Читать книгу Violence in Roman Egypt - Ari Z. Bryen - Страница 9

INTRODUCTION

The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life

Pain may be a human universal; writing about one’s own pain is not. When historians see individuals transforming pain into narratives that complain about neighbors, local officials, or family members, we would do well to pay attention. These narratives about pain and injury invite a series of questions: What can we learn from the ways that people experience, describe, and complain about violation, pain, and injury? In what ways, and under what circumstances, can we use a narrative about violence to give an account of the ways in which non-elite individuals theorized their own behaviors? In what ways can accounts of pain—and the redemption and socialization of pain through petitions—contribute to a historical account of empires?

These questions are hardly unique to the ancient world. And they are tricky enough for social historians, especially those of an anthropological bent. They become yet more complex when we have to take into account that, in the Roman world at least, we have our accounts of pain and violation only because they have been mediated through legal structures. This is so not only in the narrow sense that these narratives were attempts to participate in the legal arena by asking authorities to judge and punish violators, but in the broader sense that the practice of defining what counts as a violation was already contingent on particular sets of legal categories. This fact of legal mediation in the writing of non-elite history is thereby complicated not only because a layer has been added to the analysis, but also because such a history runs up against a deep and persistent disciplinary division.

In the historical tradition, one might say, individuals exist in the subjunctive, always as an endless series of possibilities, capacities, and complexities; law exists in the imperative, a series of commands, reductive and violent. Individuals make their world within dense and overlapping reciprocal networks; within these networks they share stories, rituals, gods, meals, and families. Law reduces networks to flowcharts of authority, abstracting those within the networks and treating them as replaceable units of analysis. Individuals exist in time and space; law tries its best to develop an allergy to such categories. The project, then, would seem to be built on a fundamental tension between two different visions of how to map the social world, and the histories which emerge from it tend to be stories of the conflicts between these two irreconcilable ways of imagining such a world. They are normally tragic stories, for no matter how crafty a litigant might be, no matter how well he or she might negotiate the complexities of a judicial system, the law nonetheless frequently wins.

The above diagnosis could be faulted in many ways: social historians, it could be objected, have always romanticized non-elites to an intolerable degree. Humans are not endlessly capable, but radically bounded by structural and environmental factors, as well as by various mental demons of their own making. Law is not divorced from social relations, but deeply embedded. Nor is it unidirectional or transcendent. Drawing a line between law and society is anyhow a flawed project, because it merely replicates a typically “legal” claim—the claim, made most often by practitioners of law, that law is not the social or the everyday, that it is something that has a different essence (should we wish to be metaphysical), a logic and language fundamentally its own, and a capacity to remain innocent of or at least insulated from the work of everyday life.

Objections could be multiplied, but they begin to feel thin to historians. And this is not because these objections are wrong (they are not), or because historians are unphilosophical people (though they sometimes are). They feel thin because, if we take the primary task of social history to be that of giving an account of the reasoning that our subjects gave for their behaviors, then these objections seem to have held little weight for them. They took problems to court. They asked for judgment. They fell into stunned silence or joyous relief at the reading of sentences. They moved through a social world wearing (and watching, and interpreting) scars from judicial whips and rods. Alternatively, these objections begin to feel thin because so much of social history is anyhow done on the back of law’s records: in societies in which literacy is not widespread we can count on finding non-elites in judicial archives, where their understandings of themselves were contested by others. Think here only of Carlo Ginsburg’s monumental work on inquisitorial records. Even in societies with abundant documentation and high literacy rates judicial records have proven a boon, given the vagaries of archival preservation.

But here we have come no closer to a method, and no closer to an answer as to whether the results will be entirely predictable when we pair social history with the history of the subject before the law. What we need is an explanation of why people found these structures so congenial in the first place, why law served as an important category to them—a richer explanation as to why, given the tremendous stakes and the possibility of disaster, someone would have been willing to move from open-textured capacities and possibilities to the world of judgments. And here I am loath to accept explanations that cast subjects as mechanistically responding to some sort of external factor—that these practices of “going to law” somehow emerged or persisted “because of” culture or class or status or identity, ideology or false consciousness or bad faith, litigiousness or prickliness or honor, or out of a rational choice to maximize gains vis-à-vis other social actors. This is not to deny the existence of any such factor; it is to deny all of them a priori causal status. It is to do so because these explanations—in fact, even the logical form of these explanations—strike me as being, at the very least, deeply inhumane. They smell of the kind of social theory that historians have often rightly distrusted: cold, abstract, and mechanistic—in many ways, the doublet of law itself.¹ Such theories, it seems, have smuggled law’s most frustrating and mystifying elements into their own projects.²

This is not to say that social theory is useless to historians (it is not). It is to say that, if we wish to remain true to the humane project of social history, easy explanations are not to be had, and the usefulness of any theory will be judged by its capacity to do hermeneutic service, rather than provide a ready account of causation—that is, it will be judged by its ability to open up more possibilities and richer understandings, not to wrap the world into a neat and tidy package. This was, I take it, the stance of E. P. Thompson, and one reason his work has proven enduring.

The world may not be neat and tidy, yet people often wish it to be. This brings me to the central thesis of this project: when the social world—with its possibilities, networks, and participants—becomes, for whatever reason, overwhelming, unlivable, or intolerable, law may provide a means to rectify this situation. It does this not because it is necessarily a source of fair judgments or because it is per se a source of power (though it can be), but because, through its compressions, fictions, translations, and abstractions, it provides a manageable and simplified framework—a conceptual language—for people to rethink themselves and their relationships. It can serve, in however imperfect and attenuated ways, as a source for people to theorize themselves and their behavior—to answer the question “Who am I, where do I fit within my world, and how can I render that world tolerable?” As with social theory, law’s most important contribution to social life is hermeneutic.

As the title to this Introduction indicates, I have chosen to let Erving Goffman serve as my jumping-off point for this study. Goffman is perhaps the least systematic of social theorists; he was at his best as a diagnostician of human behavior. His central claim, to simplify greatly, is that human behavior and interactions are aimed at the goal of inhabiting a tolerable universe. Human beings do this by a series of small maneuvers, enacting delicate scripts that structure conduct and make it regular, predictable, knowable, or at least capable of being explained. But when these scripts fall apart, or when there is dissonance between the person and the script, repair work needs to be done, for these dissonances make the world fundamentally unlivable. But what happens when people are cast in a script which they find horrid or objectionable? How do they change it? What were the mechanics behind this process of changing a script? Here Goffman’s answers tend to be unsatisfactory, or at least depressing (for often, in the case of his other famous book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, the script cannot be changed). What I will argue, in the course of this book, is that, in Roman Egypt at least, law provided one mechanism for changing these scripts. It did this because of the particular ways in which it interacted with narratives.

My strategy is this: to take narratives (in this case, petitions concerning violence) seriously and to read them sympathetically; to try, insofar as possible, to work out the logic of the claims that petitioners are making, to place these claims within both local and comparative contexts, and to propose a model for making them “make sense” to a historian that comes closer to explaining the way that they might have made sense to a petitioner in the Egyptian countryside. Two caveats are important. First, “sympathetic” reading, here, does not involve having to like, appreciate, or enjoy one’s informants. It does not entail a political commitment to sympathize with or romanticize non-elite people. If anything, the people who wrote petitions in Egypt are very much like any group of people who tend to complain: they lie and exaggerate, they whine; they are occasionally funny or clownish, periodically pitiable; sometimes we might suspect that they are a bit thuggish. Reading sympathetically simply entails that when they make claims we take them seriously, and try to understand the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which claim-making takes place. Second: when I speak of comparison, I mean comparative method, not comparative evidence. Bluntly put, I do not believe that the latter category has any meaningful purchase as a method, at least not in the sense that ancient historians have applied it in the last few decades—as a way of coping with the fact that our sources are incomplete and fragmentary by substituting information from “better documented” societies. Comparative method, here, is used in the ways described by Jonathan Z. Smith: as a stance that mistrusts easy analogies and coincidences, and tries instead to develop a rich language of difference.³ Whether I have been successful in this will be judged by what follows.

What follows also tries to accomplish a larger goal, namely, that of outlining a dialectical model of imperial law and governance on the basis of this particular genre of narrative complaint. I attempt this through two main lines of inquiry. First, I try to show how violence “worked” in day-to-day life in Roman and Late Antique Egypt. This involves outlining the ways violence was discussed, how it was acted out in towns and villages, where it fit in disputes between individuals and families, how it served to govern, shape, and alter interpersonal relationships, and how it was transformed, through the language of law, into legal complaints, courtroom hearings, and institutionalized punishments. As I hope to show in what follows, violence has always had a peculiar role in the history of Roman Egypt. The discussions of Egyptian violence in literary sources from the Roman period—which portrayed Egypt as a violent place, a hardscrabble backwater filled with superstitious inhabitants particularly unsuited to civil government, and held in place only by force of arms—has had major historiographical consequences for writing the history of violence in Egypt. Specifically, it has at times forced historians to engage in apologetic treatments rather than close analysis of Egyptian violence.⁴

An analysis of the style of violence is a central part of this study, but in addition I hope to contribute to the ways we understand the Roman legal system in the provinces, and, at a broader theoretical level, to how we understand the relationship between law and society in general. This involves several related things. It involves outlining what a bottom-up view of the law might have looked like in Roman Egypt, clarifying what we think we mean when we speak of provincials entering the field of legal contest, and giving an account of both the rules and the relationships that were meaningful in a Roman province, as well as what Žižek calls the “metarules” or Searle calls the “background”—the correct system of applying rules in the first place.⁵ It goes without saying that both of these categories—the rules and the ways to apply the rules properly—were constantly changing and precisely the object of contest. It also involves explaining more precisely why people chose to alter their relationships through the legal sphere in the first place. When we explain these phenomena properly, law begins to look like a rather different creature from what historians (and in particular, ancient historians) often take it to be: rather than a system of rules to be applied correctly or erroneously or a simple imposition of imperial power, law emerges, paradoxically perhaps, as both a field of contested practice and a simplifying language through which individual petitioners can redefine themselves and their universe of personal relationships.

These are perhaps less than modest goals, and if it were possible to achieve them it would probably represent the culmination of a career or a lifetime, rather than the product of a short and restricted study. But I hope that it will be possible to essay some tentative answers to some of these questions, to push the evidence farther than has been done previously, to find ways of making old documents say new things, and to present, through a detailed study of violence, some models through which these larger questions can be pursued. What follows will not be the last word on violence, law, or society in Egypt, but will serve three functions. First, I hope to complement some recent trends in ancient history and papyrology, especially the laudable efforts in the last twenty or so years that have sought broaden the scope of the issues on which papyri can be brought to bear.⁶ Second and more important, I hope to contribute to some larger discussions of how to write social history from legal documents, especially where the content of the documents reflects actions that are, necessarily, viewed as aberrant, problematic, or contested either by an individual or by the community at large.⁷ Finally, taken as a whole this work is an attempt to write provincial history from the bottom up, as a series of complicated transactions and conversations, as well as to bring individual choice and agency into the picture.⁸

The argument proceeds in two parts. Part I is largely an exercise in brushclearing. I begin in Chapter 1 by giving a close reading of one petition, and present some of the questions that will guide what follows. In Chapter 2 I discuss the significance of the fact that our documentation comes from Egypt, and that Egypt was a part of the Roman Empire. Here I deal with the matter of Egyptian exceptionalism, and begin to describe some of the institutional features of government in Egypt which I consider important to understanding what follows. Because one of the stories that was told by the Romans about Egypt was that it was “violent,” in Chapter 3 I turn to a discussion of violence, and the import of such a term within contemporary historical and critical projects. From there I highlight some possible ways these contemporary categories can be reappropriated for dealing with ancient material. In Chapter 3 I also deal with the question of language, since, for reasons I discuss, violence and language are intimately connected. In this particular context, however, the language I am primarily interested in is mediated language, that is, the consequences of our documentation being intertwined with scribal traditions and practices.

Part II turns back to the world of petitioners and their claims. In Chapter 4 I discuss narrative techniques, and begin to outline the ideology that underpins petitioners’ claims. I argue here that the rhetorical moves in petitions point to a world in which personal dignity is insecure and subject to constant evaluation by peers and neighbors, rather than being connected to rigid positions on a clearly delineated social hierarchy. This insecurity is rooted in an equalizing ideology that can be recovered through a careful analysis of the papyri. As a consequence of this ideology, however, social relationships are complex and multifaceted, and no clear patterns of deference emerge from the world that petitioners describe. Chapter 5 continues the argument, providing an explanation of how the narratives did their work in a legal context. Here I address in greater detail a problem raised in Chapter 2, namely, the consequences of pluralism and localism for understanding petitioners’ claims and strategies. Chapter 6 returns to petitioners and their opponents, and presents a model for understanding the role of violence in structuring the dynamics of interpersonal relations in Roman Egypt. A conclusion follows, as do appendices. The appendices contain translations of my primary sources, as well as a brief introduction to papyrology addressed to nonspecialists.

The central concepts that structure the argument are fiction, translation, metaphor, and narrative. These are concepts drawn from literature, not “social science” or “legal science.”⁹ The format I have chosen is that of a historical essay, not a comprehensive monograph or an edition of texts that treats all remaining extant evidence seriatim. My notes mark intellectual debts, document my claims about papyri, and pick the occasional fight. They are necessarily selective in their citations of secondary literature.

* * *

The question of sources structures nearly all historical projects, but is particularly acute for non-elite social history in the ancient world. For a variety of reasons that take their origins in various disciplinary configurations, the strong spine (if not the entire central nervous system) of ancient history has traditionally been the “literary” sources: works that have been passed through the medieval manuscript tradition, preserved because of their status as “classics,” and copied and read in the Renaissance and thereafter as sources of humane value. “Literary,” here, refers primarily to sources existing within this chain of preservation, not to sources of a particular genre (thus literary sources include poetry, but also history, epistolography, rhetoric, and technical manuals, for example). Though it is important not to paint with too broad a brush, the basic conclusion of many ancient historians is that these sources are frequently very useful for reconstructing political and military narratives and of mixed utility for reconstructing the cultural world of male elites, but they can be made to do little work for telling us about the lives of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the ancient world, Roman or otherwise. The reason given for this is that the literary sources do not tend to reflect reality, but rather to make tendentious and normative claims about it; their purpose was not to provide a record of sober analysis, but to position our largely aristocratic ancient authors within their societies. Phrased differently, literary sources are artifacts of elite “self-fashioning”—a term I am uncomfortable with. (All it seems to tell me is that language is positioned and performed—but when is language not a matter of speaking from somewhere? In what sense then would someone ever not be self-fashioning? And if all texts are only self-fashioning, then does the historical project not collapse into the study of comparative narcissisms?) Still, as a diagnosis of what the literary sources do say about non-elites, this assessment seems fair. Romans writers were, unsurprisingly, not great fans of their social inferiors; they tell us little about them, and what they do tend to tell us is that their inferiors were, well, inferior.

“Documentary” sources provide one way around this problem. (It is conventional, in ancient history, to distinguish literary sources from “documentary” ones—namely, inscriptions and papyri.) Inscriptions record massive amounts of information regarding administration, official careers, and burial practices, to name but a few categories. Making history from inscribed documents is still very much a work in progress, despite huge advances over the last two hundred years. This progress has improved substantially our knowledge of the ancient world, and given insights into the precise ways in which the literary tradition distorts matters. But inscriptions were an expensive technology. While they served to monumentalize things that individuals thought important, they are hard to use to write non-elite history.

It is papyri that provide the greatest promise for this sort of project. While they are found in a variety of parts of the Roman Empire, Egypt provides our greatest concentration of them. Starting in the late nineteenth century, they began to be published by generations of careful scholars, on whose work and expertise this study rests. Still, they are not an “even” data set, even within Egypt. Recovered papyri tend to come from two main areas, the Fayyum basin and the excavated cache of documents preserved in the garbage mound of the city of Oxyrhynchos. A few come from other places as well: the western Oases, for example. They come primarily from concentrated areas of population—towns, cities, and villages, not predominantly agricultural areas. Their preservation is also chronologically uneven—the second and fourth centuries are well represented, whereas information for the fifth century, for example, is spotty. Chronological preservation also varies geographically. Additionally, while many thousands of papyri have been preserved, large numbers remain unpublished. What publications there are (and there are many) are the product of shifting editorial interests, from the earliest phases in which social history was subordinated to literary and legal history, to the more recent editorial interests in archives and record-keeping. As for the content of the documents themselves, what is published is rarely a straightforward record of personal beliefs, but is almost exclusively mediated through scribes and literate professionals composing on behalf of a largely illiterate society. Additionally, though papyri initially were considered to have much promise for social historians, they are not representative of the population as a whole. Though all who work with papyri will concede this point, it is still largely unclear and hotly debated what segment of the population they do represent.

These difficulties aside, papyri in general, and petitions concerning violence more specifically remain an important data set. The people writing them were significantly different from the writers of the literary tradition. They were non-elites in any meaningful sense of the term. Here, for reasons that will become apparent, I have focused on petitions from the first six centuries of Roman rule in Egypt: a period from the Roman acquisition of Egypt in 30 B.C. until, more or less, the age of Justinian in the sixth century A.D. Justinian is formally my endpoint, but I have resisted treating the sixth century in a rigorous fashion: this is because one major cache of sixth-century papyri, the papers of Dioskoros of Aphrodito, are currently being reedited by the able hands of Jean-Luc Fournet and his team of students. But the pre-Justinianic papyri are important in a different sense: they come from a period before the introduction of the first properly comprehensive promulgation of Roman law, Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis—that is, they come from a period in which law was largely uncodified and, despite imperial queasiness with this fact, also still developing. I have little to say about the preceding Ptolemaic period. There is certainly a story to be told here, but since I lack the linguistic capacities to deal with the demotic evidence, someone else will have to tell it. And for the purposes of preserving my already limited sanity, I have restricted myself to material from Egypt, though we have petitions concerning violence from other places as well.