Despite its centrality as a mode of investigation, analytic stratification of the evidence by date and provenance is only one mode of temporal and spatial contextualization. Side by side with the analytic approach is a more synthetic one, in which the historian asks what is the appropriate framework in which to view the evidence and ask questions about it. Three variations of this question will occupy the remainder of the chapter. All of them are central to the broad issue already raised more than once: how far the evidence of the papyri can be treated as having relevance to something more than a particular period of Egyptian history.
The first of these is the view of Egypt as a part of the social and cultural context of the ancient Mediterranean world, and in particular that world in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. A good recent example is a paper of Marie Drew-Bear, in which she studies the professional athletes and musicians, but mainly athletes, who appear in the archives of the council of Hermopolis Magna receiving privileges—particularly maintenance pensions—
from the public purse during the third quarter of the third century.9 These athletes appear in about 20 percent of the documents of this archive, which Drew-Bear is reediting. At first glance this seems like a high figure, but we know little enough about the manner in which these archives were preserved. This category of document is preserved at Hermopolis alone of the metropoleis of Roman Egypt.
The essential results of the study of these papyri are clear enough. The dominant group of beneficiaries of these civic pensions is the pankratiasts, “heavy” athletes who competed in an event combining boxing, wrestling, kicking, strangling, and twisting (but not biting or gouging). Many of them have the Roman-style triple names (Marcus Aurelius Asklepiades, for example) normally borne by citizens and, more precisely, by citizens whose families received the Roman citizenship before the universal enfranchisement of the Antonine Constitution in AD 212. This pattern suggests origin in the wealthier strata of Hermopolitan society; this is in turn confirmed by the fact that some of these athletes served in important municipal offices and by direct evidence about their landholdings.
If the investigation of these papyri were limited to Egypt, we would be at a loss to provide an adequate context for what they tell us. Studying only Oxyrhynchos, Arsinoe, and other Egyptian metropoleis, we could not tell if the picture derived from these archives was in anyway remarkable, a Hermopolitan peculiarity, or something universal. It happens, however, that the institution of civic pensions for athletes who have won first-ranked contests is well known in the Roman East outside Egypt, and Drew-Bear brings a full range of evidence to her examination of the archive.
Pliny the Younger deals with pensions in his correspondence with the emperor Trajan, and there are numerous inscriptions, particularly from Asia Minor, referring to them.10 From these we find, for example, clear confirmation of the pattern found in the papyri: the Asian athletes also largely have the Roman tria nomina, not the simple nomen Aurelius. They too thus come from families which possessed the citizenship before the Antonine Constitution.
Once again, we find also in Asia Minor that some of these athletes served in important municipal offices, including those of annual eponymous magistrate and of moneyer.
The overall picture is profoundly important in establishing that these elements of the Greek culture of Hermopolis in the mid-third century were highly characteristic of the international Hellenism of the period, as we find it in other parts of the Greek-speaking provinces of the empire. By the use of epigraphical evidence, then, Drew-Bear is able to deal a formidable blow to the still-lingering notion that Egypt was still a world apart in this period. At the same time, the comparative evidence helps to clarify the ways in which Hermopolis actually was a renowned source of athletes—a fact noted by the rhetorical author Menander of Laodicea—particularly in the “heavy” sports like the pankration and boxing. It shows, also, that their retirement there after their careers was normal. We learn, thus, both that the overall framework visible in these documents is absolutely typical of the Hellenic East and that Hermopolis occupied an important and distinctive niche in that world.
Egypt was also the site of the most famous learned institution of antiquity, the Museum of Alexandria. Under the Roman empire, the Museum continued to exist, and membership was an honor considered worth mentioning by those who enjoyed it. A number of members of the Museum therefore appear in the papyri, and these cases have raised questions about the nature of the Museum and its membership in this period. Was membership still a sign of high intellectual distinction and activity, as it was under the Ptolemies, or (like the granting of university honorary degrees today) did it include men distinguished in other areas of life, like government service, but lacking in scholarly credentials? The latter was the common view, but from the late 1960s a contrary view began to be voiced, that the “non-scholar” members of the Museum probably had significant scholarly credentials that may simply be unknown to us.
This was the choice of views that Naphtali Lewis set forth in a paper devoted to this question.11 Although he does not frame his question in quite this way, he takes as his starting point the displacement of the question outside Egypt itself, to the highest level of Roman imperial government. Lewis (1981:149) sets forth a syllogism he sees at work in the discussion of one exemplary member of the group in question, M. Valerius Titanianus, who held the high imperial offices of prefect of police (praefectus vigilum) and director of imperial correspondence (ab epistulis): “1) Titanianus was appointed to the office of ab epistulis; 2) Only literati or scholars were appointed to that office; 3) Therefore Titanianus was a scholar or literary figure.” As (1) is a given, the argument must center upon (2). The implications are, obviously, that if Titanianus must be acknowledged to have had a scholarly or literary dimension, the way lies open to positing such activity for other members of the Museum who, like Titanianus, had public careers—albeit in some cases by no means so illustrious.
Lewis proceeds to enumerate the known holders of the office of ab epistulis. Apart from first-century imperial freedmen, he finds thirty-three individuals, of whom only a third clearly had some literary ability or pretensions that are not simply an avocation.
More than half are clearly career public officials, and most of these do not even have any signs of avocational literary interests.
The remainder are simply unknown outside their tenure of this particular office. From this, Lewis naturally concludes that literary distinction was by no means a requisite for the office of ab epistulis.
The argument then returns to the Museum members themselves, of whom also thirty-three are known. The situation is similar: no more than a third have any known creative or intellectual achievements to their credit, a couple are known only as members of the Museum, and the rest—a clear majority, once
again—are attested otherwise only as local or imperial officials or military officers. Lewis (1981:157) concludes:
The possibility exists, surely, that behind one or another of these military or bureaucratic exteriors there lurked an aesthetic gift or scientific mind lost forever to posterity, but it strains credulity beyond the breaking point to suppose that that could be true of all or even of most of them.
The point is clear: we cannot attribute intellectual distinction to individuals on the basis of membership in the Museum, and such membership was given also on the basis of other eminence.
In its own terms this argument is unanswerable. It figures here because it takes a problem arising from the papyri mentioning members of the Museum and treats it as dependent upon a problem existing at a higher imperial level; in fact, of course, what is striking is that the characterization of the Museum’s membership is not so much dependent on the outcome of the analysis of the ab epistulis as it is analogous to it. The evidence is similar, the patterns displayed are similar, and the conclusions are similar. It is hard to avoid the view that the real gain in this case is the discovery that this is not a local question to be solved by analysis internal to papyrology, but a characteristic situation for the world of the empire, to be approached in that broader context. Whether within that setting this is the right answer is another matter. It is by no means evident that the neat distinction of political and intellectual activity is tenable. Certainly it was for the most part the same small elite that carried on both, and the interrelationship of the two looks to be far more complex than the either-or formulation considered here would allow.