P. GISS. 40 AS POLICY

μεθ' ετερα∙ επrγεrνωσκεσθαr γ⅛ρ εiς τους λινουφ[ο]υς οi ⅛ληθrνοr Αiγυπτrοr δυνανται ευμαρως φωνη η aλλων [αυτ]οr εχειν oψεrς τε καr σχημα. ετι τε καr ζω[η] δεικνυει εναντrα ηθη ⅛πd ⅛ναστροφης [πο]λεrτrκης εiναr ⅛γροrκους Αiγθπτrους.

Further on: The real Egyptians can be easily recognized among the linen-weavers by their speech, or because they have different looks and characteristics. Moreover, the fact that their daily customs are different from civilized behavior (αναστροφης [πο]λειτικης) proves that they are rustic Egyptians. (ii.27-30)

The Egyptians who are subject to expulsion, in other words, are not only mapped as linguistically and even phenotypically different from those who permitted to reside in the city, but whereas those dwelling in cities possess the institutions of a city (αναστροφης [πο]λειτικης), those inhabiting the countryside possess merely “cus­toms” (ηθη) - sets of long ingrained preferences that exist subordinate to legal/po- litical orders properly constituted, and which are permitted to persist only at the discretion of the latter.^[62]

Thus, if we are to understand what the grant of citizenship might have meant on the ground, this series of edicts provides a rich package of associations. Politeia/ civitas,/citizenship in the first edict is certainly a form of “membership,” but it’s a very specific form indeed. Notionally, it is membership in the entire Roman oik- oumene, but it is nevertheless a strikingly place-dependant form of membership. In both the amnesty decree and the expulsion order, but I think also in the first edict was well, there lurks the idea that there is a natural place where people belong; in the process of bringing order to the world as a whole, Caracalla seeks to re-place such inappropriately located members in their correct places in the landscape. Thus the exiled nobles are to return to their lands, the peasants to theirs. The proper dis­tribution of peoples is, moreover, racialized: reading these edicts together, we might conclude that the people who are to be restored in the amnesty decree are especially to be restored to cities: they are to recover their politikas timas - their honorary positions in city governments - subject, of course, to a verification of their property. In addition to positing a world of people being properly located, Caracalla’s edicts, on this reading, describe a world where the location of politics and the location of production are, ideally, sharply differentiated, with the countryside and its inhabit­ants imagined to be different in customs, language, and character from those who are to be replaced in towns and cities.^[63] These country folk are allowed to make religious processions to the city, are allowed to be awed by the city, and are allowed to treat the city as a place to settle their local problems (that is, they are allowed to surrender to it their abilities to autonomously regulate their communities), but they’re not members of these cities, they’re subjects. In other words, the distinction that animates these edicts is not any longer between citizen and alien, but between citizen and peasant. The message that these edicts send can thus be seen as a precur­sor to the Diocletianic reorganization of the urban-rural relationship through the taxation system at the end of the third century, and the first step in the empeasant- ment of the towns that characterizes the late antique landscape.^[64]

Caracalla’s vision of the well-ordered world, then, is hardly utopian in the sense that it envisions the obliteration of local differences in favor of a newly renewed community of people who are the same or equal. To appropriate the distinction of Jonathan Z. Smith, it is more a “locative” vision of the world: a world with a place for everyone and everyone in his place. To the extent that these edicts imagine movement from place to place, it is not a vision of free and uninhibited movement across a multicultural world without borders; it is movement along well-established

processional routes, movement that is coordinated for the purposes of worship and hierarchy: movement from the towns to the cities for the purpose of sacrifice and to be awed by spectacle; movement to pay taxes and adjudicate disputes, across a tes­sellated patchwork of territories, each with an urban center that is itself a miniature Rome. Such was the emperor’s charis.

3. P. GISS. 40 AS ARTIFACT

Just because it is possible to read these edicts as an attempt to impose order and uniformity upon the world does not mean they did. Our default assumption should not be that people will move across a landscape, or begin to consider themselves as urban or rural, cultivated or empeasanted, merely because the emperor told them to do so or be so. But it is important to understand why this was not the case. It was not for lack of interest on the part of the population of the empire in the fact that they had been newly granted citizenship: the profusion of name changes in the wake of the Constitutio clearly indicates the opposite. Nor was it because the population of the empire was uninterested in the substantive rules of law: the post-212 spike in petitions by women asking to act independently according to Roman rules seems to indicate the opposite here as well.^[65] Nor finally was it because the state was incapa­ble of or disinterested in enforcing its will and its pronouncements. It was rather, I would suggest, because the Constitutio Antoniniana was not imposed on a blank slate: from the late first and early second centuries subject populations had been developing a robust and flexible way of thinking about the nature of government’s substantive legal pronouncements; they had been cultivating a style of legal herme­neutics that ran counter to the intentions of the state; and they had learned a package of rhetorical resources for turning these local understandings into claims on the state itself.^[66]

This, then, is the second way in which I want to read this papyrus: as an artifact that encodes an understanding of law that runs counter to the state ideology. Figur­ing out this system of encoding can give us insight into the ways in which the Con­stitutio was processed on the ground - into how the population attempted to make sense of such a radical proposal. Whereas in the previous section I started from the substantive claims of the three edicts in P. Giss. I 40, in this section I want to focus instead on the form this papyrus takes, and on some of the features of its compila­tion. I would suggest that these legal forms can be “read” to tell us a lot about the ways in which the Constitutio was understood, and therefore what the grant of 212 might have meant - or not meant - on the ground.

The most important feature of P.Giss. I 40 is that, while it preserves official information, it is not an official document - that is, it is not a certified copy of the emperor’s edicts. A certified copy of an edict would have indicated that it was cop­ied and checked, usually from an official source, and that it had been witnessed. In the case of imperial edicts, official copies usually are preceded by an official letter of the prefect instructing that the edicts be posted in public.^[67] P.Giss. 40, by con­trast, is a private collection of imperial pronouncements. It provides evidence that someone collected these three edicts and had them copied onto a single papyrus.^[68] We do not, and cannot, know these reasons for copying these edicts. What we can say, however, is that the person who compiled them was participating in what was already by that time a long-standing tradition of interacting with imperial law. The practice of gathering together edicts and using them to support claims in court be­gins late in the first century and continues into the second and third. This has been dealt with elsewhere.^[69] What is important in this context is that the compilation of edicts is a way in which provincials re-appropriated official texts and pronounce­ments in order to procure for themselves a right. In other words, one thing that P.Giss. 40 is telling us is that, at least so far as the level of legal forms goes, this looks exactly like other attempts to use the language of law to assert a right.^[70]

This is significant, for several reasons. First, it reminds us that, in the country­side of Roman Egypt at least, a robust system for processing the text of imperial dictates and turning them into claims of right preceded the Constitutio. There is no reason to think that such a system - and the advantages it was perceived to hold - vanished in 212 with the grant of citizenship; and what is more, the form of P.Giss. 40 suggests that even an imperial pronouncement about the most significant catego­ries of legal belonging was capable of being encompassed within this local system of rights claims. Second, there is some tantalizing evidence that, in the course of this process, subtle changes were made to the content of the edicts themselves to get them to fit within the world of local interpretations. This is so in two senses.

First, it is in the nature of private copying of things that small changes can, on occasion, be snuck into the official text to make them make the point that a peti­tioner wants them to make. In the edict as preserved on P.Giss. 40, Caracalla de­clares:

καr εr φανερ6ν εστιν, πως πληρη την χaρrτa μου παρενεθηκα, oμως rνα μη τις στεν6τερον παρερμηνευση την χaρrτa μου εκ των pη[μa]των το[υ] προτερου διαraγματος, εν ω ουτως ⅛πεκρrν[a]μηv ⅛ποστρεφετωσαν πaντες εiς τ⅛ς πατρrδας τ⅛ς iδrας â€?

And if it is clear to what extent I have fulfilled my promise (charis) completely, nevertheless let no one misinterpret in too narrow a fashion the favor I showed in the text of my earlier edict, in which I judged: “Let all people return to their own homeland.” (ii.6-9)

It is one of the most charming ironies that in this section of Caracalla’s declaration, where the emperor expresses most emphatically that he and he alone is to have in­terpretive control over his own words, we have a different copy of the same edict. In P.Oxy. XXXVI 2755 someone has recopied the text found in P. Giss. I 40.ii.1-15, but made a correction, crossing out “too narrow a fashion” (μη [[τις στενoτερον]]) and adding, in supralinear text, “too hostile a fashion” (μη ∖τε πονηρoτερ/). To be certain, this is a subtle change, but one that may nevertheless be of significance. It is not pushing too far, I hope, to suggest that an interpretation of the amnesty edict that is “overly narrow” is precisely the kind of interpretation that might be made by a state official in deciding that in case X or Y the emperor’s amnesty did not apply, whereas an interpretation that is “overly hostile” is the kind of interpretation char­acteristic of a local enemy who, seeing someone return to a city, might use to file a charge. The compiler of P. Giss. 40 chose to stick with an “overly narrow” interpre­tation. If an “overly narrow” interpretation is the kind that might guide the interac­tions between state and subject, this may be important in light of an additional in­sight that this papyrus might provide into local understandings of the nature of legal language.

It is clear that the third edict has been excerpted from a longer edict. There is no way to know whether the first or second edicts have been excerpted as well. But the fact of excerpting is interesting, and gives some insight into the ways in which im­perial pronouncements were processed at the local level. The indication that the edict has been excerpted comes in ii.27: “meth’hetera, the emperors says...” This “meth hetera'' (or met ’ alla) is an important legal technology, and one whose history we can trace philologically. This technique of abbreviation begins to appear in Egypt starting in the late first century, and disappears in the early fourth century.^[71] It is only rarely used in the way that it is used in P.Giss. 40, as a way of shortening an imperial constitution.^[72] It appears exclusively in legal documents, in two main capacities: first, in reports of proceedings and extracts from official commentarii; second, in cases in which someone makes an excerpt from an official source (such as a census declaration or an epikrisis record) attesting to an individual’s personal status.^[73] Perhaps most importantly, in 13 out of 72 extant examples it appears in copies of the epikriseis of retired veterans. An example, from the archive Marcus Lucretius Diogenes, will suffice (P.Diog. 5, post AD 138):

[εκ τ6μου επικρrσεω]ν Φλαουrου Τιτιανου γενομενου ηγεμ6νος [ου παρεπιγραφη∙ επικ] ρrσεις Φλαουrου Τιτιανου γενομενου ηγεμ6νος [⅛πo -ca.?- εως ca.?]. ς του ιζ (ετους) θεου Aδριανου διa Aντωνrου 'Pου[- ca.12 - μεθ^, ετε]ρα, σελ(rδων) ιγ. Μaρκος Λουκρητιος Κλημης [βουλ6μενος παρεπιδημεr]νπρδς καιρδν νομω Aρσινοεrτη, ετων, [καr τεκνα Oκτaουιος, ετ]ων, Λουκρητιος, ετων, Σερηνος, ετων, επεδει[ξεν o Κλημης δελτον χαλ]κην ⅛σφρaγισμα στη[λ] ης χαλκης ⅛να[κειμενης εν 'Pωμη δι^, η]ς εδηλο[υ]το στρατευσdμενον [αυ]τδν καr εν[τrμως aπολελυσθαι πε]ριε[χουσ]αν ουτως∙

From the roll of epikriseis of the former prefect Flavius Titianus, with the title “Epikriseis of former prefect Falvius Titianus from...until the 6^th of the 17^th year of the divine Hadrian through Antonius^,,...After other things, page 13: Marcus Lucretius Clemens, wishing to reside for the present in the Arsinoite nome, being X years old, and his children, Octavius, X years old, Lu­cretius, X years old, Serenus, X years old. Clemens presented a bronze tablet bearing an official copy from a stele erected at Rome, by which he attested that that he had served in the military and was discharged honorable. It read thus... (a copy of the diploma follows in the papyrus)

As veterans were demobilized and settled in various places in Egypt, they came bear­ing documents - copies of official documents - that were transformed into discerna­ble rights and privileges. Diplomata gave citizenship rights to the individual, based on a specific grant to that individual that marked him out as different from other indi­viduals in whose milieu he lived. Nevertheless, these practices of granting individual privilege, and the techniques of making those individual privileges look authentic, could easily be copied and transformed. Others - those who had not been granted Ro­man citizenship as a result of military service - watched this process, and imitated, compiling official declarations and abbreviating them - getting to what they thought was the main thing that affected them - with this same “meth’helera." But with a major difference. As we can see from P.Giss. 40, this technique of authoritative ab­breviation of official documents came to be understood, by the broader population as a whole, as a way of turning a general proclamation into an individual right - or at least a right that would be activated in an individual context, such as a court case. The significance of this is that provincials already possessed the intellectual and rhetorical resources to absorb a new imperial decree, even a decree that would attempt to regu­late significant aspects of their relation to the state and to the society around them. What this means is that the Constitutio could be processed on the ground not as a substantive transformation of the world of the subject in the Roman provinces but as just yet another one of a series of rights that the individual might possess.

With one crucial difference: it was in the nature of the military diplomas and the viritane grants of citizenship in general that what was granted was a distinct status vis-a-vis one’s neighbors in a given community: citizenship, that is, was a status that ranked its recipient above his neighbors. When everyone has citizenship, how­ever, there is no need to rank people relative to one another. But this is precisely what seems interesting about the grant of citizenship in the provinces: while citizen­ship no longer ranked subjects relative to one another, it could nonetheless be un­derstood to offer its possessors a series of protections from the violence of the state itself. This understanding of citizenship can be found in one of the most fascinating among the tendentious misreadings of the Constitutio Antoniniana in the literary tradition. While explicating for his congregation a passage of the Acts of the Apos­tles, John Chrysostom had to explain the Apostle Paul’s invocation of his status as a Roman citizen. Lest such an invocation appear anachronistic before a late antique audience, Chrysostom explained awkwardly that in an earlier era, “not everyone had this status; from the time of Hadrian [some hundred years before 212], they say, all people were called Romans, but in antiquity this was not so. Indeed, he said that he was Roman so that he could escape corporal punishment.”^[74] Paul, on Chrysos­tom’s reading, was lucky enough to be able to exercise provocatio ad populum, and in so doing to protect himself against the illegal and degrading treatment of provin­cial authorities; now all citizens were lucky enough to possess this protection against the state as a whole: Chrysostom continued, “He would have been con­temptible had he been scourged: but as it is, he puts them (the state) into greater fear (than they him).”^[75] The idea that a citizen can indeed put fear into the state would seem laughable for the late antique world: a world where punishments became sig­nificantly harsher and the protections of the citizen body were gradually whittled away.^[76] But such an idea should not be dismissed out of hand, for this sort of rheto­ric of citizen-inviolability is powerful to people on the ground, even as an ideal from which practice diverges. A Chrysostom-esque reading of the Constitutio An- toniniana can be found in another papyrus (Chr.Mitt. 71, AD 458), a document containing a cessio bonorum relating to a case in which a man was held accountable for debts that he guaranteed for another:

...I don't know how, since the person whom I guaranteed was present and was not trying to flee, he accused me on account of that man, on the pretense that he (Sarapion) was careless about his obligations, and I was summoned and locked up in the public prison on account of debts.I was even tortured, which is prohibited by the laws.in my own home and then in the public prison, though your gloriousness did not know about this. Since everywhere the laws command that Romans are to have their bodies be free and inviolate, I have availed myself of this cessio...in exchange for the debts in full receive all of my property and money, and I ask that I reserve a sixth part, and that I be released from these bonds and tortures, and that I can have my body be free and inviolate according to the laws.

To the extent that the Constitutio had a major effect in people's consciousness, it seems to have been meaningful as a further guarantee of protections of the citizen body against the abuses of the state and its agents. It was absorbed into pre-existing cognitive and rhetorical structures and re-imagined not as a locative vision of a perfectly ordered world with all people in their respective places, but rather as a means to protect one's own person from the incursions of the state, and to make rhetorical claims holding the state and those who acted in its name accountable when such ideas were violated. To the extent that the Constitutio was in any way a “liberal” act,^[77] it was so only because it could be interpreted locally in liberal ways, and be reactivated - whether by Chrysostom or by an Egyptian petitioner - as part of a series of claims that the possessor of citizen right did, indeed, deserve protec­tions.

It is not surprising that these rights and protections were constantly violated, that the towns were absorbed into the countryside and were gradually empeasanted, or that the late antique state made remarkable progress chipping away at the con­ceptual and rhetorical resources that the population of the empire used to preserve its rights. States are often successful at imposing their visions of perfection, even if we can catch glimpses of resistance to such grand projects.^[78] But if there's some­thing surprising in this process, it comes from considering just how difficult such a process must have been, and what kind of work must have been done to achieve it. It tells us, in other words, about how committed - in terms of manpower and re­sources - the late antique state was to imposing its vision over and against compet­ing ways of ordering the world.