THE TRANSFORMATIVE MOMENT?
In 1901 Giessen University acquired an abraded, mangled piece of papyrus containing edicts of the emperor Caracalla. It has gone on to have a storied career. One of the founding fathers of “juristic papyrology,” Paul Meyer, published an editio princeps of it in 1910 (P.Giss.
40), from which began a torrent of scholarship: P. Giss. 40 is the subject of four monographs, a two-part Literaturubersicht, and countless reprints, often with corrections, supplements, and hypotheses, especially, if not primarily, concerning the restoration of its first column. The most recent edition, by Peter Alois Kuhlmann (P.Giss.Lit. 6) runs, with commentary, to forty-one typed pages, of which the comments on the first, highly fragmentary thirteen lines (the first edict) run to twenty-three typed pages. P.Giss. 40 has the dubious honor of having produced more secondary literature than any other documentary papyrus, a record it has held for some forty years.[43]The reason for this profusion of scholarship is easily understood. Most scholars believe that the first edict - the one whose readings are most controversial - is a copy of the famous edict of Caracalla granting citizenship to (almost) all free inhabitants of the Roman world in 212 AD. They believe, moreover, that this copy was made shortly after 212 AD - no earlier than 215, since the third edict on the papyrus dates from Caracalla’s sojourn in Alexandria, but likely not too long thereafter. Aside from tendentious and often downright erroneous reports of the Constitutio Antoniniana preserved in the literary tradition, this papyrus is our only direct extant documentary evidence for Caracalla’s grant, and it seems to preserve the grant’s ipsissima verba.[44] As the bibliographic entries intimate, however, the only other thing on which scholars agree is that the papyrus does, in fact, contain edicts of the emperor Caracalla.
They are divided, inter alia, as to how many edicts there are, their dates, their relative ordering, and their historical importance.[45] Nonetheless, the reconstruction of the first, largely mutilated column has consumed the most energy. The historical importance of the other edicts - and their relation to the first, most famous edict - have largely gone unremarked upon.[46]This is a pity, since P.Giss. 40 is important not only because it provides evidence for the Constitutio qua legislation, but also for the earliest reception history of this legislation - that is, the ways in which such legislation was interpreted by those whom it might have effected. Thus the questions that motivate this paper: if this papyrus speaks to the moment of the grant of citizenship and its short-term impact, what was the person who composed this papyrus doing? Why place the citizenship edict in this collection of edicts? What can we learn from this papyrus, as a whole, about the ways in which citizenship did or did not serve as a meaningful axis of belonging? What could it have meant - what, indeed, was it like - to read this papyrus, or to write it? Who would have been doing so, why, and with what sort of reactions? And under what circumstances might it be possible to write a history of this moment of becoming a member - to write an account of what might have been at stake in possessing or using the Constitutio Antoniniana?
The long-term effects of Constitutio are well known.[47] There followed, in its wake, a massive shift in personal nomenclature throughout the Roman world, as well as the infiltration into daily legal practice of a variety of distinctly Roman legal forms.[48] Similarly, as the Introduction and Afterword of this volume emphasize, the extension of citizenship at this scale posed a number of complex intellectual problems for the jurists of the third century and beyond.[49] But it remains an open questions as to whether these were meaningful effects, or if so, at what level of society, or in what realms of practice, these changes might have “meant” something.
Some headway might be made, then, by asking not, What effects did the Constitutio have?, but rather, as we read this papyrus, What resources - either conceptual or rhetorical - did provincial populations have for understanding this change? Should we imagine it as an emancipatory moment, much as newly enfranchised veterans seem to have (in their handsome military diplomas), one in which those formerly classed as alien emerged proudly reborn from their previously degraded status? Should we alternatively imagine it as a conciliatory moment, one in which the Roman government finally recognized the logical end-point of the process it had started, either with the Social Wars or with the process of municipalization? Or did it represent, as Cassius Dio might have imagined, a moment in which people merely found themselves bewildered at the change they had supposedly undergone?[50]The proper answer to these questions will go some length in explaining not only what the Constitutio “meant” locally, but also how it came to take effects in different and perhaps surprising ways. To come to an answer to these questions, in what follows I “read” P.Giss. 40 in two different ways. To begin with, I read it as a statement of imperial policy, asking what kinds of claims these three edicts, taken together, make in the context of the longer history of imperial policies and practices regarding citizenship. Subsequently I read this papyrus for traces of local interpretations of this supposedly transformative moment. To reconstruct these traces, I draw attention to the logic supporting the assembly of these edicts in a single papyrus, arguing that this logic can be reconstructed to reveal a distinctly provincial way of thinking about the connection between citizenship, access, and law.
Implicit in proposing these two reading styles is the assumption that there is not a single way to read a document, especially a legal document like P. Giss. 40, but that there are at least two ways: the state’s and the subject’s.
Moreover, it implies that state and subject understandings are at least in tension with one another, if they’re not downright adversarial. This may seem to be a problematic starting assumption, and, in the context of a study devoted to categories of political membership, may seem to beg the central question of what precisely is a state, what kind of personnel constitute it, and how might that state differentiate itself from other, potentially powerful actors. This is an especially pressing question in the case of heterarchic states, or empires. Empires, we are told, are states or state-like systems that rule diverse, heterogeneous people and territories; to do this, they have to concede to the realities of pre-modern governance and vest a great deal of agency in subordinate groups - in the case of the Roman Empire, cities and town councils - to achieve the primary goal of extraction and redistribution. The tradeoff, for these groups, is that they get to retain their local autonomy; hence, a main characteristic of empires is that their sovereignty is by nature also fragmentary.[51] Scholars in recent years have turned this fragmentation into a virtue, and increasingly fetishize imperial diversity and pluralism as a solution to problems of nationalism and racism, of their own misgivings about the reach of the sovereign authority vested in the modern nation-state, and of their own discomfort with the at-times messy and divisive nature of modern political claim making.[52] As to whether these are reasonable modern concerns I plead no contest; I would suggest, however, that whoever compiled P.Giss. 40 - someone who, most likely, had made the transition across the line from subject to citizen, and had done so recently - was not at all confused about the location of sovereign authority, did not think of it as fragmented, and understood perfectly well that local autonomy was primarily limited and contingent: that such local autonomy as existed was always the result of bargaining in the shadow of sovereign power, to adapt the famous saying. Our compiler would have been a witness to (or perhaps a participant in) the annual, forcible transfer of agricultural (and other) wealth from Egypt to Rome. Had he refused to participate in this process he would eventually find himself physically violated by someone bearing a Roman gentilicium. He may have gone from alien to citizen - with important consequences that will be explored in what follows - but at no point did he cease to be a subject. The existence of an extractive state was a basic fact of life in Roman Egypt with material, physical consequences - that is, it could directly influence, in any given year, how much a person might expect to eat, and it could directly influence how many pints of blood that person would get to keep if he disagreed. We would do well to keep these things in mind while trying to understand the nature and reception of a moment in which the state altered the legal expression it gave to its underlying realities.[53]This does not mean that the relationship between states and subjects is straightforward, of course, nor does it mean that these relations of domination, extraction, and violence provide an exhaustive map of the relations between a subject and a sovereign in Roman Egypt. While the threat of violence always loomed in the background, successfully applying violence was a last resort: to use violence was expensive and time-consuming, and violence could always backfire. In practice, sovereign authority had two faces: one violent and unpredictable, the other conciliatory and rational; in practice this meant that in the Roman world sovereign authority - the authority of the emperor and his agents - was made manifest more often as the guarantor of a complex and ever-expanding universe of privileges and arrangements. Such privileges might be invoked by individuals against representatives of the semi-autonomous groups who had bargained or arrogated themselves power in the sovereign’s shadow, or by one group against another. Emperors and their representatives might only find out later (if ever) that their subjects had invoked them to guarantee such things. As end-users of law, but also of other symbolic modes of state authority, subjects had tremendous leeway to interpreting state dictates. This would become more complicated, however, as the state began a process of expanding its regulatory reach over more numerous and more intimate aspects of its subjects’ conduct through the course of the third century. In what follows, I attempt to map, through the particular case of the Constitutio Antoniniana and P.Giss. 40, the interplay of these tensions.
2.