Violence, Law, and Legal Institutions
in Late Antique Egypt

Ari Z. Bryen (University of Chicago)

This paper examines the nature of the individual’s relationship to the law and legal institutions of Late Antique Egypt in the context of petitioning for redress after a violent assault. It deals specifically with petitions complaining of violence (hybris), and argues that the average person in Roman Egypt perceived a close relationship with his or her legal institutions, especially when confronted with violent behavior.

The current scholarly consensus on the nature of violent encounters in the ancient world emphasizes the preference for local mediation and arbitration in dispute settlement and the disputing process. This in turn has been engendered by the belief that the legal institutions of Egypt failed to function or at the very least declined, especially in Late Antiquity, creating a distance between the subject and the government, and thus the preference that the disputing process remain local. On this view, petitions to high authorities should be taken as aberrant – failures of local institutions to deal with a particular issue. This paper, however, takes as its starting point the petitions to authorities from the third and fourth centuries, and argues that there are a number of patterns evident in these documents that challenge this idea, at least in the context of dealing with violence against oneself and one’s family. Thus, petitions dealing with hybris tend to come within a day or two after the attack, even when the petitioner concedes that the violent attack itself comes in the context of a larger dispute (ie, P.Cair.Isid. 63). Likewise, petitions dealing with hybris rarely ask the authorities for some sort of tangible restitution. Rather, they focus on having the opportunity to have the case heard in the presence of the legal authorities themselves. This of course is a high-risk strategy that could potentially result in an embarrassing situation for the citizen prosecutor (ie, P.Amh. II 66), but is indicative nonetheless of the degree of trust and status that was placed on the judgment of the state.

This paper further argues that modern studies of “crime” or “dispute” in an Egyptian context must take into account that there is a fundamental difference between violent and non-violent dispute. While it is certainly possible that there was a preference for recourse to local institutions, mediation, and arbitration in non-violent disputes, the only socially acceptable avenue for dealing with violent behavior was to appeal to legal institutions. Thus, rather than seeing the corpus of petitions concerning violence as evidence of lawlessness in Egyptian society or a failure of local institutions to address conflict, these documents should be understood as instances of citizen participation and trust in legal institutions.