The Journey of Theophanes: Travel, Business, and Daily Life in the Roman East

263 Pages·2006·2.57 MB·English

by  John Matthews

The Journey of Theophanes
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Th e Journey of
T h e o p ha n e s
Travel, Business, and Daily Life
in the Roman East
john matthews
Yale University Press New Haven and London
Frontispiece: Th e image of Antioch in the Peutinger Map. Ancient World Mapping Center, University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill.
Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University and the Department of
Classics, Yale University.
Copyright © 2006 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
Th is book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying
permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
Set in Adobe Minion type by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania.
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Matthews, John (John Frederick)
Th e journey of Th eophanes : travel, business, and daily life in the Roman east / John Matthews.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-300-10898-9 (alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-300-10898-2 (alk. paper)
1. Middle East—Social conditions. 2. Th eophanes, fl . 4th cent.—Travel—Middle East. I. Title.
hn656.a8m37 2006
306.0939′4 2006003340
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Th e paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines
for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
preface vii
list of abbreviations and short titles xi
list of illustrations xiii
the contents of the theophanes archive xv
egyptian months xvii
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
Chapter 2 Hermopolis: Th eophanes and Friends 12
Chapter 3 Th e Road to Antioch 41
Chapter 4 Interlude: Travel and Topography 62
Chapter 5 At Antioch 89
Chapter 6 Homeward Bound 122
Chapter 7 Costs and Prices 138
Chapter 8 Food and Diet 163
vi contents
Appendix 1 P.Ryl. 627: Summary of Contents 181
Appendix 2 Notes on the Text 185
Appendix 3 Costs and Prices in the Memoranda 203
Appendix 4 Kemia and kemoraphanos 233
Bibliography 237
Index 241
Preface
It is many years since, in the early stages of my graduate work in later Roman history,
I fi rst encountered Th eophanes of Hermopolis. I read about him in the pages of a typically
enterprising article by Ramsay MacMullen on imperial bureaucrats in the Roman provinces,
from which I followed through the reference to C. H. Roberts’s publication of Th eophanes’
family and business papers in the collection of Greek and Latin Papyri held by the John Ry-
lands Library at the University of Manchester. What I found was an extensive collection of
memoranda about travel, living costs, and diet relating to the journey Th eophanes made from
Hermopolis to Antioch and back that is the subject of this book. For all its evident interest,
the material was dense and not very inviting; it did not speak from the living page and, in the
more austere learned traditions of those days and despite the fact that its vocabulary lay outside
the familiar boundaries of Classical Greek, it off ered no translation and little commentary. As
time went on I oft en looked at Th eophanes’ journey with the idea of making it better known
but did not do so with really serious intent until much later, in the midst of other preoccupa-
tions and duties that always seemed to claim fi rst place.
Th e core of the book is a translation of the Greek text of the travel memoranda preserved
in the Th eophanes archive. It is presented in installments, covering in turn the outward journey
from Hermopolis to Antioch and the preparations for it (chapter 3), the period of almost three
months during which Th eophanes and his party were resident at Antioch (chapter 5), and
the journey home (chapter 6). With the help of some papyrus letters involving Th eophanes
or written to him, I have added portraits of Th eophanes as a leading citizen of Hermopolis
vii
viii preface
and of the city itself and off ered suggestions about the origins and purpose of his journey
(chapter 2). I have used comparative material to describe the circumstances of travel in the
Roman empire of Th eophanes’ time and to evoke the great city of Antioch (chapter 4); and in
the last two chapters (7 and 8) I have addressed questions of living costs and diet, for which
the memoranda provide rich and, as far as I know, unparalleled evidence.
In setting at the heart of my book the translated texts, together with visual resources in
the form of maps, plans, and pictorial images, I have tried to give it something of the character
of a working manual of some of the methods used by ancient historians, but there is a point
of special interest I wish to emphasize at the outset. Th e archive of Th eophanes has survived
because of the particular climatic conditions that have yielded so many thousands of papyri
from the communities of the Nile valley. Th e journey that is so richly documented by the
memoranda was, however, to places outside the borders of Egypt. Th e memoranda provide
information about these places on a level of detail that is normally available only within Egypt,
and in doing so they overcome the limitation oft en felt of papyrological evidence, that it refers
in untypical detail to a region that may itself be untypical. Th e Th eophanes memoranda p resent
us with a quite diff erent situation. Here we have the wider world of the later Roman east and
one of its greatest cities documented in a way that is not just untypical of the evidence but
unique in it, and it is almost totally unexploited.
I have felt some hesitation along the road to publication, in that I am not a trained papy-
rologist, and I take seriously the suggestion of Hélène Cadell mentioned in my introduction,
that Roberts’s publication is in need of a second look from an expert eye. But I do not think
that such a revision would generate the need for a total reassessment of the text, and I maintain
the principle that the chief purpose of the publication of papyri, as of any other ancient text, is
to make them available to those who wish to use them without being expert in their technical
features. I have, however, taken the opportunity to inspect the original papyri in combination
with Roberts’s published text and wish to thank Lorraine Coughlan and her colleagues in the
John Rylands Library for their help in making this possible. Some textual amendments I have
to suggest in the light of this study, together with other points of interpretation, are listed in
appendix 2. Apart from these, my main points of diff erence from Roberts are that I do not ac-
cept his opinion that the six columns of household inventory occurring in P.Ryl. 627 are part of
the preparations for Th eophanes’ journey; while on the other hand I do believe that P.Ryl. 639
records the early part of Th eophanes’ residence at Antioch. It has been suggested to me that I
should print a version of the Greek text together with my translation, but apart from my lack
of qualifi cations to do so, my wish to make the archive more accessible is uncompromising.
Roberts’s text is very well presented in a standard publication, and those who need to consult
it for technical reasons should be able to do so without too much diffi culty.
I have had the opportunity to present aspects of my work at seminars held at the University
of California at Berkeley and at Columbia and Cornell Universities, at a conference held at
preface ix
the University of South Australia in 2001, at the Papyrological Institute sponsored by the
American Society of Papyrologists and generously supported by the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, held at Yale in the summer of 2003, and most recently at the University
of Leicester. I remember in particular the suggestions I received on these various occasions
from Susanna Elm, John Bodel, Rafaella Cribiore, Ann Hanson, and Colin Adams, none of
whom will mind my saying that the benefi t of such seminars goes beyond the individual con-
tributions made, to the collective spirit of interest and vigorous discussion they generate. I am
grateful to my former graduate student and now professional colleague as well as good friend,
Edward Watts, for the invaluable help he gave me in assembling and organizing the material
on food and prices contained in the memoranda and also for reassuring me that his students
at Indiana University, like mine at Yale, have found the material interesting. I have learned
much, and avoided several mistakes, through the advice of the two readers, Dr. David Potter
of the University of Michigan and Dr. Timothy Renner of Montclair State University, to whom
Yale University Press sent my book for review. I wish to thank Dr. Dorothy Clayton, of the
John Rylands Library, for her willing permission to reproduce two photographs of documents
in the Th eophanes Archive and John Tait and his colleagues at the Egypt Exploration Society
in London for permission to reproduce three of the papyrus letters published by B. R. Rees
in the society’s Graeco-Roman Memoirs of 1964. Professor Tait introduced me to Dr. Nikolaos
Gonis, of the Papyrology Rooms in the Sackler Library at Oxford, who helped me to trace the
history of the Th eophanes texts published by Rees; while Dr. Csaba Láda, of the University of
Manchester and the John Rylands Library, Manchester, helped me to follow through a story that
seemed for a time to have ended, strangely enough, in a salt-mine in Cheshire, where the papyri
were being stored while the historic library in Deansgate undergoes restoration. I am most
grateful to Dr. Láda, and to Professor Roy Gibson of the Department of Classics at Manchester,
for their help in recovering the papyri so that I could make a fi nal check of certain details. I
have received assistance from Carlos Noreña in preparing for publication the photographs of
the papyrus letters from Graeco-Roman Memoirs and from David Driscoll in preparing those
from the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte. Patrice Cauderlier kindly sent me a copy of the
publication in which appears his article on the journey of Th eophanes referred to in chapter 1.
Th e maps have been drawn by Bill Nelson, and the striking, very observant “realization” of
the Antiochene topographical mosaic in chapter 4 is by Tina Re; I have learned a lot about
the mosaics by seeing them through her artist’s eye. I off er my best thanks to all, and to Keith
Condon for presenting the book for publication by Yale University Press and for seeing it
through its fi nal stages, as well as to Lawrence Kenney for his careful and extremely helpful
editorial work. Th e book has been published with the generous assistance of the Frederick W.
Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University and the Yale Department of Classics.
In the course of researching and writing this book I have become ever more aware of the
fascination and importance for historians of the ordinary things of life as they are documented
in ancient texts. Th eophanes’ journey to Antioch lasted a few months only, but for this short