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REAL BANDITS
of force. 115 The suspiciously frequent use of the phrase leistrikoi tropoi in
Euhemeria therefore leads to the reasonable supposition that the usage was
not always employed in a strictly juristic sense, but was sometimes applied
‘non-technically’, as an expression of outrage by the victim.
I turn now to a review of what was stolen in Euhemeria, and to its worth.
Mention has already been made of pigs, hay, olives, wheat, bread and oil. In
addition, we have evidence for the theft of household goods, such as cups,
bowls and baskets; tools, such as sickles, rakes and shovels; items of clothing,
such as cloaks; and even basic or partially processed goods for the
production of textiles, like wool and weaving threads. The 17 cases that fall
under this heading concern consumer goods or objects that were needed for
everyday use. In 14 cases mention is made of the theft of money or valuables,
or both. Gold and silver jewellery goes missing only twice. In 10 cases sums
of money are registered as having been stolen, comprising amounts between
40 and 200 drachmas. As we can deduce from Texts nos. 127 and 138, the
two largest amounts, of 200 and 120 drachmas respectively, need not be
regarded as the private property of the complainants. The same may hold
true of most of the other cases in which money was stolen. We are probably
dealing with business funds, entrusted to the victims for the purchase of
goods or for other commercial purposes.
These statements as to number, volume and value of stolen items are
generally very modest. We may be fairly certain that personal enrichment
through the sale of stolen property could not have been a major motive in
such crimes. Most thefts were probably just to meet personal requirements.
All these cases belong in the category of ‘theft and robbery from need’,
occasionally mentioned in the literature of the imperial period as symptomatic
of the living conditions of the lower orders. 116
Examination of the perpetrators yields further conclusions concerning the
social milieu. In at least 19 cases complainants were able to give information
as to the identity of those responsible. In only nine instances are charges
made against a person or persons unknown; in such circumstances it is
usually simply declared that someone has made off with something leistrikoi
tropoi. The significant finding, that in two-thirds of all cases perpetrators and
victims were known to each other, hardly needs pointing out. As a form
of social control, personal acquaintanceship raises the threshold of people’s
readiness to commit crime – higher, at any rate, than the level achieved by
the communal anonymity of city life. This confirms the assumption that
most of the crimes recorded as having been committed in Euhemeria were
motivated by economic need. The findings from Euhemeria are fully consistent
with those of H.-J. Drexhage from throughout Egypt. His general conclusion
was that miscreants and victims came from the same social classes as
each other. 117
Looking again at the 19 cases in which the complainants could say
precisely whom they suspected of having carried out the crimes, we find that
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