τούτου

ὑ̣ε[̣ ιὸ]ν [̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣]̣ ̣ ̣ἐλ̣ άνον-

τας ̣ ἡ̣μ̣ιένους δη̣[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣]̣ ̣ ̣

ἐν τοῖς παρεσπαρμένοις

λαχάνοις καὶ ἐμοῦ λογο-

πυουμένου πρὸς αὐτοὺς

καὶ ὕββριν μοι ἐπεταίλε-

σαν οὐ τὴν τοιχοῦσαν ἔτι

δὲ καὶ ἐκ τοῦ τοιούτου ἔδο-

κάν μοι ἀφιδέστερα πληγὰς

πλήρους εἰς τὰ παρατυχό-

ντα μέρη τοῦ σώματος

κ̣α̣ὶ ̣π̣ρ̣ο̣[σέ]π̣α̣ισ̣ ο̣ ̣μ μοι εἰς τὴν

πλευρὰν το̣ ῖ̣ [̣ ς] γρόνθοις

ὥσται νῦν κατακλεινην εἶ-

να̣ ι κα̣ὶ ̣κ̣ιν̣ δυ̣νεύ̣ ̣ει̣ ν̣ ̣ τῷ̣

ζῆν. διὼ ἀξι̣ῶ̣ι̣ γ̣ρ̣ά̣ψ̣α̣ι̣

τῷ․ τῆς Ταλεὶ ἀρχεφώδῳ

ἐκπέμψε τοὺς ἐνκαλου-

μέν[ο]υς ἐπὶ σαὶ πρὸς τὴν ἐ-

σομένην ἐπέξοδον.

εὐτύχι.

(The date, name, and description of the petitioner follow)

To Apollonios, strategos of the Arsinoite nome, From Petsiris son of Phoulemis, one of those from Talei. On the 5th of Tubi of the present 8th year of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus Imperator, while I was working in the vineyard that I rent from Ischyrion, son of Ptolemaios, in Talei, I myself saw Patynion son of Herakleides and his son … leading mules … in the vegetable patches. I had a discussion with them and they did inappropriate violence to me, and what’s more, they beat me unsparingly with many blows all over my body. They laid into my side with their fists, so now I am laid up and in danger of losing my life. Therefore I ask you to write to the archephodos of Talei to send the accused to you for forthcoming punishment. Farewell.

Ἀπολλωνίῳ στρατηγῷ Ἀρσινοείτ(ου)

παρὰ Παποντῶτος τοῦ Παποντῶτο(ς)

τῶν ἀπὸ Ταλὶ τῆς Πολέμωνος με-

ρίδος λεγο(μένου) Ψεναμτῖτο(ς) γεοργοῦ

τῶν ἀπὸ Ταλεὶ τῆς αὐτῆς μερίδος.

ἐπιβάλλον(τός) τινος λῃστρικῷ τρόπο

εἰς ἣν ἐχο ἐν προγεγραμμένῃ κό-

μῃ Ταλὶ οἰκίαν καὶ ἤρωσάν μου

δοκοὺς δέκα καὶ ὅλμον, καὶ ἐ-

μοῦ τὴν ἀναζήτησιν πυουμέ-

νου σὺν τῷ τῆς κώμης Ταλεὶ ἐ-

πιστάτῃ εὗρον ἀπʼ αὐτοφώρωι

ἐν τῇ Πατυνίωνος τοῦ Ἡρακλήου

οἰκίαν ἀπὸ μέρους τῶν ἠρμέ-

νων δοκῶν δοκοὺς ̣ πέντε, καὶ

ἐμοῦ λογοπυουμένου πρὸς αὐ-

τὸν περὶ τούτων ὕββριν μοι

ἐπετέλεσον οὐ τὴν τοιχοῦσαν

καὶ ἐν τῇ συμπλωκῇ ἐξέπε-

σον παρʼ ἐμοῦ εἰς τὸ ἔδαφος

ὃ εἶχον ἐπὶ τῶι ὤμῳ μου

παιδίον ὥσται ἐκ τοῦ τοιούτο(υ)

κινδυνεύειν τοῦ ζῆ̣ ̣ν.̣ διὼ

ἀξιῶ γράψε τοῖς τῆς

Ταλεὶ ἐπιστάταις ἐκπέμ-

ψε τὸν ἐνκαλούμενο(ν) Πατυ-

νίωνα ἐπὶ σαὶ πρὸς τὴν ἐ-

σομένην ἐπέξοδον.

εὐτύχ[ει].

(The date, name, and description of the petitioner follow)

To Apollonios, strategos of the Arsinoite nome, From Papontos, son of Papontos, one of those from Talei in the division of Polemon and a farmer of the land called Psenamtis, in the same division of Polemon. Someone entered the house which I have in the aforementioned Talei in the manner of thieves, and took ten beams and a millstone. When the commander of Talei and I made an investigation, I myself saw five of the aforementioned beams in the house of Patynion son of Herakleos. When I had a discussion with him about this he used inappropriate violence, and in the melee a small child who was seated on my shoulder fell down to the ground, and because of this is in danger of losing his life. Therefore I ask you to write to the commanders of Talei and to have them send the accused man, Patynion, to you for forthcoming punishment. Farewell.¹⁸

Both documents tell stories with similar language, and both are fine examples of well-preserved first-century petitions—long and thin papyri, narrations that are short and to the point without excessive amounts of language. The formula for the address at the top of the papyrus and the formula for the request are personalized, but essentially the same, even down to the ways in which they present the text visually. Space is left at the bottom of both documents, perhaps to fill in any subsequent bureaucratic endorsements. More important, there are stock phrases and legal boilerplate used to frame the complaint itself: not only is hybris present as a legal term (and identically misspelled), but the same verb is used in both papyri to describe the way that it is employed. In addition, it is qualified as ou tychousa (inappropriate, aggravated) in both papyri. Both petitioners mention that they “had a discussion” (i.e., a verbal confrontation) with the assailant, and use the same term (logopoieisthai). The comparisons could be extended.

Figure 2. P.Mich. V 229. Digitally reproduced with the permission of the Papyrus Collection, Graduate Library, University of Michigan.

Figure 3. P.Mich. V 230. Digitally reproduced with the permission of the Papyrus Collection, Graduate Library, University of Michigan.

These two documents have striking similarities, but it should be immediately obvious that they are telling different stories. In one (229), the story focuses on a seemingly unplanned act of violence, coming on the heels of a violation of property; in the other (230), there is also a violation of property, but the violence here is certainly not planned. In the second document (230) the petitioner is trying to convey that Paytnion is the thief himself. Likewise, in the first case, the violence is described at greater length, focusing on the blows to “all the parts of the body,” whereas in the latter document, any personal injuries received by the petitioner have been subordinated to the injuries to and grave condition of the child he claims to have been carrying on his shoulder.

That both of these documents are mediated through a scribe, and probably through the same scribe, makes them a good test case for asking some questions about the nature of narratives in the papyri, and what the proper methodological guidelines should be for using these documents as sources for individual experience. No tidy solution to this problem is possible, given that there is little evidence for the ways in which these documents were composed. Nonetheless, it is worth making three main methodological suggestions.

First, the temptation to isolate scribal intrusions into the narrative, strip them from the text, and then look at the remainder is methodologically problematic. Certain kinds of legal boilerplate show up in all petitions, but to attribute this to the hand of the scribe alone is to enter dangerous territory. There are good reasons for thinking that there is an interactive process going on when petitions are composed, and that the interface between the scribe and the speaker is a dynamic one.¹⁹ In Chapter 5 I detail a case of how the draft of a petition is turned into a final (or at least a subsequent) version, and how the appropriate legal language is inserted into the document to bolster the position of the petitioner and clarify her legal complaint. Additionally, we know precious little about scribes, and to vest them with such agency in a process of complaint is risky. For the moment, however, it will suffice to note that the insertion of certain kinds of legal boilerplate into these documents is not a mere formality.

Second, legal language is loaded. The words themselves carry meanings, and these meanings would be critical for the ways that the complaint was subsequently processed by magistrates. The form of the document was likewise important. As scholars have recently cautioned, papyri must be imagined not only as texts, but as artifacts.²⁰ As such, we must imagine how the document would have been read. It was necessary to make it look like a petition, so that the strategos or the relevant members of his staff would know exactly what they were looking at the instant that they unfolded it—as Traianos Gagos once pointed out, it is probably no accident that the physical shape of petitions in the Roman period remains so consistent.²¹ No mistakes could be made about this, and thus we also see that certain documents have labels telling the reader what they were. P.Mich. V 229 does this: on the verso, it declares that it is the petition (hypomnema) of Petsiris of Talei. Form had to be gotten right.²²

Third, the idea that scribes hold a monopoly on legal words is dangerous. Legal anthropologists have, in the last twenty or so years, reminded us that while legal language may come from the “top down,”—though it need not—it can be appropriated and made meaningful to large segments of the population that are not responsible for its initial genesis.²³ In contemporary life legal words are used with great frequency and precision precisely because they are packed with communicative force, even we often use them in ways in which they were not originally intended. For instance, if a police officer touches me menacingly, I know to shout “police brutality” (at least if there are witnesses present). If he subsequently arrests me, I know to remind him that “I’m not resisting.” Certain legal words worked themselves into the popular vocabulary in Egypt as well: in a letter from a man named Demarchos, he tells his sister Taor, “I want to acknowledge that you wrote me about what Agathinos did to me. If I live a while and return to my homeland I will get satisfaction for myself (ἐκδικήσω ἐμαυτόν).”²⁴ Demarchos’ use of the verb ekdikein is unusual in a letter that is otherwise overwhelmingly concerned with mundane matters, but the term is common in legal documents. Likewise, in a letter with otherwise mangled language, a son writes to his father inquiring, “who … is the one who has done violence to you?” (ὕβριν σοι πεποίηκεν).²⁵ In the next chapter I look in greater detail at a personal letter that is almost exclusively concerned with violence. But for the present purposes it should suffice to note that the kinds of language that were critical for activating legal action were also, to a certain extent, part of the larger vocabulary. What is important, then, is to see the final product (the petition) as a carefully shaped narrative, one that goes out of its way to exploit certain kinds of language to fashion the narrative itself into a formal complaint. This was an interactive process that took place between the scribe and the victim, and the resulting narrative must be treated as a whole, boilerplate and all.

* * *

Properly deciphering the technical terminology of violence and outlining the cultural and institutional matrices from which that terminology comes is the beginning, rather than the end, of the problem violence poses for historians. Getting the words right, while important, will not tell us what violence “meant” for someone living in Roman Egypt. Simply knowing the semantic range of hybris cannot explain what was at stake in making a claim of violence, how violence came to challenge a petitioner’s sense of self, or how that sense of self was redeemed through the writing of a petition and the subsequent legal processes. And just as philology cannot inform us about what violence “meant” for our subjects, so too it fails to explain what violence “means” for us. At stake here are not just theoretical questions, but questions of method as well. With what sort of epistemological distance should we write about violence? Is it a concept that can be understood through the conventional forms of reasoning available to historians? Or is there something inherent in violence that challenges the capacities of historians? Can we genuinely know someone else’s pain or trauma? Do we actually know what we mean when we say “violence”? And if we do not, then why is that the case?

These are, of course, complex questions. They are made even more so because they are informed by a long discussion taking place in contemporary social theory concerning the interface between modernity and violence. It is a debate which evolves alongside, and is likely intertwined with, the penal and criminological revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that brought us “governing through crime.” The result of this discussion is that scholarly accounts of violence proliferate, and violence has come to be a label applied promiscuously to a wide—and ever increasing—variety of social phenomena (pari passu with the increasing criminalization of a diversity of social phenomena). Nevertheless, it remains odd that, in spite of the “genealogical” turn in the modern social sciences which seeks to subject every central analytical category to the scrutiny of the historicizing eye, “violence” has thus far largely escaped such a treatment. Yet it is crucial that it should be so analyzed, both for its own sake and to outline its cross-cultural applicability.

In the section that follows I attempt to outline, provisionally and in broad strokes, something of the modern discussion of violence; to mark out the path we’ve taken that makes the concept of violence so challenging to historical writing. The goal is not to cover everything that has been labeled “violent” or “violence,” but rather to understand why this label has come to be so important and so amenable to marking a diversity of acts and relationships; what it is, in other words, that people think is at stake when they declare that something unexpected is in fact “violence.” Here a caveat is important: what follows is not a proper intellectual history that traces in detail threads of thought through various philosophical “schools”—it is an attempt to gesture at what I think are key moments in this history when certain conceptual doors were opened up. Once these doors were opened, other thinkers—sometimes with irreconcilable ideas and commitments—often walked through them. The second part of this chapter attempts to cleave from this mass of literature a few central, threading concepts that might support some sort of rigorous cross-cultural application, differentiating what might be of broad methodological applicability from what should remain historically contingent. In this part I turn back to the world of the papyri and to their particular language of complaint, as well as to the distinction between force and violence, in an effort to better understand the force of the label of violence (pun intended) within these categories.

* * *

A genealogy of the concept of violence, or at least of violence as a sociologically significant concept, should begin with Max Weber. There are two reasons for beginning with Weber, one historical and the other linguistic. The historical point is the easier one: Weber’s thesis, variously expressed, that the modern state successfully claims a monopoly on “the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” has proven fruitful in the social sciences generally, so much so that even though it is often subject to critique from a variety of perspectives it remains a pithy and original formulation. The difficulties inherent in Weber’s thesis—that even modern states often fail to control territories effectively, that they often delegate their monopoly unwillingly, that premodern and modern state-building projects differ in aims and scope, that legitimacy is often up for grabs, that force is not always or necessarily physical—need not detain us here. The more important matter for the comparative study of violence is linguistic: Weber uses a single, ethically neutral term (Gewalt) for violence. Contemporary discussions, especially in sociology and political science, of “state violence,” “legitimate violence,” or the “monopoly on violence” that translate the German terms (staatliche Gewalt, Gewaltmonopol) are still deeply influenced, methodologically speaking, by the ethical ambivalence of the original term.²⁶ Yet this ethical neutrality is hard to translate into English, in which we tend to make a distinction between violence and force—the former being unjustified, the latter ethically neutral or at least unsuspicious. That Weber’s Gewalt can be and has been translated both ways should make us alert to the agenda of the broader historiography of violence.²⁷ While it may be useful for large-scale sociological comparison to rid ourselves of this distinction between force and violence (or even between legitimate and illegitimate force),²⁸ failing to be alert to the ethical position of those who choose to write about violence (instead of force, or vice versa) ends up obscuring some critical moves and currents in twentieth-century historiography.

To contextualize this problem, we can point again to Weber, and the tradition of historical sociology that is anchored in his work but finds its real starting point in Norbert Elias’s Civilizing Process (originally published in 1939). To paint in broad strokes, this tradition posits a dichotomy between violence and social order, and seeks to explain the ways in which order contains violence, usually by incorporating it within legitimate institutional frameworks. This tradition, in its least intellectually sophisticated manifestations, can be a teleological narrative of the ways in which contemporary liberal order is fashioned (or fails to be fashioned) from chaos and uncertainty; more recent work, such as that of Charles Tilly or Douglass North, has substantially improved on this teleological tendency while keeping the basic insight that institutions—both formal and informal—can lower incentives for actors to “defect” (to cheat or to use violence) in transactions, and thus promote stability, safety, and growth.²⁹ To say that institutions can control violence is not, of course, to argue that they necessarily succeed in so doing, or that institutional configurations cannot sometimes promote violence.³⁰ It bears adding as well that this perspective does not always entail optimism: one only need think of the pessimism that marks the climax of Weber’s Protestant Ethic, a bleak vision of man trapped in the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality. Mutatis mutandis, a similar pessimism about human paralysis in the face of the rationalization of institutions extends to Foucault’s diagnosis in Discipline and Punish of the carceral revolution in contemporary society.

While Weberian pessimism about the disenchantments of modern rational governance is a key part of the tradition of historical sociology, a different reaction to the same processes that Weber described emerged in the wake of World War II. In particular, it is a thread in the critical tradition that emerges from a deep anxiety about the nature of industrial progress and Enlightenment rationality, based more on Marx and Nietzsche (and, to an overlooked degree, on Kierkegaard, about which more below) than in traditional German sociology—though it was certainly indebted to Weber. It is these postwar German thinkers who contributed the most to the problems that a study of violence today entails, and it is worth mapping a few key moves in this line of critical thought to approach an answer to why contemporary scholars are so comfortable with applying the label of “violence” to such a broad range of phenomena.

While the sociological tradition prized a value-neutral approach and therefore relied upon the ethically ambiguous sense of Gewalt, the same cannot be said of the critical projects of the late twentieth century. To give a potted narrative of their development, one could say that, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, the world witnessed the advent of new technologies for both mass production and mass destruction (or, depending on one’s perspective, for both simultaneously). These technological developments, claiming to emerge under the banner of progress, culminated in two events: industrialized genocide in bureaucratically rationalized and technically sophisticated death camps, and the nuclear attacks on Japan. The rapidly changing technological horizon was joined to an increase in political consciousness (not least in scholarly circles) of the fragile and sometimes dubious bases of political power and sovereignty. This political consciousness was linked to the technological changes in large measure through the writings of the Frankfurt school, whose emphasis on total critique was rooted in Marx and Nietzsche, but when translated into an American landscape (not least through the work of Marcuse) came to serve as a catalyst for the intellectual and political revolutions of the late 1960s, and from there has informed contemporary critical projects.³¹

The experience of comprehensive destruction in general, and of a technologically sophisticated genocide in particular, guided inquiry. While this appeared in a variety of manifestations, one place to start would be with Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, in which, through attempting to explain Nazism as a species of “radical evil,” she argued that the nature of the concentration camps—spaces in which “everything is permitted”—led to a form of human experience that defied the categories of language, law, and even ethical thought. Tellingly, “crime” is her point of reference:

We attempt to understand elements in the present or recollected experience that simply surpass our powers of understanding. We attempt to classify as criminal a thing which, as we feel, no such category was ever intended to cover. What meaning has the concept of murder when we are confronted with the mass production of corpses? We attempt to understand the behavior of concentrationcamp inmates and SS-men psychologically, when the very thing that must be realized is that the psyche can be destroyed even without the destruction of the physical man; that indeed, psyche, character, and individuality seem under certain circumstances to express themselves only through the rapidity or slowness through which they disintegrate. The end result in any case is inanimate men, i.e., men who can no longer be psychologically understood, whose return to the psychologically or otherwise intelligibly human world closely resembles the resurrection of Lazarus. All statements of common sense, whether of a psychological or sociological nature, serve only to encourage those who think it “superficial” to “dwell on horrors.”³²

The link here between the tremendous violence of the concentration camps and the problem of moral (or legal) judgment, if not explanation, is brought to the fore through recourse to the language of religion (Lazarus). These links are critical: totalitarianism, through its vision of technologically perfected and socially dis-embedded modernity (camps), opens up a space in which men can finally realize their Enlightened potential (anything and everything)—only to find that this transgression of previous limits is in fact a species of nihilism which erodes even the categories of understanding. Hence, the recourse to the language of the miraculous, and in particular, to the image of Lazarus, a man who moves across the space of life and death. The image of Lazarus is key to Arendt’s argument in more ways than one: not only is he something miraculous in the sense that he cannot be understood according to traditional categories (if at all), but insofar as he can be understood, it is in the sense that his resurrection marks the boundaries between life and death that Arendt’s Nazis disregarded: namely, in ways which require a transcendental policing ironically missing in the modern and disenchanted world. Arendt is not unique here in linking violence and late modernity with the language of religion and miracle, or in linking this package of features to a claim that totalitarian violence challenges our power to understand and describe. Arendt is less clear, however, on whether it is actually in the nature of violence that it confounds such categories, or whether this is an optical illusion of sorts—that is, that extreme violence only appears to be incapable of description or cognition.

Arendt’s claim that totalitarian violence challenges our categories of understanding did not emerge from a vacuum. It is part of a larger conversation on the nature of reason and enlightenment that played out over the course of the mid-twentieth century among thinkers as diverse as Heidegger (Arendt’s teacher) and those of the Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School of critical theory). In many respects our current discourse on (and discomfort with) violence is linked to this discussion as much as it is to our legal categories, albeit in the former case perhaps more tangentially. The basic claim—shared by Heidegger and the Frankfurt school—was that the instrumental, scientific reason prized by the Enlightenment had become fundamentally dehumanizing. It is this dehumanization that is productive of violence,³³ and not just particular acts of violence against particular individuals, but, because the violence perpetrated on the vulnerable is actually a species of self-hatred,³⁴ this instrumentally rationalized system promotes a violence which pollutes all participants in it. As Adorno and Horkheimer put in it in the section of Dialectic of Enlightenment dealing with anti-Semitism:

The enlightened self-control with which adapted Jews effaced within themselves the painful scars of domination by others, a second kind of circumcision, made them forsake their own dilapidated community and wholeheartedly embrace the life of the modern bourgeoisie, which was already advancing ineluctably towards a reversion to pure oppression and reorganization into an exclusively racial entity. Race is not, as the racial nationalists claim, an immediate, natural peculiarity. Rather, it is a regression to nature as mere violence, to the hidebound particularism which, in the existing order, constitutes precisely the universal. Race today is the self-assertion of the bourgeois individual, integrated into the barbaric collective. The harmonious society to which the liberal Jews declared their allegiance has finally been granted to them in the form of national community. They believed only that anti-Semitism disfigured this order, which in reality cannot exist without disfiguring human beings. The persecution of the Jews, like any persecution, cannot be separated from that order. Its essence, however it may hide itself at times, is the violence which today is openly revealed.³⁵

Reason—true reason, not coldly instrumental reason—can critique this system, but fundamentally, in its modern, technological instantiation, “Enlightenment is totalitarian.”³⁶

There are two important moves here: first, the extension of the violence of totalitarianism from death camps to the entirety of late modernity meant the opening up of a vast territory in which one could locate, expose, and critique the violence that was now revealed to structure everyday life and practice. And the experience of the twentieth century meant that this could be extended beyond the boundaries of Europe proper to include the European colonial experience writ large (and the thorough nastiness of the violence of nineteenth-century colonization and twentieth-century decolonization made this task both easier and more timely).³⁷ Additionally, the sense that the demise of Nazism in World War II did not in fact end the progress of modern totalitarianism, but simply allowed it to appear in newer and seemingly more benign clothes, necessitated turning critical attention to modern society and exposing its violence through an analogous process of critique.³⁸ A sense that violence lurked in every corner and was a central social ordering principle (and a morally questionable one, in contrast to Weber, who was only pessimistic) resulted in the profusion of the use of the term today, in which we find, to draw from the table of contents of one recent collected volume, that there is, at the very least, state violence, structural violence, everyday violence, symbolic violence, interpersonal violence, and gendered violence.³⁹ In its specific manifestations, violence can be anything from punching another individual in the nose to anything generally coercive or even unpleasant (and here we can include all forms of social ordering), on the assumption that order is possible either because (a) it ultimately rests upon the eventual likelihood of violence, regardless of whether such violence is ever actually employed; or (b) because ordering proceeds from power, and power in itself is reducible to acts of violence.⁴⁰ In this process of marking things as violent and exposing them to the critical gaze there was never any need to produce a method by which types of violence could be disassociated from one another: since all forms of violence could be equally traumatizing (and therefore equally valid opportunities to expose the dynamics of power), a system of distinguishing which forms of violence might be more important than others would have been fundamentally an imposition of power, and hence of violence, and hence culpable. The downside to this critical move, however, is obvious: history quickly comes to look very much like Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, in which:

Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new forces that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power. Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.⁴¹

To continue in this vein rapidly exposes one of two problems, depending on how one approaches the analysis: at one level, if all is violence and violence is everywhere, then violence is also nowhere and nothing particularly remarkable—it’s just turtles all the way down. In this sense, the concept becomes sociologically useless; it has the additional disadvantage of making the writing of the history of violence along these lines excruciatingly boring.

The other way that these moves have changed historical discourse on violence is perhaps more important, as well as being both philosophically and methodologically dangerous. To return to Arendt’s move in bringing the language of religion to bear on questions of totalitarian violence, we could say that, if violence is both everywhere and nowhere, then it is not sociologically empty, but instead paradoxical in the Kierkegaardian sense: that is, it implies or induces a critical stance in which violence can only be beheld with a horror religiosus, observed with awe but not understood, because, like the sacrifice of Isaac, it suspends the ethical and as such touches on the sublime or the indescribable.⁴² This is the second legacy of critical theory, namely, the involvement of the language of religion and mystified awe in the study of violence. While initially proposing to expose the violence of the Enlightenment by marking it as mythical, it is no small irony that subsequent critical projects often have come to echo their own objects, returning to the language of religion in a sort of inversion in which acts, images, or descriptions of violence come to exercise a power of fascination;⁴³ from this fascination it is only a short step further to where violence can be treated as something transcendent, sublime, or even joyous: think here, for example, of Jean-Paul Sartre’s glorification of revolutionary violence in the end of his preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, where violence has became therapeutic, purgative, and humanizing;⁴⁴ or of the ludicrous mutterings of Jean Baudrillard, expressed with what can only be described as tittering glee, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, in which actor is indistinguishable from victim, in which what is real is inextricable from what is fiction, in which the ethical has been overtly suspended, and all that matters is the putative purity of a collective sacrifice.⁴⁵

* * *

To return, briefly, to Arendt, and from there to the problem of how historians should treat violence: it is to Arendt’s credit that she came to understand the nature of the methodological impasse that her early use of the term “radical evil” provoked: she rejected the term in Eichmann in Jerusalem, explaining in a letter to Gershom Scholem that “I changed my mind and…. It is now my opinion that no evil is ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ‘thought-defying,’ as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because it finds nothing. That is its banality. Only the good has depth and can be radical.”⁴⁶ It is not the task of historians, fortunately, to identify, in the same ways as may be critical for normative political theory, what has genuine or radical depth. It is, however, the job of historians to avoid or untangle concepts that are “thought-defying,” to subject them to scrutiny, and to avoid methodological paths that lead only to hopeless irrationalism. This is the task for understanding violence, one with which ancient historians have likewise grappled (in many respects unsuccessfully).⁴⁷ The fact that such a broad range of concepts might fall under the rubric of “violence” has led to hand-wringing and despair, and to the dismissal of the problem, in the words of Bruce Frier, as “all but intractable, especially because it is virtually impossible to define and depends so much on the perspective of the observer.”⁴⁸

It is unfortunate that Frier dismissed the problem, however, primarily because his central insight is correct. Violence is not so much a thing to be defined as it is a label used in a process of defining the actions of another, and locating those actions (and sometimes also the motives and character) of others within a discourse of claim-making. In other words, using the label “violent” to describe an action or a person is a way of declaring unacceptable something that another thought appropriate, natural, or necessary.⁴⁹ By applying the label of violence, individuals engage in a process of actively challenging the legitimacy of what might otherwise be understood to be innocuous, necessary, or well deserved, unmasking these things for what they “really” are. It is not that it “depends so much on the perspective of the observer,” but rather that it depends on the perspective of both the victim and the observer—the receiver of the complaint—and ultimately, on whether the observer can be convinced and—just as important—can convince others that the label of violence is correct.

Two examples might be brought to bear here. The first comes from a cache of documents, largely petitions, surviving from Euhemeria, a small town at the edge of Lake Moeris in the Fayyum in the first century A.D. The petitions are largely addressed to the epistates phylakiton, the local commander of the guards (police chief would be a misnomer, as his function was not policing in the contemporary sense). The commander of the guards was sent petitions from villagers complaining of a predictable set of annoyances in village life: theft, trespass, interpersonal violence, and the like. He had to make decisions about which complaints were reasonable and required official attention, and when he decided that a complaint did, he would forward the petition to the archephodos, who, it appears, was in charge of “arresting” or “sending” the people about whom the petitioner complained.⁵⁰ Among the petitions one stands out:

Ἀθηνοδώρωι ἐπιστάτῃ φυλακιτῶν παρὰ Ἰσίωνος δούλου Χ[α]— ιρήμονος ἐξηγητοῦ. τῇ Σεβαστῇ β τοῦ ἐνεστῶτο(ς) μηνὸς Παῦνι τοῦ β (ἔτους) Γαίου Καίσαρος Σεβαστοῦ Γερμανι[κ]ο(ῦ) παραγενομένου μου εἰς Εὐημέρειαν τῆς Θεμίστου μερίδ(ος) περὶ μετεώρων ἐλ[ογ]οποιήσαμην πρὸς Ὀννῶφριν Σίλβωνος τῶν ἀπὸ τῆς κώμης ὑπὲρ οὗ ἔχω πρὸς αὐτὸν ἐνεχύρου, ὃς δὲ ἐκ τοῦ ἐναντίου ἄλογον ἀηδίαν μοι ἐπιχειρήσας παρεχρήσατό μοι πολλὰ καὶ ἄσχημα καὶ ἐνειλούμενός ̣ μοι ἀπώλεσα πινακίδα καὶ ἀργυ(ρίου) (δραχμὰς) ξ, ἔτι δὲ καὶ ἐτόλμησεν φθόνους⁵¹ μοι ἐπαγαγεῖν αἰτίας τοῦ μὴ ὄντος. διὸ ἀξιῶ γράψαι ἀχθῆναι αὐτὸν ἐπὶ σὲ πρὸς τὴν δέουσαν ἐπέξοδον. εὐτύχ(ει).

To Athenodoros, commander of the guards,

From Ision, slave of Chairemon the exegetes. On the 2nd of the present month of Pauni, dies augusta, in the second year of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, I was present in Euhemeria of the division of Themistos due to some unfinished business, and I had an argument with Onnophris son of Silbon, one of those from the town, about a pledge that I have from him. But he, for his part, treated me with irrational violence, abused me in many unpleasant ways, and beat me. I lost my account book and 60 silver drachmas. Still he dared to cast envy at me, though for no good reason (?). Therefore I ask that you write for him to be brought before you for the necessary punishment. Farewell.⁵²

A lot can be learned about the power of the label of violence and related claimmaking discourses from this story of a confrontation between two men (or a man and a slave) in an Egyptian village. On the one hand there is the accountbalancing slave, Ision, charged by his master to collect a series of debts; on the other hand, the assailant, Onnophris, resists him. Behind Ision’s narrative there may lurk many potential stories about motives, both his own and Onnophris’, and there are some tempting details in Ision’s description. It is interesting, for example, that Ision loses his πίναξ—his account book—in the melee, and given that the argument itself is about the settling of accounts, it seems possible that Onnophris could have been venting his anger over a financial situation both upon Ision’s body and upon the documentation of the ins-and-outs of their previous interactions. The accusations of envy, though grammatically bungled, may also speak volumes about how Ision perceived the nature of their relationship. Envy proceeds from a perceived imbalance in the “right” power distribution in a relationship or set of relationships, and points to the suspicions that ensue when these feel out of order.⁵³ In this case, despite his formal status as a slave, Ision was hardly powerless: this is in part because of the large range of abilities that slaves in the Roman Empire were allotted on behalf of their masters, but also, significantly, because he was the agent not just of any master, but of a fairly important one: the exegetes was connected to the office of the strategos, and in charge of citizenship lists and the appointment of guardians.⁵⁴ Likewise, there are the details of the violent acts themselves: Onnophris’ “irrational violence” (ἄλογον ἀηδίαν), his abuse, and his threats are recorded in the typical, indignant language of complaint—a language that presumes that Ision had dignity capable of injury in the first place. Onnophris, it appears from the petition, did not agree.⁵⁵

When Ision wrote this petition, he made a public claim about the ways in which he deserved to be treated, sought to get the upper hand in defining the terms of his relationship with another individual, and attempted to involve external authorities in the relationship between himself and another (free) man. As with all claims, his was subject to contest, not just subsequently by his opponent in the courtroom, but also by local authorities (the observers, in Frier’s formulation), who could use their power to decide whether such a claim could be convincing or not.⁵⁶ In this case it is fortunate that this petition comes from an archive, for here we can better understand the workings of this process: while most of the Euhemeria petitions were subscribed by the epistates phylakiton and sent on to the archephodos with instructions that the archephodos “arrest” the malefactors and thus begin legal proceedings, Ision’s petition has no subscription.⁵⁷ In other words, it appears that Ision’s claim of violence was rejected. One way to frame this would be to say that local authorities decided that what Onnophris had used was merely justifiable force, not unacceptable violence, and he used it against a slave who deserved it, not a man who had rights worth taking the state’s time in defending. Presumably Chairemon, Ision’s owner, could try again by suing Onnophris for damages, but in such a case Ision would be presumed to be a piece of property, not a man.

The second example is not papyrological, but comes instead from the jurisprudential literature. (Here it bears adding that Roman jurisprudence was not a hermetically sealed and independent tradition of thought, but was instead forged in tandem with empire.) The passage in question comes from the Digest, and is woven together from excerpts of Ulpian’s and Paulus’ commentaries On the Edict (both from the third century, but here discussing the opinion of Salvius Julianus, who worked in the second century). In book 9 of the Digest the opinions of the jurists are set out on the question of Aquilian liability, namely, the relationship of obligation that results from unlawfully causing harm to slaves and chattels. But the text then turns to the case of teachers, and a teacher who kills or wounds a slave during a lesson. Here the jurists are certain that the teacher is liable under the Aquilian law if he kills or wounds the slave, but the jurists then turn to the question of how to deal with a teacher in the case where he uses violence against his free-born charges: sutor, inquit, puero discenti ingenuo filio familias, parum bene facienti quod demonstraverit, forma calcei cervicem percussit, ut oculus puero perfunderetur. Dicit igitur Iulianus iniuriarum quidem actionem non competere, quia non faciendae iniuriae causa percusserit, sed monendi et docendi causa: an ex locato, dubitat, quia levis dumtaxat castigatio concessa est docenti: sed lege Aquilia posse agi non dubito: (Paulus libro 22 ad edictum) praeceptoris enim nimia saevitia culpae adsignatur.

The second example is not papyrological, but comes instead from the jurisprudential literature. (Here it bears adding that Roman jurisprudence was not a hermetically sealed and independent tradition of thought, but was instead forged in tandem with empire.) The passage in question comes from the Digest, and is woven together from excerpts of Ulpian’s and Paulus’ commentaries On the Edict (both from the third century, but here discussing the opinion of Salvius Julianus, who worked in the second century). In book 9 of the Digest the opinions of the jurists are set out on the question of Aquilian liability, namely, the relationship of obligation that results from unlawfully causing harm to slaves and chattels. But the text then turns to the case of teachers, and a teacher who kills or wounds a slave during a lesson. Here the jurists are certain that the teacher is liable under the Aquilian law if he kills or wounds the slave, but the jurists then turn to the question of how to deal with a teacher in the case where he uses violence against his free-born charges:

sutor, inquit, puero discenti ingenuo filio familias, parum bene facienti quod demonstraverit, forma calcei cervicem percussit, ut oculus puero perfunderetur. Dicit igitur Iulianus iniuriarum quidem actionem non competere, quia non faciendae iniuriae causa percusserit, sed monendi et docendi causa: an ex locato, dubitat, quia levis dumtaxat castigatio concessa est docenti: sed lege Aquilia posse agi non dubito: (Paulus libro 22 ad edictum) praeceptoris enim nimia saevitia culpae adsignatur.

He (Julianus) says: a shoemaker, in the course of teaching a freeborn boy who was a son-in-power, struck his (the boy’s) neck with a shoe last, since the boy did not sufficiently perform the task he was taught. But as a result, the boy’s eye was knocked out. Julianus said that the action for iniuria does not apply, since he did not hit the boy with the object of causing injury, but with the object of teaching and admonishing. He doubts whether the action on hire applies, since the right of lightly chastising is granted to teachers. But I do not doubt that the Lex Aquilia applies: (Paulus, On the Edict book 22) since an excess of brutality on the part of the teacher is a reason for assigning fault.⁵⁸

The Digest passage is interesting, not least because it mirrors certain moves that were made in defining the relationship between Ision and Onnophris. In the case discussed by the jurists, the question is put as to the nature of the relationship that occurs when there is violence between two free men who have unequal degrees of power over one another. The question, put in one form, is whether the striking of the child should count as violence or as force; certainly teachers have the right to strike the children they teach: so long as this is done for the purpose of “teaching and admonishing,” this is justifiable force, and no further relationship results between the two parties. But Ulpian and Paul do think that a claim can be made for Aquilian damages, if only as an actio utilis,⁵⁹ if the instructor’s violence crosses from acceptable to brutal. But in this case a series of wires have to be crossed for the legal operation to proceed properly: the praetor would write up a formula for Aquilian damages, and the judge would have to decide whether such a line had been crossed. But this would presumably require treating the free pupil through a fiction as though he were a slave, and allowing the suit to his father in his capacity—again fictional—as the boy’s “owner.”⁶⁰ The jurists’ moves in this argument reflect the same kind of intellectual slippage—though this time in the opposite direction—as that which prevails in the quarrel between Ision and Onnophris, and raises, however obliquely, a set of questions as to what kinds of relationships (of personal status and of obligation) can or must be assumed when the term “violence” (here, iniuria, a term I will return to below) is applied to certain kinds of acts. Here the injury to the boy cannot be characterized as violence between free and independent men (iniuria), for they are incapable of having a relationship of equals, at least in the sense that violence is prohibited between equal men, for here the right to harm lightly and for the purpose of correction is granted to one of them; nor, for the same reasons, as a relationship of contract (since the teacher was allowed, under such a contract, to use limited amounts of force); instead, the last available option is to treat the boy as a damaged slave, and allow his father—like Chairemon in the imagined alternative to the case of Ision—to sue under the Lex Aquilia. Were the boy in question not an imaginary construct of the jurists, one would imagine that he, like Ision, would have felt this to have been an affront to his dignity.

From here we can return to the question of how violence is best understood as an ethical label, and propose that the force/violence distinction I discussed above can be reappropriated as a methodological guideline for the study of violence: more than just an artifact of divergent scholarly traditions, the English distinction between (potentially justifiable or morally neutral) force and (unjustifiable) violence is precisely what is at stake in defining the relations between Ision and Onnophris and the shoemaker and his pupil, and is central for understanding the scope of the term “violence” in the papyrological evidence in general. And there is a good deal at stake in this distinction, in two senses. First, violence—or the ability, legally speaking, to feel pain as a result of violence—is intimately connected with ideas of personhood. I will deal with this more momentarily, but for the moment it will suffice to say that personhood is also connected to the ability to enter into certain kinds of interpersonal relationships, in particular, the relationship that results (or does not result) from an act of violence or force. To wit: someone can be “forced” to do something legitimate or justified—to pay taxes, to abide by the terms of a contract, or to make a shoe properly.⁶¹ Once the force has been applied, provided it is justified, the relationship between the two individuals is over. The taxes have been paid or the shoe stretched correctly, and the government or the teacher does not subsequently owe that individual recompense for having had to resort to force. But when someone commits an act of violence—or when someone labels someone else’s actions as an act of violence—there is a claim of a subsequent relationship between the individuals in question. Violence opens avenues of redress, but additionally creates and transforms individual relationships, construing victim and violator as legal equals bound together through obligations. The offender subsequently owes something to the victim, and the two are henceforth bound in a relationship of debt and repayment until the issue is settled—if indeed it ever is. The act of giving the label of violence, as in modern discourse, implies that one finds another’s actions to be inappropriate or unpalatable. But unlike modern discourse, the label of violence does not implicitly try to relegate the violator beyond the line that distinguishes civilization from barbarism; instead, the idea is that violence has created a subsequent, albeit inverted, relationship—a new relationship of obligation wherein the violated dominates, albeit only in the sense that his obligation will be redeemed before a judge. This is because one man’s violence is often another man’s force, and the correctness of the label “violence” has to be worked out politically, that is, through public claim-making and contestation.

* * *

The quarrels between slaves and debtors and shoemakers and students lead to another point about violence, one hinted at in the previous section: there is a connection between violence and personhood, and particularly how one perceives oneself as a person (that is, one’s subjectivity), in two senses of the term. One sense is legal, and is reflected in the ways law connects the power to claim things as violence with questions of status, expressed most starkly above in the movement between free and slave, but to one extent or another implicitly in every violent conflict. The ways in which law constructs and impinges upon subjectivities through the language of personal status and obligation is an important part of my narrative, and an element to which I will return below. But for the moment, it is profitable to begin with a wider sense of the term subjectivity, that is, with how people come to understand themselves and their place in the world, and how violence connects with these elements of self-perception.

At one level one could say that, while all people are vulnerable in some way or another, in any given society (and for current purposes we can take this term as being unproblematic) there are differential degrees of vulnerability. How and where one can be injured, by whom, and with what sorts of result to a person’s sense of self and self-worth is a product of culture, though it is in the nature of these cultural categories that they are often precisely what are being contested in the case of a claim of violence. Two examples will again suffice. The first comes from Pierre Bourdieu’s classic discussion of the contested dynamics of vulnerability in Kabyle society in Algeria, in which he describes honor as a game to be played between equals, a dialogue of challenge and riposte in which the worth of both the offender and the challenger was open to public scrutiny. When challenged, a man could reply, presuming himself to be the social equal of his challenger; by the same token, he could choose to ignore the insult, marking the offender as someone not worth responding to while similarly declaring his own person as invulnerable to the hostilities of those who were lower ranked. The ideals, however, were complicated by the realities:

To choose not to reply may have different meanings, even contradictory ones. The offender can, by his physical force, his prestige, or the importance and authority of the group to which he belongs, be superior, equal, or inferior to the person offended. If the logic of honour presupposes the recognition of an ideal equality of honour between the two parties, popular consciousness is nevertheless not unaware of inequalities in fact. He who cries, “I’ve got a moustache too!” is answered by the proverb: “The moustache of the hare is not that of the lion.” In this way a whole casuistry, spontaneous and extremely subtle, may develop.⁶²

The dynamic process of challenge and riposte (or refusal to counter the challenges of another) that Bourdieu describes can be compared with a letter of the younger Pliny, describing the murder of Larcius Macedo, a senator and ex-praetor, but also himself a descendant of slaves (and for this reason, according to Pliny, a harsh and unpleasant master), by his own slaves in the baths. The first part of the letter describes the murder itself (I will return to this part below). After reflecting on Macedo’s death, Pliny pauses to recall another incident in which Macedo had been subjected to violence in the baths, considering it a sort of an omen:

addam quod opportune de eodem Macedone succurrit. cum in publico Romae lavaretur, notabilis atque etiam, ut exitus docuit, ominosa res accidit. eques Romanus a servo eius, ut transitum daret, manu leviter admonitus convertit se nec servum, a quo erat tactus, sed ipsum Macedonem tam graviter palma percussit ut paene concideret. ita balineum illi quasi per gradus quosdam primum contumeliae locus, deinde exitii fuit.

I will offer another detail which just came to mind concerning this same Macedo. When at Rome, he was in the public baths when a noteworthy, and, as his death has proven, ominous incident occurred. A Roman knight was tapped lightly by Macedo’s slave so that he could pass by; the knight wheeled around and slapped not the slave, but Macedo himself, so hard that he nearly fell over. In this way, the baths were for Macedo like a path, leading first to violence (contumelia), and finally to death.⁶³

The contrast between these two texts, both dealing with the ethics of violence and the nature of vulnerability, is striking, to pun just slightly (and, it bears mentioning, yet another good empirical reason for jettisoning the nonsense about “Mediterranean” societies that continues to return, in zombie-like fashion, to scholarly inquiry). The delicate casuistry of Bourdieu’s Kabyle society that provides a commentary on how the game of honor should be played (often with telling mistakes and misunderstandings) is answered quickly by Pliny’s Roman knight, who strikes instinctively and derogatorily at his social inferiors (an open-handed slap possessing the same degrading and emasculating force it has today, it appears). The only accident here is that in this case the open hand lands on the knight’s vast superior in social rank; the assumption remains that the knee-jerk delivery of punishing violence to a slave who had the audacity to invade a superior’s personal space (by his touch, and by his request that the knight yield a way through the crowd) is perfectly reasonable and acceptable. The lesson, for Pliny, seems to be that the baths are dangerous, for when the markers of invulnerability are checked at the door you may well end up violently humiliated by your social inferiors. But in a wider sense, these texts demonstrate how violence is enmeshed in a society’s broader discourse about who can be rightly injured and how, and similarly within notions of who can feel pain and who can complain about feeling it. In this sense, it contributes to a person’s subjectivity, since when people come to notice that they have been victims of violation they reflect, through their written complaints at least, but probably more broadly in ways that we cannot see, on precisely who they are (and how this contrasts with who they think they are, and/or who others think they are) and where they fit into society.

This is so not only in general terms, but in particular ways as well. One of the most important contributions of anthropology in recent decades has been to draw attention back to the physical body, and in particular, to how subjectivity is affected by the physical body, how it is or how it comes to be perceived.⁶⁴ Violence plays an important role in this process as well. To return to Pliny’s letter on Macedo, this time to the narration of Macedo’s death:

lavabatur in villa Formiana. repente eum servi circumsistunt. alius fauces invadit, alius os verberat, alius pectus et ventrem, atque etiam—foedum dictu—verenda contundit.

He was bathing in his villa at Formiae. Suddenly slaves surrounded him. One of them grabbed his throat while another one beat his face, another beat his chest and belly, and also—horrible to say—pounded his private parts.⁶⁵

Pliny’s description of the assault on Macedo is presented through the lens of privacy and vulnerability (both literally and figuratively); it is made more horrifying by playing on fears that are endemic in slave systems. The slaves’ violation of Macedo deprives him of certain protections to his body that are guaranteed by his rank, and does this by harming him in places that are off limits to others. The language of the body is central to this, and provides a way into the question of how subjectivity is based upon—and similarly can come to structure—ideas about the body. Throughout petitions—and likewise in the subsequent claim-making process—bodies are on display, being written about as wounded and marked, swollen and bruised, violated and exposed. This is so not only in the first-person narratives of petitions, but, since the power of observation was spread throughout society, in other contexts as well. In contrast to Pliny’s Macedo, a report from a public doctor gives a hint of the power of the official gaze in the Egyptian context, and the amount of parts that would have been on display:

(hand 14)ρϚ

(hand 1) [Οὐαλερίῳ] Ἀμμωνιανῷ τῷ καὶ Γεροντίῳ λ[ογισ]τ[̣ ῇ] Ὀξυρυγχίτου [παρὰ Αὐρηλίου] Σαραπίωνος Ἡροδότου ἀπὸ τῆς λαμ(πρᾶς) καὶ λαμ(προτάτης) Ὀξ[υρυγχιτ]ῶ̣ν̣ πόλεως δημοσίου ἰατροῦ. [ἐπεστάλην τῇ] χθὲς ἡμέρᾳ, ἥτις ἦν Μεχεὶρ κϚ, ἐκ βιβλιδίων [ἐπιδοθέ]ν̣των σοι ὑπὸ Οὐαλερίου Νουνδιναρίου [- ca.9 -]traces ὥστε γενέσθαι ἐν ἐποικίῳ αὐ̣το̣ ῦ̣ Π̣ ̣ ̣ [̣ ̣ ̣ ̣]̣ ειω καὶ ἐπιδεῖν τὴν περὶ τοῦ πλη[γέντος (?) ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣]̣ ̣ ̣ τ̣ ο̣ υ κα̣ὶ ̣[ ̣ ̣]̣ φ̣ύλ̣ ακος Μουεῖτος διάθεσιν καὶ ἐγγράφως σοι π̣[ρο]σφωνῆσαι. ὅθεν ἐν τῷ ἐποικίῳ γε̣ [̣ νόμενος] ἐπεῖδον τὸ̣ ̣ν̣ αὐτὸν Μ[ο]υ̣εῖν κλινήρη ὄντα ἔχοντα κατὰ μὲν τοῦ βρ̣έ̣γ̣ματο̣ς διαίρεσιν μετὰ ψιλώσεως [τοῦ] ὀ̣σ̣τ̣έ̣ο̣υ καὶ κατὰ τῆς κορυφῆς τραύματα δύο μετὰ̣ ψιλώ̣σε̣ ω̣ ̣ς τοῦ ὀσ[τέ]ου καὶ κ̣ά̣[τ]ω̣θ̣εν τούτων τραύματα [ ̣ ̣ ̣ἐ]πὶ τοῦ δεξιοῦ μέρους τῆς κεφαλ̣ῆ̣ς ̣ καὶ κατὰ τοῦ ἀριστεροῦ κροτά[φου -5-6-] ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣οἰδήματος καὶ κατὰ τῶν̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ [̣ -ca. 2-] [τοῦ] ἀ̣ριστεροῦ ὠτί[ου οἴ]δημα μετὰ πελ̣ ̣ιώ̣ ̣μ̣α̣τος καὶ κατὰ τῆς δεξιᾶς ὠμο[πλάτης κα]ὶ ̣τοῦ ὤμου οἴδημα μετὰ πελιώματος [καὶ κ]ατὰ τῆς δεξιᾶς χει[ρὸ]ς κατὰ τοῦ μεγ̣ίσ̣ ̣το̣ υ̣ ̣ δακτύλων πλῆγμα μετʼ οἰ̣ δ̣ [̣ ήματο]ς ̣ καὶ κατὰ τοῦ βραχίονος τῆς δεξιᾶς χειρὸς οἴδημα μετ[ὰ] π̣ελιώματος καὶ κατὰ τοῦ ἀριστεροῦ μηροῦ τρῶ[σιν ̣ ̣ ̣]̣ [̣]̣ ω̣ ς καὶ τοῦ γονατίου ἄνωθεν τρῶσιν καὶ ἐ[̣ πὶ] το̣ ῦ̣ δεξιοῦ μη̣ρ̣οῦ τρώσεις δύο πέρας εἰς πέρας ̣ [κ]α̣ὶ ̣κ̣ατὰ [πάσης τῆς] ἀριστερᾶ̣ς ̣ π̣λ̣ευ̣ ρ̣ ᾶς τρῶσιν· ὅθεν προσφωνῶ. (ἔτους) ι [καὶ] η τ[ῶ]ν̣ κυρίων [̣]̣ ̣ ̣ἡμῶν Κωνσταντίνου καὶ Λ[ικινίο]υ̣ Σεβ̣ αστῶν, ἐπὶ ὑπατ[ε]ία̣ ς Καικ̣ιν̣ ̣ίο̣ υ̣ ̣ Σαβεί̣ [̣ νου] καὶ Οὐεττίου Ῥουφίνου τῶν λαμ̣π̣ρ̣ο̣τά̣ ̣τω̣ ̣ν̣ Μ̣ εχ̣ ̣[εὶρ κζ].

——

(hand 2) Α̣ὐρ̣ ή̣ ̣λ̣ιο̣ ̣ς ̣ [Σαρα]π̣ίων ἐπιδέδωκα π̣ρο̣ ̣σφ̣ ωνῶ̣ν̣ ὡς πρόκειται.

Page 106

(hand 1) To Valerius Ammonianus, also called Gerontius, logistes of Oxyrhynchos,

From Aurelius Sarapion son of Herodotos, public doctor from the glorious and most glorious city of the Oxyrhynchites. Yesterday, which was the 26th of Mecheir, on account of a petition submitted to you by Valerius Noundinarios I was sent … to go to the village of P—, and to observe and report on the condition (?) of the wounded man … the condition of the guard Moueis, and therefore I submit to you this report. When I arrived at the village I observed Moueis lying in bed, with a gash on his head stripped to bone, two wounds on the top of his head with stripping to bone, beneath these wounds … on the right side of his head; and on his right temple … swelling and on his … on his left ear a bruise with lividity, and on his right shoulder-blade a bruise with lividity, on his right hand on the largest finger a bruise with swelling, on his right wrist a bruise with lividity, on his left thigh a wound … above his groin a wound, on his left thigh two wounds from end to end, and all along his left side more wounds. I attest to this. Year 18 of our lords Constantinus and Licinius, Augusti, in the consulship of the mot glorious Caecinius Sabeinos and Vettius Rufinus, Mecheir 27. (hand 2) I Aurelius Sarapion have submitted this report as requested.⁶⁶

When petitioners chose to complain about violence, they were asked to reflect not only on who they are as social beings, but similarly on who they are as physical beings. The experience of pain, mediated through language, draws attention to the body and its wounds. I will discuss this process at greater length in what follows, but for the present a few comments must suffice for outlining the ways in which the experience of violation contributes to subjectivity and self-perception. The overt reflection—and narration—of the experience of being a victim of violence provides a window into the world of differential vulnerabilities that I mentioned above, and as such is a valuable source for how individuals living in an ancient empire chose to describe and classify themselves. This does not, however, make these sources unproblematic. What we see in the narratives that petitioners create is both a set of normative claims about how they wish to be treated, and also a narration framed at the moment when they are forced to acknowledge publicly a disjunction between their wounded bodies and their normative claims—or, in another sense, between their ideally deserving social body and their actually mistreated physical body. At the moment of violation, in other words, we are seeing not unmediated subjectivities, but deeply and problematically affected ones, which reveal themselves through highly selective descriptions. These descriptions, however, cluster in interesting and important ways, and deserve to be treated systematically.

A final issue, however, relates to the mechanics of how personhood is structured by and reflected in this narrative process, but comes from there to a broader problem, one which is both linguistic and epistemological. Namely: as I suggested above, language (in this case, the language of petition, with its accompanying narrations and claims and its stilted and repetitive terminology) is a highly imperfect technology for communicating pain. It is therefore also an imperfect tool for communicating one’s self-understanding in the wake of violence.⁶⁷ This is so for three reasons. Language is imprecise and capable of misunderstanding. Pain is largely a private emotion or sensation. Language that expresses pain—if people choose to express it at all—often feels limp and inadequate to its task.⁶⁸ Finally, in the world of Roman Egypt, the language of pain that is found in petitions is delivered through a stilted, legalistic vocabulary, the product of a scribal culture that mediates or translates between the language of pain and the language of law. Though working through all the details of these problems would be beyond the scope of this chapter (and working through them in the detail necessary would require a deep and wide-ranging philosophical anthropology), let me make a suggestion: translation and fiction, like obligation, are powerful metaphors, and they work in multiple directions. What matters in the case of a petition is not some underlying truth or reality of what actually happened, nor simply the ability of the words in the petition to move a higher power to sympathy. What ultimately matters is what comes to be accepted as truth in a particular moment in a particular society. And this is precisely what is interesting about law. When people framed their narratives about wounded bodies and personal pain, they were setting administrative wheels in motion, and they and the people they accused would subsequently be responsible for details placed in their narrations. The reason why this worked was that by translating some version of their painful experiences into the proper legal categories, by writing them up in petitions that would be passed around to high officials, petitioners thereby made those feelings and experiences “true”—because, at least in some sense, the truth of law is capable of flattening out the truth of facts and experience.⁶⁹ Traduttore, traditore, of course, and this is precisely the power of these narratives, and why people sought refuge in them in the wake of violence.