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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
13 statements specify the occupations of the guilty parties. Among these,
shepherds ( pastores/poimenai), mentioned nine times, form the largest group.
Throughout the Roman Empire, and also particularly in Egypt, shepherds
were notorious as ne’er-do-wells, implicated in both petty and serious crime.
The Bukoloi, bandit shepherds of the marshes of the Nile delta, provided
Heliodorus’ Aethiopica with the setting for many a vivid incident; 118 and,
under Marcus Aurelius, shepherds also find mention in historical works in
connection with an uprising, examined further below. 119 The remaining
references to the occupations of likely perpetrators name a builder, a gatekeeper
of the village of Euhemeria and two brewers. The victims display a
similar cross-section of mainly rural callings, and so belong, it should again
be stressed, to the same social level as those accused.
The fact that women took part in only four of the crimes registered by the
depositions speaks for itself. Perhaps the most spectacular case in this respect
(no. 124) took place in the public baths at Euhemeria. It was there that
Aplounos, wife of a certain Hippalos, and her mother, Thermis, were violently
assaulted by two women and two men, all named. Battered by blows all over
their bodies, and robbed, amongst other things, of their earrings and a
necklace, the two ladies eventually had to seek refuge under a bed. Bodily
harm as an accompaniment to the crimes recorded occurs in only six
cases, but it is striking that all of these took place in the period 37–40 bc
Whatever the significance of the fact that violence against the person is
confined more or less to the reign of Caligula, injuries were usually sustained
not as part of the committing of the crime, but only when a victim resorted
to self-help by confronting a suspect. Let us take, for example, the deposition
of the slave, Ision (no. 144).
On the second day of this month of Pauni, in the second year of the
reign of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, I came to Euhemeria
in the district of Themistes on account of unfinished business. I
started a conversation with Onnophris, son of Silbon, an inhabitant
of the village, about a charge that I had brought against him.
Thereupon he began a violent and disgraceful assault on me, and
mishandled me shamefully. In the course of the struggle I lost a
writing desk and 60 silver drachmas. In addition, he then had the
effrontery to bring baseless charges against me.
Apart from the fact that this slave could move relatively freely in society,
which was not uncommon in servile life in Roman Egypt, 120 this case draws
our attention to the remarkable circumstance that a slave might, independently
of his master, be in direct contact with the criminal authorities and
seek justice in law. As far as one can judge from the usual criteria for unfree
status (i.e., specific identification as slaves, lack of a patronym), slaves are not
mentioned anywhere else in the police records from Euhemeria, either as
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