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And Dissidence in Roman the Case of the Ada Alexandrinorum. By This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Loyalty and dissidence in Roman Egypt : the case of the Acta Alexandrinorum. Harker, Andrew John The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 03. Oct. 2021 Thesis Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Ancient History of the University of London in 2000. and Dissidence in Roman The Case of the Ada Alexandrinorum. By Andrew John Harker. Department of Classics. King's College London. Supervised by Dr Dominic Rathbone. Submitted in September 2000. (LC L Abstract, The Ac/a Alexandrinorum are a group of 'sub-literary' texts found on papyri from the first three centuries AD in Roman Egypt, telling the stories of the trials and executions of noble Alexandrians by Roman emperors. This study is not a re-edition of the individual texts of the ActaAlexandrinorum, but an historical study of the literature. I have produced a revised list of Ac/a Alexandrinorum proper and the Ada-related literature, and discussed and clarified the historical and social content and context of all the texts. I have examined the historical development of the Ac/a Alexandrinorum proper, which I have argued were born out of the contemporary reactions towards the embassies to Gaius and Claudius. While the modern name 'Ac/a Alexandrinorum' ('the trial minutes of the Alexandrians') presupposes a documentary basis to the literature, I have questioned the attempts to classify all the Ac/a Alexandrinorum proper and Ac/a related literature as either strictly 'documentary' or 'literary' texts. This has involved re-evaluating what constituted a document in the ancient world, and examining whether there really were fixed, rigid boundaries between ancient 'documentary' and 'literary' texts. I have examined the possibility that the Ac/a Alexandrinorum proper were derived from official Roman records. I argue that the ActaAlexandrinorum were a truly popular literature with a very broad readership that covered a wide social spectrum. I have placed the literature into its wider literary context by comparing the Ac/a Alexandrinorum proper with similar literary productions from elsewhere in the empire, and taken a more complex view of 'dissidence' and this literature. In my appendices I have listed the details and editions of the individual texts and discussed suggested corrections and restorations, examined a chronological problem which is important for understanding the chronology of the earlier stories, examined the background to the Graeco-Jewish violence in Alexandria and reviewed the dubious and unidentified fragments. Table of Contents. I. Introduction. 5. II. The Embassies to Gaius and Claudius. 21. III. The Acta Alexandrinorum and Acta related literature. 57. IV. The Ada Alexandrinorurn in Context: A Literature of Dissent? 109. V. The 'Acta Alexandrinorum' or Acta Graecorum et Romanorum? The wider context of the ActaAlexandrinorum literature. 160. VI. Conclusion. 218. Appendix I: Editions of the Acta Alexandrinorum and related texts. 223. Appendix II: AD 38/9 or 3 9/40? 254. Appendix Ill: The Status of the Alexandrian Jews. 256. Appendix IV: The 'dubious and unidentified' fragments. 268. Bibliography. 274. 3 Note on Abbreviations. Literary sources and journals are cited by their standard abbreviations, as found, for example, in OCD3. Other frequently used abbreviations are: Acta - Musurillo, Acta Pack2 - Pack, R., The Greek and Latin Alexandrinorum, Lipe, 1961. Literary Papyri from Greco-Roman AFA - Acts of the Arval Brethren. Egypt, (second edition) Ann Arbor Agr. - Philo, de Agricultura. 1965. Alex. - Philo, Alexander. Prob. - Philo, Quod omnisprobus APM— Musurillo, The Acts of the liber. Pa gan Martyrs, Oxford, 1954 Reg.et imp.apophth. - Plutarch, Reguni GC - Oliver, reek Constitutions, et imperatorfjmn apophthegmata. Philadelphia, 1989. Spec. - Philo, de Specialibus legi bus. L.A. - Philo, Leguni Allegoriarum. All papyri are cited according to the latest version of the Checklist of Editions of Greek and Latin Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets published on the World Wide Web. I have used the abbreviation CPJ rather than the Checklists' C.Pap.Jud. for the sake of convenience. All citations of Eusebius, Chron.Hieron. are from the edition of Helm 1984. All citations from Byzantine sources (Georgius Syncellus, John Malalas, the Chronicon Paschale) are from the Corpus Scriptoruni Historiae Byzantinae series. 4 L Introduction. The vast majority of the many thousands of papyri that have been recovered from ancient Egypt are documents, but roughly a tenth are literary and 'sub-literary' texts. Some of these papyri contain literary works that have survived anyway, like those of Homer and Thucydides, but others have yielded pieces of ancient literature that had not survived, such as Aristotle's Constitution ofAthens. Among this lost literature is an intriguing group of texts that have become known as the Acta Alexandrinorum or the Acts of the Pagan Martyrs. The Acta Alexandrinorum proper tell the stories of noble Alexandrians who were executed at the order of a Roman emperor. The favoured form of these stories is a record of the reception of an Alexandrian embassy or a trial scene in the imperial court, usually presented, with only a small amount of narrative, in the form of official minutes (acta).' The Acta Alexandrinorum proper tend to follow the same basic story- line. Typically a group of Alexandrian nobles travel to Rome as ambassadors. On arrival, they face an emperor who has allied himself with Alexandria's eriemies, often the Jewish community resident in Alexandria, and is hostile towards them. A bitter exchange of words follows between the emperor and the Alexandrian ambassadors as the Alexandrians bravely confront the emperor on behalf of their beloved fatherland, and scornfully attribute the emperor's hostility towards them to his lack of high birth and culture. The stories usually end with at least some of the Alexandrian ambassadors being led away to execution, recalling as they depart the long and glorious line of Alexandrian martyrs. The stories, which feature most of the emperors from Augustus to Caracalla, are very sympathetic towards the Alexandrians and their causes, and allege that the Alexandrians die as the innocent victims of imperial bias and cruelty. It is demonstrable that at least some of the stories have an historical basis, and use historical personages, but it is far from clear in any one case if we are dealing with 'history' or 'fiction', or indeed, a combination of the two. While the term 'ActaAlexandrinorum' should be reserved solelyfor the category of texts that recycle this same essential story-line, in practice it has been extended to cover numerous other pieces of related 'literary' and 'documentary' texts. Thus we find the categorisation has been used of imperial letters to Alexandria, stories of secret meetings between Alexandrians and Roman prefects, long and rhetorical apologiae delivered before emperors, accounts of imperial receptions in Alexandria, accounts of Alexandrians prosecuting Roman prefects, and so on. These texts do not conform to my definition of the ActaAlexandrinorum proper, but are often extremely similar in theme and content. For convenience, I will refer to them as the 'Ada related literature'. The Acta Alexandrinorum proper and the Ada related literature were read in Egypt from the Augustan period to the mid third century AD. Most of the extant texts come from the late second/early third century AD, but this is unsurprising, as most surviving papyri come from this period anyway. 2 Nonetheless, the fact that the older stories were being rewritten in this period, and new stories being composed, would suggest that the literature was particularly popular in the Severan period, before disappearing entirely. There can be little doubt that the literature had a very broad appeal in Egypt. Ada Alexandrinorum proper and Ada related literature have been found both in urban centres, like Oxyrhynchus, Hermopolis Magna and Panopolis, and in villages, such as Karanis and Tebtunis, both of which are situated in the Fayum. The majority of the texts come from Oxyrhynchus and the villages of the Fayum. This is to be expected, however, as these sites have yielded the most papyri. Given this rather impressive geographical spread, it is reasonable to suppose that the Acta Alexandrinorum and Acta related literature were known and read in Egypt wherever people could read. This, and the fact that the same archetypal story was recycled with different characters, suggests that the writers had found a popular, winning formula. There are several problems to be aware of when working with papyri. Papyrus was made from the fibres of a plant that was cultivated in Egypt. The fibres were made into sheets, which were then joined to form rolls, or (in the later Roman period) bound into codices.
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