This monograph seeks to explore ancient stories of violence in order to understand how and why ordinary people in Egypt contacted Roman magistrates and used law courts to redefine their relationships with each other. This aim is an extension of B.'s Chicago dissertation (2009) which focused on the expression and construction of pain and personal violation narrated in the petitions of Egypt's papyrological record. Marshalling petitions, protocols of court proceedings and the occasional papyrus letter from approximately 30 b.c. to the reign of Justinian, B. reproduces and translates these in extenso with close readings. He shows how the interlaced legal traditions of the day offered means for counteracting violent assault by simplifying complex interpersonal problems and reconstructing the aggrieved person's social world into a more desirable configuration. The blended philological and anthropological work of Gagos and Van Minnen (1995) serves as his starting point, from which B. builds an approach using ideas modified from scholars such as Goffman and Arendt. His work runs in parallel with B. Kelly, Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt (2011) as well as J. Bauschatz, Law and Enforcement in Ptolemaic Egypt (2013), but with a markedly different analytical framework and agenda.
The first main chapter analyses P. Mich. 3.174 (Karanis – a.d. 145–7), a petition authored by a certain Ptolemaios against his fellow villagers, in order to introduce common elements of the petitionary process. This document, notwithstanding its odd Greek grammar and vocabulary, sheds light on typical expressions and legal manoeuvres available to rural petitioners, for example going over a regional magistrate's head direct to the prefect. B. then pivots and, after describing the questions asked of such petitions by papyrologists, asks how provincials like Ptolemaios gauged the likelihood and quality of official redress for personal violence. This I take to be a middle road between a study of individual mentality or emotional experience of violence and a macro-scale treatment of law and imperialism, one reminiscent of attempts to resolve the apparent dilemma of human agency and social structure (for a summary of, and useful theoretical intervention into, this dilemma, see P.J. Martin and A. Dennis [edd.], Human Agents and Social Structures [2010]). This is a sensible approach in view of the evidence to hand and has the merit of using papyri to generate models of human interaction.
Chapter 2 addresses a persistent characterisation of Egypt as teeming with hooligans who could only just be kept in good order by their betters, an idea which took root in antiquity and is still disputed among scholars. B. here departs from his generally synchronic analysis to trace the development of this attribution through the classical literary tradition, linking it to the marked upswing in the number of petitions preserved on papyrus from the late-first century a.d. onwards. It was only then, he contends, that provincial institutions were solid enough such that Egyptians would think it profitable to employ officials for redress of typical disputes rather than local councils or vigilante practices. Roman magistrates during this consolidation were, moreover, conflicted since they had to maintain a happy populace and extract tax grain from Egypt for the city of Rome but also created complex new population categories and legal statuses so as to limit access to tax exemptions. These factors complicated and multiplied disputes in Roman Egypt, although whether these made its cities and villages appreciably more dangerous or violent than the ancient Mediterranean average (whatever that was), or more so than a modern city, remains an unclear and probably unanswerable question.
Chapter 3 surveys the vocabulary and rhetorical presentation of violence in petitions with an eye to Weber's ethical distinctions of force versus violence. After establishing the small range of petitionary words in Latin and Greek that unambiguously signified unethical force, analysis turns to the problem of which kinds of truth were conveyed when plaintiffs hired scribes to narrate their violation with stereotyped legal jargon. B. uses instances when separate drafts of the same petition survive to argue for the typically deep involvement of plaintiffs in the drafting process and to show how such narratives must have had plausibility in the eyes of the courts, thereby limiting opportunities for spin. He then turns the implied question of a petition's historical reliability on its head by looking at papyri as oriented more to future legal decisions and therefore indicative of the means by which provincials imagined that they could get their way in a dispute. Furthermore, this chapter seeks to redress the conceptual neglect that violence has suffered since it has either been used to describe any exercise of power or presented as defying critical analysis, a theoretical gap noted also in B. Shaw's Sacred Violence (2012). B. conceives of violence as an ethical label or interpretative claim intended to condemn humiliating physical actions, a definition whose utility is shown by a close reading of certain literary and documentary examples in which petitioners confirmed their side of the story through visible, bodily evidence of their violation. The fourth chapter continues the survey of how provincials displayed their marks of humiliation in order to overcome their disgraced passivity and recover dignity. The fifth chapter addresses how such presentations were directed, often to good effect, to audiences of Roman magistrates for the sake of material and reputational redress. This point ties readily into scholarly discussions of provincial buy-in to Roman rule, since the perceived utility of this petitionary system also attracted more than just the elites to join the game of empire.
Chapter 6 seeks to comprehend the stories behind these petitions through the eyes of the defendants, i.e. those who used physical assault, forced entry and confiscation rather than the magistrate's sword. In line with K. Harper's Slavery in the Late Roman World, ad 275–425 (2012), the chapter argues for an underlying notion of parity among freeborn Roman provincials which created substantial grey areas of conflicting claims and competing obligations. He notes also that this type of violence aimed to overwhelm the other side by superior numbers and employed what we today see as dirty fighting tactics. The book concludes with a nod to modern colonial history by characterising the petition process as part of a conversation of empire, i.e. a primary tool by which provincials defined Roman law and governing practice up until its codification beginning in the third century a.d.
B. achieves his goals by assembling a new analytical approach from other disciplines and using it to unlock an important body of evidence, thereby answering certain as-yet-unasked historical questions. His theoretical intervention regarding the nature of violence works well for the evidence he employs, while also the agency he has bestowed upon provincials in the daily working and long-term development of the Roman Empire is exciting to contemplate. I will end with two final notes: first, I am not convinced by his concluding metaphysical point that interpersonal violence as here defined is inherently wrong or, in his dualistic terms, ‘world destroying’, if only because it may give support to a state's monopolistic claim on legitimate coercive force which B. seems to deprecate elsewhere. Also, it seems to me that he misconstrues plaintiffs in thinking of them each as unique in their pain rather than as belonging to a limited number of miserable categories. Could it not be instead that happy individuals and families are the strange, quirky ones because they cannot fit comfortably into legal categories and vocabulary? Such people would not use such tools to reconstruct their relationships or resolve conflicts, if they left a documentary paper trail at all.
