Violence in Roman Egypt

198 PHOENIX Caldwell’s Epilogue reiterates that, although the childhoods of daughters and sons were widely divergent, Roman parents, authors, doctors, and others spent considerable thought and ink about what was the proper gender role for elite girls and how these girls should be educated and trained for their adult roles. With its judicious treatment of a variety of sources (some of which, such as the controversiae, are not often examined and discussed), this book is essential for anyone interested in what life could be like for an elite Roman girl. I wish Caldwell had analyzed more extensively and provided images of the depictions of girls on tombstones and in public reliefs. Her analysis would be enhanced by more attention to the status of the girls she mentions in the text and a discussion of whether we can apply the elite picture of Roman girlhood to girls of lower social status and living in different parts of the empire. For example, Aelia Procula (21–22, 124), named on a funerary altar, was the daughter of an imperial freedman, and Clodia Anthianilla (124), honored by the decuriones of Brundisium with a public inscription and statue “in a very frequented public space” (frequentissimo loco publice, AE 1910, 203), was the granddaughter of a patronus municipii. Did brides of the fourth century c.e. read Ausonius’ Cento? Or should we understand it as addressed primarily to male readership and something that informed the wedding-night expectations of the groom; were young girls strongly advised, no matter how eager they might have been for sexual initiation, to show not only reluctance, but even terror? Provoking reflection and scholarly imagination, Caldwell’s book will, I expect, help shape further investigation into the Roman fashioning of femininity. University of South Dakota Judith L. Sebesta Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation. By Ari Z. Bryen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (Empire and After). 2013. Pp. viii, 363. In the last few years, two major contributions to the socio-legal history of Roman Egypt (as distinct from the technical study of Graeco-Roman law in Egypt) have appeared : Petitions, Litigation, and SocialControl in RomanEgypt by Benjamin Kelly (Oxford 2011), and Bryen’s monograph under review. In many respects, they are complementary: while Kelly addresses the operation of the Roman legal system in the province and its practical use in dispute resolution, Bryen’s work, a study of narrative complaints concerning violence, attempts to provide a “‘sympathetic’ reading” (4) of the ways in which non-elite and sub-elite litigants in Roman Egypt used law to make sense of their social surroundings. Bryen has no real predecessors in his endeavour to write a “largely subjective , perception-based history” (23) of petitions apart from the Soviet scholar Arkady Kovelman, whose seminal study (Ritorika v teni piramid [Moscow 1988] 30–61) remains largely unknown in the West. Kovelman in any case attacks the problem from a slightly different angle, concentrating his attention on the moral reinterpretation of social categories . After a brief methodological introduction, Part I, “The Texture of the Problem” (11–85), explores methodological issues further. Bryen opens his account engagingly with a chapter on a complaint by Ptolemaios, son of Diodoros, a particularly litigious— and well-attested—landholder from the Arsinoite nome (P.Mich. III 174, a.d. 145–147), addressing the different types of questions that could be asked on its basis. This is BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 199 followed by two chapters situating his research against two different frameworks: that of Roman elite thought and the institutional treatment of Egypt in the high imperial period, and that of modern perceptions, conceptualisations, and measurements of violence. The former is perhaps the least successful one in the monograph; it is not clear to me that an overarching narrative of the “Roman” perception of Egypt as a particularly violent place can be construed (and criticised) on the basis of Tac. Hist. 1.11, Juvenal’s Fifteenth Satire, references to Delta bandits in the second-century Greek novels, and a couple of passages in the Historia Augusta (Quadr. Tyr. 7.4–8; cf. Tyr. Trig. 22.1–2, not discussed by Bryen). Even in the HA itself these

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