Culture and Society in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt

The Christian amulet P.Oxy. VIII 1151 was first published over a century ago and has often been reprinted, but, beyond a single line (D. Hagedorn, ZPE 145 (2003), 226), never revised (bibliography in the TMMagic database organized by the Leuven Trismegistos project, http://www.trismegistos.org/magic/index.php, entry #61652). I provide a preliminary report on a new edition with expanded commentary.

The archive of Harthotes, priest and public farmer of Theadelphia, is a rather enigmatic group of texts. Early interpretations focused on the family’s chronic debt as evidence of a threadbare existence (Casanova, 130), but more recent commentators have pointed out that the family was able to repay all of their loans, while leasing fairly substantial tracts of land and engaging in a variety of economic ventures (Rowlandson, 189). Perhaps because of these conflicting views, historians have not given the archive the attention that it deserves.

Despite the availability of rich documentation, and apart from a few scattered discussions, a comprehensive study of village elites in Roman Egypt is still lacking. In a paper entitled ‘Village and Urban Elites in Roman Tebtunis’ (Berkeley, 1999), Roger Bagnall indicated in the Tebtunis material, particularly family archives and dossiers, an excellent starting point for the investigation of village elites and of the socio-economic links between them.

Under Ptolemaic and Roman rule, a number of innovations appear in Egyptian funerary practices. One of the most interesting is the appearance of many unique texts at this time. New compositions were creatively fashioned by borrowing themes and passages from earlier materials and religious rituals and combining them with original content in inventive ways. One particularly fascinating example is found in Papyri Rhind I and II, now housed at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh (Inv. A 1956.313-4).

The present paper intends to shed light on a new source concerning Demosthenes’ suicide. The account of this event is preserved in a rhetorical dialogue on Demades’ trial at the Macedonian court contained in P.Berol. inv. 13045 [MP³ 2102 + 2570, LDAB 6760 + 6761], a papyrus of the end of the second century BCE edited in 1923 by Karl Kunst [BKT VII, 13-31]. The reason why this source has so far remained unknown is that the editor, referring to a tradition represented, among the others, by D.S. 17.117.1-2 and Arr.

The majority of the texts constituting the modest archive of Flavius Eulogius (PLRE 2.421 [10]) were excavated in Grenfell and Hunt’s first season at Bahnasa and published in P.Oxy. XVI. As additional texts were identified (in P.Oxy I, P.Iand. III, PSI V, and, most recently, P.Lond. V) and subsequently published (in P.Oxy. LXVIII and P.Mich.