Municipal government

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lay Kysis, also part of Khargeh. The Dakhleh Oasis lay westward, beyond another stretch of desert – further into the desert, as the name implies. A papyrus letter from a Roman official travelling from Khargeh to Dakhleh in the late fourth century describes a journey from Khargeh to Dakhleh of four days and nights through waterless desert (anydrōn orōn) (M.

Chrest. 78, ll.6–7).¹⁴⁰ A long desert road, faster but less convenient, went directly from Lycopolis to Dakhleh.¹⁴¹ Travel to and from the Nile Valley would have relied on donkeys and camels, with larger caravans preferring the latter.¹⁴² Roads continued northward from Dakhleh to other oases, eventually reaching the Mediterranean coast

elites and village property holders. Many of these officials, on both the city and village level, reappear in the Kellis texts.

Until the fourth century, the most important civilian representative of Roman government in the nomes was the municipal governor (stratēgos) who was appointed by the prefect in Alexandria.¹⁴⁵ The strategos oversaw the running of local, nome government: he maintained public records (including village accounts) and adjudicated conflicts. As in other parts of the Empire, a large-scale reorganisation of local administration was undertaken in Egypt in the late third and early fourth century under Diocletian.¹⁴⁶ Dakhleh was separated from Khargeh, probably as part of this reorganisation.¹⁴⁷ The ancient city of Mut (Mōthis) received independent status as nome capital, and Dakhleh became known as the ‘Mothite Nome’, Khargeh as the ‘Hibite Nome’. Both were subjected to the new province of the Thebais created by Diocletian, whose governor, the praeses, was probably seated in Antinoopolis.¹⁴⁸ The office of curator civitatis (logistēs) became the chief imperial representative,¹⁴⁹ replacing the office of strategos, which was given the Latin name exactor civitatis.¹⁵⁰ However, despite the division of the Great Oasis into two nomes, the logistes and the strategos/exactor retained responsibility for the entire Great Oasis, even after Diocletian’s division.¹⁵¹ The Great Oasis, then, appears to have remained administratively quite centralised, a point to which I return below (section 2.5).

145 A system inherited from the Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty. Roger S. Bagnall, Egypt in late antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 63.

146 For a summary, see Alan K. Bowman, ‘Egypt from Septimus Severus to the death of Constantine’, in The Cambridge Ancient History, ed. Alan K. Bowman, Averil Cameron, and Peter Garnsey (Cambridge, 2005).

147 For dating, see pkgr.41 (d. 310). Bagnall suggests 307/8 as the year of division (P. Kell. IV, 73.), see also Worp,

‘Short texts’, 345–46.

148 Up to this point, Egypt had been under a single prefect, but various rearrangements were made in the course of the fourth century. The praeses did not receive command of the military. See Bagnall, Egypt in late antiquity, 63–64; Alan K. Bowman, Egypt after the pharaohs 332 BC–AD 642: from Alexander to the Arab conquest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 81–84.

149 For the functions and development of this office, see Brinley R. Rees, ‘The curator civitatis in Egypt’, The Journal of Juristic Papyrology 7–8 (1953–1954): 98–104; Naphtali Lewis, The compulsary public services of Roman Egypt, 2nd ed. (Firenze: Edizioni Gonnelli, 1997), 82.

150 The term ‘strategos’ continued to be in use for a while into the fourth century; see Bagnall, Egypt in late antiquity, 60–61; J. David Thomas, ‘Strategos and exactor in the fourth century: one office or two?’, Chronique d'Égypte 70, no. 139–140 (1995).

151 Pkgr.25 features a logistes of the entire Great Oasis, P. Gascou 70 an exactor.

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The strategos/logistes did not directly administer the cities. That was the responsibility of city councils (boulai), bodies of wealthy and respected local citizens collectively referred to as the bouletic or curial class.¹⁵² The councils were modelled on Greek antecedents, and were formally introduced to Egypt by the Emperor Septimius Severus only in 200/201 CE.¹⁵³ They consisted of magistrates, headed and represented by a council president (prytanis, proedros).

The magistrates were tasked with paying for a range of public services, like keeping the peace, collecting taxes, and financing festivals. The fourth century saw great changes to city administration and to the relationship between city and countryside. Many traditional magistracies disappeared in the course of the century or shortly after,¹⁵⁴ while city councils received more responsibility for administrating the countryside. The logistes, in fact, ceased to be an imperial officer appointed from the outside, and came instead to be drawn from the local, curial class.¹⁵⁵ The countryside had previously been divided into districts called toparchies; these were in 307/8 renamed pagi, and put under supervision of a magistrate called the praepositus pagi.¹⁵⁶

Here, too, the Great Oasis appears to have been peculiar. It may be that its cities (Hibis, Trimithis, Mothis) each had their own praepositus.¹⁵⁷ Another new official, the riparius, oversaw law and order.¹⁵⁸ A riparius, who doubled as strategos/exactor, appears to have been of local significance in Kellis.

152 It has been argued that the responsibilities of officials often overlapped, providing several instances of appeal for legal redress, and making the system somewhat confusing and inefficient. See Benjamin Kelly, Petitions, litigation, and social control in Roman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 78–86.

153 Some form of administrative civic bodies also existed before this date. See Alan K. Bowman and Dominic W.

Rathbone, ‘Cities and administration in Roman Egypt’, The Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992): 120–27.

154 Bagnall, Egypt in late antiquity, 59–67.

155 Rees, ‘The curator civitatis’, 88–92

156 For the consequences of this reform, see Bagnall, Egypt in late antiquity, 62 and n.107.

157 Bagnall & Ruffini write: ‘It looks, in other words, as if there was a logistes for the Great Oasis as a whole, consisting of three cities, but each city had its own municipal officials and presumably council. In a structure of this sort, it could well be that each city also constituted a pagus with a praepositus. Exactly what his relationship to the civic officials was, we cannot say, but he may have functioned as a kind of mini-logistes on the spot.’ Roger S. Bagnall and Giovanni Ruffini, Ostraka from Trimithis. Texts from the 2004–2007 seasons, Amheida I (New York:

New York University Press, 2012), 46.

158 This office superseded the old eirenarch. Bagnall, Egypt in late antiquity, 61; Sofia Torallas Tovar, ‘The police in byzantine Egypt: the hierarchy in the papyri from the fourth to the seventh century’, in Current research in Egyptology, ed. Christina Riggs and A. McDonald (Oxford: 2000), 115–16. He performed his tasks in conjunction

The villages that dotted the countryside had their own local officials, called liturgists, who were responsible for maintaining order, keeping records, and collecting taxes.¹⁵⁹ From the early fourth century on, village liturgists were overseen by the praepositus pagi.¹⁶⁰ Serving as a liturgist was compulsory, and villagers did so at their own cost and responsibility; the central government intervened mainly to make sure the duties were in fact performed.¹⁶¹ Liturgies were thus chosen from among villagers of a certain financial standing, to guarantee that services were performed and taxes paid.¹⁶² Tax collection was of particular concern to the Roman administration. Locally appointed tax collectors included the sitologoi, responsible for wheat and barley, and the apaitetai, for taxes on other goods and trades. The most important liturgy, however, was that of ‘village leader’ or komarch (kōmarkhos), which had superseded the old village scribe (kōmogrammateus) in the mid-third century.¹⁶³ The duties of the komarch, as summed up by Diana Delia and Evan Haley, ‘involved collection and disbursement of funds and grain, including the annona; filling army supply quotas; leasing lands to private individuals; and cooperating with the police to carry out orders for the arrest of villagers’.¹⁶⁴ They appointed other local liturgists, including their own successor. The office of komarch bolstered the local authority of the holder, and remained a popular post in the fourth century despite the associated expenses.¹⁶⁵

with the city advocate, the defensor civitatis (syndikos, ekdikos), who (in this period) largely heard minor court cases. See Brinley R. Rees, ‘The defensor civitatis in Egypt’, The Journal of Juristic Papyrology 6 (1952).

159 For a survey of liturgies on both city and village level, see Lewis, Compulsory public services. Roman citizens had (mostly) been exempt from such duties, until the grant of universal citizenship by the Constitutio Antoniniana of Septimus Severus in 212 CE, after which only Romans of distinction or with special arrangements remained exempted. Ibid., 89–94.

160 Liturgists were originally appointed by the strategos, but by the third century he seems mainly to have rubber-stamped nominations made by the locals, and the task was transferred to the praepositus. Ibid., 65–66, 82.

However, the strategos/exactor may still have had some functions related to liturgies in Dakhleh; see pkgr.23.

161 Ibid., 69–70 (villages), 77 (magistrates).

162 Bagnall, Egypt in late antiquity, 133–36, 57–60; Peter van Minnen, ‘House-to-house enquiries: an interdiciplinary approach to Roman Karanis’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 100 (1994): 244. Still, wealth differences within this elite could vary considerably; see Roger S. Bagnall, ‘Property holdings of liturgists in fourth-century Karanis’, The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 15, no. 1/2 (1978).

163 Lewis, Compulsory public services, 66–67.

164 Diana Delia and Evan Haley, ‘Agreement concerning succession to a Komarchy’, The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 20, no. 1–2 (1983): 43.

165 Ibid., 43–44.

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Both magistracies and liturgies were restricted to half a year or one year’s service, although by the fourth century the same person could serve several terms.¹⁶⁶ This system of urban and rural officials drawn from local elites, overseen by a small group of imperial appointees, ensured a civil administration that required little interference by the Roman government.