The Councillor and the Clerk: Class and Culture on a Roman Frontier

we know the names of a lot of ordinary individuals who lived in the ancient Mediterranean world, probably well over a million of them.¹ Most are literally ghosts: people whose gravestones have survived and of whom we usually know only the name, where they lived, some idea (however approximate) of when they died, and perhaps a few details like age at death and the names of a relative or two. From Egypt we have, according to the Leuven website Trismegistos, the names of over 370,000 individuals: taxpayers in registers and receipts, involuntary workers cleaning canals, lessees of land, relatives mentioned in private letters, and the like. Most of these people are known from only one tax or rent payment or some similar occasion; they may just figure on a list. We are somewhat better off with what papyrologists conventionally call "archives"—masses of texts related to a single person, family, or office.² It is largely from such archives that we can get beyond the curtain of obscurity that separates us from the personalities of the individuals known from the papyri.

But even with such archives we face daunting obstacles to understanding a human personality embedded in the ink on papyrus, tablet, or potsherd. Our difficulties go to the essence of why most personal and family archives existed, which was the protection of rights to personal status and property.³ People collected documents to prove that they owned property, that they were free rather than slave, that they had paid their taxes or discharged a public duty, that a judge had ruled in their favor in a dispute. These documents too are external and transactional. For the most part they tell us nothing about how individuals felt, how they tried to represent themselves to those around them, how others perceived them. Some letters and petitions are more subjective, but the letters are mostly conventional requests for goods or wishes for health, and the petitions are loaded with rhetoric out of handbooks.⁴

Sometimes, with patience and persistence, we can get around all these limitations to a modest extent. I shall explore two cases in which we can, I think, get some glimpses of the personalities and specific characteristics of individuals despite all obstacles. One of them is a man named Serenos, whom we can understand to some degree by combining archaeology and the documents. The other is someone whose name we do not know, whom we can try to tease out only from his writing. Taken together, these two men can help us understand the possibilities and limits of the exploration of those ancient personalities who did not, unlike a literary figure of the stature of Cicero, leave behind hundreds of informative and distinctive letters.

Serenos has gradually emerged over the past dozen years during the excavation and study of a house located at an archaeological site called Amheida, in the Dakhla Oasis of Egypt.⁵ The town was called Trimithis in the Roman period, and it was the center of the western part of the oasis; in the fourth century

Figure 1.

House of Serenos, view from north. (Photo: Excavations at Amheida)

there was a Roman garrison stationed a few kilometers away.⁶ The house that we have come to call the house of Serenos (Fig. 1) was first discovered during the survey of the area by the Dakhleh Oasis Project in 1979.⁷ Pulling back the sand, they found a corner of a room painted with scenes from Homer, and it was with that room that we began our systematic, stratigraphic excavation in 2004. Along the east wall, above a high dado painted to resemble polychrome stonework, we find a representation of the Homeric scene (from Odyssey 8) in which Ares and Aphrodite are caught in adultery and witnessed by the gods (Fig. 2). At the left of that scene is a personification of the City, Polis (Fig. 3), looking on. Trimithis had been a village as late as the second century, but by the fourth century it...