Violence in Roman Egypt : a study in legal interpretation
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Violence in Roman Egypt : a study in legal interpretation
(Empire and after / Clifford Ando, series editor)
University of Pennsylvania Press, c2013
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [327]-344) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life
PART I. THE TEXTURE OF THE PROBLEM
Chapter 1. Ptolemaios Complains
Chapter 2. Violent Egypt
Chapter 3. Violence, Modern and Ancient
PART II. FROM THE LANGUAGE OF PAIN TO THE LANGUAGE OF LAW
Chapter 4. Narrating Injury
Chapter 5. The Work of Law
Chapter 6. Fission and Fusion
Conclusion: Nomos and Its Narratives
Appendix A: The Papyrus on the Page
Appendix B: Translations of Petitions Concerning Violence
List of Papyri in Checklist Order
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
by "Nielsen BookData"