The Romans, in principle, allowed most provincials to follow their own local laws and customs; Roman law was applied only to Roman citizens. Thus the citizens of Alexandria and the other Greek cities in Egypt (Ptolemais, Naukratis, and after ad 130, Antinoopolis) each had their own civic laws, while the Aigyptioi, who included the Hellenized elites of the metropoleis, were subject to the ‘‘laws of the Egyptians.’’ This term, however, did not mean Egyptian as opposed to Greek law, but rather the entire legal tradition of the Ptolemaic chora, combining (or juxtaposing) both Egyptian and Greek elements, with the latter arguably predominating (Meleze-Modrzejewski 1988). The old Ptolemaic courts in the chora, of the Greekspeaking chrematistai and the Egyptian-speaking laokritai, both disappear under Roman rule; justice was provided by Roman officials (using Greek language; translators assisted Egyptian-speakers, e. g. P. Oxy. II 237, P. Col. VII 175).
However, legal documents continued to be written in Demotic for almost a century after the Roman takeover, and their eventual demise was not due to any deliberate Roman policy to suppress them, but was a by-product of the Roman requirement for all contracts, including those in Greek, to be authenticated by the contracting parties writing a subscription in Greek (or having a ‘‘subscriber’’ do so on their behalf, if they were illiterate in Greek) rather than by witnesses. This requirement - which incidentally illustrates how Rome’s concern for transparency introduced changes to local law - tipped the balance of convenience and practicality in favor of having the entire contract in Greek (Muhs 2005, contra Lewis 1993). This marks the end of Egyptian law as a distinct tradition, but Egyptian elements continue to be represented in the Greek documentation, most clearly in the area of marriage and inheritance, especially the type of marriage document termed syngraphe trophitis (‘‘alimentary contract,’’ Egyptian sh n saih; Pestman 1961: 37-50). Roman officials did their best to apply the indigenous law in their courts, taking advice from experts, as exemplified by a series of extracts of legal judgements collected on a single papyrus concerning the rights of Egyptian testators, presumably the private notes of a lawyer for his own use when acting as an advocate or advising the Prefect or epistrategos (P. Oxy. XLII 3015, cf. XXXVI 2757). One can see that such a person would also have a more than antiquarian interest in the Greek translation of the Demotic Legal
Manual (P. Mattha; cf. Ch. 12 above), of which a partial copy survives from Oxyrhynchos from the later second century ad (P. Oxy. XLVI 3285).
Roman judges were not, however, bound to follow the advice of the legal experts, as emerges from the famous ‘‘petition of Dionysia.’’ This quotes a lengthy series of judgements where various Roman officials, in face of explicit evidence that ‘‘Egyptian’’ law (here in reality Greek in origin) gave fathers the right to annul a daughter’s marriage, declined to apply a law which they considered inhumane, instead allowing the daughter to choose whether to stay with her husband: ‘‘Severus and Heliodorus, advocates, replied that the former Prefect Titianus heard a similar plea advanced by Egyptian persons, and that his judgement accorded not with the inhumanity of the law but with the choice of the daughter, whether she wished to remain with her husband’’ (P. Oxy. II 237 col. vii 33-5). This shows another way in which Roman legal norms progressively penetrated the province, as such judgements become precedents in future legal cases (though precedents, too, were not binding).
The only regular courts in the chora were those held by the Prefect at his annual conventus, and by the epistrategoi on a more permanent basis. Provincials also sometimes travelled to Alexandria for cases, but, since this might involve prolonged absence from home, it was inconvenient and expensive (on the physical locations where courts were held, see Capponi, forthcoming). In practice, the strategos provided the primary source of legal arbitration for most provincials, although he could deal only with more routine cases. Cases initially presented to a higher official might be referred back to him, and the strategos would also normally be the person responsible for implementing the decisions of higher authorities (Anagnostou-Canas 1991; Lewis 2000). Centurions and other military officers were also regularly approached to adjudicate disputes, even though they possessed no formal judicial authority (nor, one assumes, any juridical expertise), but they did patently have the power to enforce their decisions, and, since military units were widely dispersed throughout the chora, they were the most readily accessible representatives of the Roman state in the remoter villages, such as those of the Fayum which provide most of our examples (Whitehorne 2004).
No procedural distinction was drawn between civil and criminal law, and anyone reading the papyri will notice how few texts relate to criminal cases (Anagnostou-Canas 1991 devotes a mere sixteen pages to criminal justice; see also Anagnostou-Canas 2000). Indeed, it has been argued that the very terms ‘‘criminal’’ and ‘‘penal’’ are anachronistic and inappropriate to Roman Egypt; the Egyptians did not differentiate what we call criminal action from other kinds of dispute, which they settled, if at all possible, by local, informal arbitration, involving the state only as a last resort (Bagnall 1989: 210-11; Hobson 1993). This view undoubtedly has some validity, but we must also bear in mind that the quantity of surviving documentation is a very unsure guide to the original importance of any ancient procedure and is heavily biased towards the margins of Egypt (the papyri include the papers of lower officials, but not Prefects or even epistrategoi). There is sufficient evidence for the official pursuit and punishment of crime to show that these duties were far from unimportant but generated much less local paperwork than, say, the routine distribution of seed to farmers; it is indicative that the commonest texts relating to criminals are ‘‘orders for arrest’’ in the form of brief notes usually sent by the strategos to the village police (Gagos and Sijpesteijn 1996). The idea of protecting the human rights of criminals, particularly lower-class ones, with meticulous paperwork would have seemed ludicrous to a Roman administrator; the purpose of archives was to protect the interests of the state and its local allies, the propertied class.
The acquisition of Roman citizenship by provincials, although a progressively more common occurrence through military service or individual grant, produced all kinds of legal problems and conflicts. For soldiers and their families the rules were clear but could still have undesirable personal consequences. For instance, the veteran Gaius Longinus Kastor, who left his property by will to his two freedwomen and their offspring, was liable to the five per cent inheritance tax because they were technically not his legal kin, although very probably the offspring were in fact his own children; Kastor could not legitimize his union with both women without infringing the law against bigamy and presumably could not marry one without causing offence to the other! (BGU I 326, translated and discussed in Rowlandson 1998: 188-90). More generally, the description of persons as apator (‘‘fatherless’’) in the papyri usually does not mean that their paternity was literally unknown, but that their parents’ relationship was not legally recognized because it infringed the rules on status or marriage (Youtie 1975). Thus Sokrates, the well-educated tax collector from Karanis mentioned previously, was almost certainly the father of twins born to his neighbor Sempronia Gemella, a Roman citizen, and registered by her in the proper Roman manner, but the twins’ own status as Roman citizens would have been jeopardized had she recognized Sokrates, an Egyptian, as their father, since the offspring of mixed marriages followed the father’s status (P. Mich. III 169; see Rowlandson 1998: 91).
The family papers of Marcus Lucretius Diogenes, born in 186 (P. Diog.) show less problematic consequences of Roman law for a provincial family. Their Roman citizenship derived from an ancestor’s service in the auxiliary cavalry, and recent generations also held citizenship of Antinoopolis. All the family’s business transactions (receipts, leases etc) were conducted in Greek, and followed local law and notarial practice. The only two Latin documents in the archive are those required to conform to Roman law: a declaration of birth ( testatio), and the will of Diogenes’ brother-in-law (also a Roman and Antinoite citizen, but he signed in Greek). The original Roman will would have been written on waxed tablets; our text is a copy on papyrus recording the opening and reading of the will.
World History
