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By Giovanni Ruffini

Imagine you find yourself thrown back in time 1500 years, to a small town in the middle of nowhere, on the edges of the Roman Empire. What would you expect to find? Most of us would look for the massive stone monuments, the aqueducts or temples or theaters, or maybe for the Roman legionaries, frozen in our minds the way they appear on the big screen. But in most places in antiquity, these things would be nowhere in sight. The vast majority of the citizens of the Roman Empire lived small, quiet lives of wood and mud brick, worlds apart from the generals and emperors in charge of the central state.

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If we want to learn about these people, we have to dig. We need archaeological excavations or blind luck to find the written records describing their lives. In one case, a hundred years ago, in southern Egypt, someone renovating his basement broke through the floor and found a subbasement with a large jar full of hundreds of papyri, documentary evidence suddenly drowning us in details about the lives of thousands of villagers from the sixth century CE. This village, Aphrodito, and these papyri give us the best glimpse at daily life anywhere in the ancient world.

Map showing the location of Aphrodito. Courtesy of Giovanni Ruffini.

On the one hand, the place seems like a mess. Petitions to the central authorities complain about assaults, home invasions, rape, murder. Dioskoros, one of the most important men in town, keeps a running record of everyone who steals from him, dozens of sheep and lambs, even a piece of cheese. The local shepherds wreak havoc everywhere they go, trampling crops and starting squabbles between Aphrodito and the village next door. Even the local priest at the town’s main church gets booed when he goes on stage.

Petition of the inhabitants of Aphrodito to Fl. Marianos, against the actions of Menas, pagarch of Antaiopolis, and his employees. P.Cair.Masp. 1 67002. ()

Settling a Dispute. P.Mich.Aphrod. (= SB XXII 15477) (l. 25-47) ()

On the other hand, if things were this bad for everyone all the time, society would have crumbled nearly at once. And yet, year after year, owners and tenants renew their leases, creditors and debtors sign loan agreements, men and women draft marriage contracts, and farmers take their crops to market without any indication that the end is near. All of these documents follow standard legal structures nearly identical to those followed throughout Egypt, and probably throughout the entire Roman Empire.

Which set of texts tells the true story, the visions of law or the visions of lawlessness? In truth, probably neither. Most things in our lives do not get written down at all. These villagers turned to writing only when they needed to safeguard their future or clean up damage from the past. The vast majority of their lives went by unrecorded, and invisible to us. We have to read between the lines to learn what motivated them, and to learn how they solved problems when things went wrong.

Take Aphrodito’s murder mystery as an example. When Maria appears before the judge around 540 CE, she knows who killed her husband. The village headmen “arrested my husband and put him in the watch-house… After taking wine to the watch-house, they drank with him,” beat him and killed him with their swords. They kill him for being an informer or denouncer. In short, they kill him for breaking their code of honor and trust.

Aphrodito’s cases of theft show the same pattern, just in a less violent way. Dioskoros’s animal thefts are the best example. His list of losses goes on line after line, recording who stole from him, how many animals they stole, and who informed on them. In several cases, the men recorded as informants in one entry appear as thieves in another, stealing from Dioskoros and informing on others who did so. The animals matter to Dioskoros, but the information matters more: it lets him judge who to trust and who to turn for help.

These are the crucial questions in Aphrodito. When Senouthes kidnaps Sophia, beats her, and kills her husband before handing her over to village officials, she struggles to get any official to pay attention to her story. The state does not seem to do her much good. Nikantinoos may have found himself in a similar situation, but with much less violent stakes. His relatives have sold family property illegally, ignoring the debt against it, and Phoibammon, Dioskoros’s relative by marriage, wants to get the property free from its burden. They could take the case to court. In fact, they get as far as the courthouse. But they sit outside of it instead, in arbitration, Nikantinoos agreeing to the mediation of “good friends.”

This is Aphrodito’s moral. It is good to have the state on your side, but good friends are better. In a face to face world, the emperor is far away, but your neighbors are all around you, divided into factions, and what matters is whose side you are on. Dioskoros tells us only one side of the story about life in his village. He complains about the faction of Herakleios, who destroys his property and gets his name put back on the tax rolls. He drafts vigorous petitions defending his village’s right to collect its own taxes. He travels all the way to Constantinople to make his case on these issues.

The Egyptian village of Kom Ishqaw (ancient Aphrodito.)  Photograph by Clement Kuehn. Used by permission.

And yet, there must have been another side to the story. Maybe Herakleios isn’t really Aphrodito’s bad guy. Maybe he has a better way to collect taxes, and thinks his party should be the one to do it. Maybe Aphrodito’s shepherds aren’t thieves, but make off with animals Dioskoros is holding hostage to get him to do what they want. Maybe Sophia’s husband and Maria’s husband were two of the worst people in town before they died. We’ll never know.

This is what makes studying history so interesting. We rarely get the whole picture. We try to find big-picture theories to explain the problems we see in the late Roman empire: class struggle; feudalism; demographic collapse; climate change. But these theories would have been meaningless to the people there at the time. For them, their lives are purely local, the Roman state and macro-economic factors barely visible in the distance. What matters much more to them is who they know, what they know, and who can help them get what they need.

Giovanni Ruffini is Professor of Classical Studies at Fairfield University.