Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt by Benjamin Kelly (review)

This study of petitions and litigation under the Roman Empire exhibits all the strengths that make papyrology, and juristic papyrology in particular, such a fascinating and frustrating field of study for scholars of both legal and social history. Kelly draws on a database of 568 petitions involving some form of dispute and 227 records of proceedings from 30 bc to ad 284 to regale the reader with vivid glimpses of everyday life and everyday quarrels in Roman Egypt, such as only documentary papyri can provide. We meet litigious priests, diligent Roman officials, wry tax collectors, and a variety of borrowers and lenders, buyers and sellers, landlords and tenants, victims and perpetrators.

Not all is what it seems in Roman Egypt, though, least of all in the petitions that have been recovered from its sands. Alongside the wonderful vividness of his examples, Kelly offers extensive methodological reflections on the value and limitations of petitions as historical evidence. The book is indeed as much about methodology as it is about the material. After introducing the reader to Roman Egypt, papyrological evidence, the study of dispute resolution, and, helpfully, “The Argument of this Book,” Kelly addresses the fundamental question behind all others in the book: Just what do petitions reliably tell us? Hopes of a window on the inner lives of petitioners are dashed: there is no control to distinguish the voice of the petitioner from bureaucratic convention. Moreover, rather than quantifiable information, we gain insight into the discourses of wrongdoing and justice in the petitions. We also learn much incidentally: reports of names, occupations, landholding, and past use of the legal systems in the documents are essentially accurate.

Turning to the legal context of the material, Kelly draws a paradoxical portrait of Roman provincial justice. The quality of its decisions appears to have been high. It is the quantity of decisions, though, that disappoints: the Roman legal system suffered a very high rate of “attrition,” i.e. the dropping of legal proceedings without obtaining a verdict. Kelly argues that Roman officials were essentially honest; the Roman system, though, was unduly complicated and poorly structured. The very officiousness of the Roman judges could be exploited for strategic purposes. Adjournments, for example, were often forthcoming, granted perhaps in good faith but to bad effect: Kelly cites (99, n.98) one case in which a man waited eight months for a hearing that was promptly adjourned! Roman justice was good, but difficult to obtain.

Kelly explores the background of petitioners and litigants before addressing broader sociological questions. Kelly first assesses the contribution of the legal system to “informal control” of the population by the Roman authorities. Clearly, the Roman courts could awe and terrify the provincials, whether as litigants or spectators, but the evidence that the legal system inspired loyalty is ambiguous. Between the lines of some petitions, one finds a view of the Roman government as concerned with little more than the timely exaction of taxes. With respect to positive, local social control, on the other hand, Kelly illustrates how petitioning and litigation reaffirmed social hierarchies, including gender roles, and encouraged group solidarity, especially within the nuclear family.

The final two chapters are closely related. Chapter 7 is dedicated to dispute resolution “in the shadow of the law.” This chapter injects a healthy measure of reality back into the study of private dispute resolution. First of all, private dispute resolution is not inherently good and innocent as opposed to the law of the ruling power (a false dichotomy aptly called “law and love”). For example, in one amusing example (250-252), the creditor Tryphon asks his buddy “Big Ammonas” to intimidate a debtor into paying him back—all through private channels. There also is no clear progression from less to more formal forms of dispute resolution, with litigation only in the last resort. More often, adversaries engage in a variety of methods in no fixed order...