Ethnic Violence in Roman Alexandria: A Comparative Approach*

The aim of this article is to offer a new approach to the study of the riots in Alexandria in 38 ce. This riot is one of the better attested outbreaks of mass urban violence from antiquity. Yet, in spite of the weight of scholarship, the rioting remains a puzzle. The article argues that rather than seeing the riots as a function of deep-seated hostility between Greek and Jewish communities or as a dispute over citizenship rights, we need to see the riot as embedded within the urban sociology of Alexandria. A close reading of the literary accounts points to the importance of associations in the organisation of the riots. The article argues that the associations were integrated with the Alexandrian political elite through large social networks, to which the Jews had limited access. Alexandrian politics centred on competing networks. These networks allowed a community of interest to develop between elites and lower class members of the network. In explaining how that competition might have encouraged extreme violence, the article deploys a range of comparative examples concerning the operation of such networks and extreme civil violence. In a similar fashion to several of the referenced cases, I argue that the Alexandrian violence resulted from a political crisis which allowed both elite and street-level political agents to mobilise violent support in pursuance of their individual interests. The result was to polarise the city and set the conditions for the subsequent decades of violence.