Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt

Abstract

This book examines the contribution that petitioning and litigation made to the maintenance of the social order in Roman Egypt (30 BC-AD 284). It does this by exploiting the many hundreds of legal documents surviving on papyrus, especially petitions, reports of court proceedings, and letters. The book focuses partly on how the legal system achieved its formal goals (that is, the resolution of disputes through judgments). But it also looks in detail at the contribution made by petitioning and litigation to informal methods of social control, with particular emphasis on the roles that these processes played in the transmission of political ideologies, the maintenance of group solidarity, and the fostering of 'private' mechanisms of dispute resolution. The book argues that although the legal system was less than successful when judged by its formal aims, it did have a real social impact by indirectly contributing to some of the informal mechanisms that ensured order. However, the book also argues that one can see petitioning and litigation being abused sometimes for the pursuit of hatreds, feuds, and vengeance. It must be recognized, therefore, that the social impacts of petitioning and litigation were multifaceted, and in some senses even contradictory.

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