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REAL BANDITS
perpetrators or victims. Most of the persons named are called by patronym,
and so may be identified as freeborn. This is hardly surprising. It has been
estimated that the number of slaves in Roman imperial Egypt was relatively
small. The evidence from Euhemeria supports this generalisation: the social
spectrum of the circle of people found in depositions allows one to conclude
that slavery did not play a significant role in the economic activity of the
place.
I can now summarise the common features of the material from Euhemeria.
Without exception, the offences registered there were just part of the petty
criminality of everyday life in a rural community. Perpetrators and victims
came from the same level in society, and in most cases were known to
each other. The felons were therefore not people on the margin, but at the
heart of the rural population. The sort of items that were stolen or robbed
scarcely suggests the involvement of professional receivers; rather they helped
opportunistic thieves to improve slightly their own living conditions.
Such criminality, occurring within so close a community – both socially and
topographically – is explicable only in terms of overwhelming local poverty.
The insights obtained by way of example at Euhemeria are confirmed by
Egyptian material from other periods and places, and even relate to other
types of crime, including to organised banditry. 121 It is worth emphasising
that these texts also come not from the period of the third-century ‘Crisis’,
but from that of the pax Augusta.
5 Conclusion
Sufficient evidence from a wide variety of source types has been presented
in this chapter to demonstrate ‘the ubiquity of the bandit’ in the Roman
world. Insofar as this cross-section, obtained by random sampling, allows for
generalisation, it would seem that crime, albeit exercised on a small scale,
was a force that shaped the events of everyday life.
The wide distribution of the material permits this conclusion to be
applied to all periods and places of Roman history. Public authorities were
unable either effectively to prevent crime or, as a matter of course, to successfully
prosecute the wrongdoers. To simply ascribe this to an almost
totally underdeveloped police service would be excessively anachronistic. To
give any sort of priority to the combating of everyday petty crime would
have been as alien to the thinking of the Roman state as it would have far
exceeded its resources. Such means as were available were fully committed to
military tasks necessitated by the waging of war. In noting the high level of
crime even in the happiest times of the Principate, one should take into
consideration the fact that the majority of the urban and rural population,
lived in chronic poverty. 122 If, in absolute terms, we have relatively little
evidence for poverty and petty criminality, this is just an indication of the
commonness of phenomena which aroused no particular interest in anyone,
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