Violence In Roman Egypt

What can we learn about the world of an ancient empire from the ways that people complain when they feel that they have been violated? What role did law play in people's lives? And what did they expect their government to do for them when they felt harmed and helpless? If ancient historians have frequently written about nonelite people as if they were undifferentiated and interchangeable, Ari Z. Bryen counters by drawing on one of our few sources of personal narratives from the Roman world: over a hundred papyrus petitions, submitted to local and imperial officials, in which individuals from the Egyptian countryside sought redress for acts of violence committed against them. By assembling these long-neglected materials (also translated as an appendix to the book) and putting them in conversation with contemporary perspectives from legal anthropology and social theory, Bryen shows how legal stories were used to work out relations of deference within local communities. Rather than a simple force of imperial power, an open legal system allowed petitioners to define their relationships with their local adversaries while contributing to the body of rules and expectations by which they would live in the future. In so doing, these Egyptian petitioners contributed to the creation of Roman imperial order more generally.

This book draws together a wide range of evidence across disciplines to show how the ordinary people of Roman Egypt experienced and enacted change.

The province of Egypt provides unique archaeological and documentary evidence for the study of the Roman army. In this fascinating social history Richard Alston examines the economic, cultural, social and legal aspects of a military career, illuminating the life and role of the individual soldier in the army. Soldier and Society in Roman Eygpt provides a complete reassessment of the impact of the Roman army on local societies, and convincingly challenges the orthodox picture. The soldiers are seen not as an isolated elite living in fear of the local populations, but as relatively well-integrated into local communities. The unsuspected scale of the army's involvement in these communities offers a new insight into both Roman rule in Egypt and Roman imperialism more generally.

Note 23 on page 252 refers to a Brooklyn papyrus.

This second collection by Roger Bagnall brings together a further two dozen of his studies, this time covering Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt, published over the last thirty years. Many of the articles deal with issues of historical and papyrological method: the restoration of papyrus texts, the direction of archaeological work in Egypt, economic models for Roman Egypt, the usefulness of postcolonial theory, and approaches to the defective literary tradition for the Library of Alexandria. Others concentrate on particular bodies of evidence, ranging from inscriptions to ascetic literature, from registers to women's letters.

Households in Context shifts the focus from monumental temples, tombs, and elite material and visual culture to households and domestic life to provide a crucial new perspective on everyday dwelling practices and the interactions of families and individuals with larger social and cultural structures. A focus on households reveals the power of the everyday: the critical role of quotidian experiences, objects, and images in creating the worlds of the people who live with them. The contributors to this book share contemporary research on houses and households in both Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt to reshape the ways we think about ancient people's lived experiences of family, community, and society. Households in Context places the archaeology and history of Greco-Roman Egypt in dialogue with research on dwelling, daily practice, and materiality to reveal how ancient households functioned as laboratories for social, political, economic, and religious change. Contributors: Youssri Abdelwahed, Richard Alston, Anna Lucille Boozer, Paola Davoli, David Frankfurter, Jennifer Gates-Foster, Melanie Godsey, Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, Sabine R. Huebner, Gregory Marouard, Miriam Müller, Lisa Nevett, Bérangère Redon, Bethany Simpson, Ross I. Thomas, Dorothy J. Thompson

Acts of the Apostles presents Roman officials and militarized police criminalizing, prosecuting, and incarcerating a movement of Jesus followers. This book brings Acts into conversation with ancient and modern understandings of crime by tending to laws and by exploring how different writers portray the criminalized.

If poor individuals have always been with us, societies have not always seen the poor as a distinct social group. But within the Roman world, from at least the Late Republic onwards, the poor were an important force in social and political life and how to treat the poor was a topic of philosophical as well as political discussion. This book explains what poverty meant in antiquity, and why the poor came to be an important group in the Roman world, and it explores the issues which poverty and the poor raised for Roman society and for Roman writers. In essays which range widely in space and time across the whole Roman Empire, the contributors address both the reality and the representation of poverty, and examine the impact which Christianity had upon attitudes towards and treatment of the poor.