Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation (Empire and After)
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: Jul 19, 2013
Number of pages: 376
ISBN-13: 9780812245080
Description: "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."--Publisher.