Sometime between A.D. 145 and 147, Ptolemaios, son of Diodoros, sent a petition to Lucius Valerius Proculus, prefect of the province of Egypt (praefectus Aegypti), the highest magistrate in the land and a man appointed directly by Emperor Antoninus Pius. His complaint recounted a violent incident with a man named Ammonios, also named Kaboi. According to Ptolemaios, Ammo nios was sent to attack him by another man, Isidoros, son of Mareis. This Isido ros held a privileged position in the area, being one of the nautokolymbetai (“sailor-divers”)—apparently (since we only know the term from Ptolemaios’ complaint) a group of...

The Romans took over Egypt from the preceding Ptolemaic monarchy in 30 B.C., inheriting a developed and legally plural society with a strong bureaucratic infrastructure. They held Egypt as a province—or a group of provinces—until the Arab conquest in A.D. 640. The question that guides this chapter is, “What precisely does that mean, and what does the fact of empire contribute to a history of violence?” This question can be answered at several levels: culturally (by asking how Egypt fit within a Roman conceptual geography of the peoples that populated its empire), institutionally (by describing the governmental offices...

At the end of the previous chapter I raised the question of the links between violence and conceptual apparatuses that purport to measure violence—crime rates, for example. The question of what can be learned through the study of something like a “crime rate” leads in turn to another problem: for better or for worse (probably for worse), we inhabit a world that exhibits a strong tendency to criminalize things that are unpleasant, to make political issues into criminal issues, and to organize state resources around the policing and protection of citizens from these criminal acts. In other words, as...

In the course of a fight, aim counts. This is a purely practical matter, especially in cases where your opponent has a chance at hurting you, too. Luckily, there are certain parts of the human body that are tenderer than others. In the heat of combat it sometimes pays to aim directly at those parts. Eyes are good, as are noses, throats, and genitals. Fists are good implements because it is relatively straightforward to aim a hand; hands have the added advantage that they can subsequently be unclenched for pulling, scratching, and rip-ping; they can be withdrawn quickly to guard...

Writing a petition meant asking for something; as such, it was undoubtedly an experience fraught with tension. It is perhaps easy for us to forget this, living as we do in modern societies where the divisions between ruler and ruled are not so pronounced, and where a sense of rights has been so richly cultivated and care fully articulated that these rights can be taken for granted—so much so that they can be spoken of as “self-evident.” But it is worth remembering that every time an Egyptian petitioner sent off a request, an official was told that he needed,...

In previous chapters I sought to build models of violence from the individual level outward, asking how violent experiences were perceived, and how these experiences were translated into legally actionable issues. As such, it was salutary to treat individuals and their narratives as the core of the analysis. Such a method, however, overlooks what is almost certainly the key factor in an act (or complaint) of violence, and one that was hinted at in the previous chapter: violence and complaint are both about regulating the behavior of others and deciding the terms on which these relations will be carried forward....