INTRODUCTION

As they appear in the surviving evidence, the Oxyrhynchite nome's social networks in the Byzantine period were highly centralized and hierarchical. The chains of social connectivity were generally vertical in nature, formed by unequal social transactions. This chapter's prosopographical study of the Oxyrhynchite elite uncovers a curious phenomenon. We can rarely prove direct links between members of the Oxyrhynchite elite; however, we can often demonstrate indirect links, in which the local office-holders and landowners hired the same scribes, had contact with the same church officials, and so forth. In network terms, the consequences of this sort of connectivity are clear: rather than documenting a web of mingled horizontal and vertical ties similar to what we see in Aphrodito in Chapters 3 and 4, our Oxyrhynchite evidence maps a series of social hubs, in which the landholders are the social centers, and their service personnel are the spokes of the wheel, extending the landholders' social reach throughout the nome. This pattern holds true not only for the elite families who spanned the mid-fifth to the mid-sixth centuries ad, but also for a number of high-profile examples late in the sixth century.

Despite the vast amount of papyrological evidence available, the social history of the Oxyrhynchite nome has long resisted a synthetic book-length treatment. The close prosopographical analysis of the large landholders and other nome elite I provide here fills a small part of that gap.

INTRODUCTION

Evidence for social life in Byzantine Aphrodito comes almost entirely from the archive or archives of Dioskoros and his family. Dioskoros and his relatives were certainly at the center of these archives. However, network analysis of this evidence indicates that he and his family were by several standards of measurement less socially important than we would have expected. These same analyses draw our attention to previously understudied members of Aphrodito's lower classes, and invite us to ask why such individuals – hidden from view because of our attention to Dioskoros and his family – might appear so structurally important for Aphrodito's social connectivity. The analyses that measure features of the network as a whole – particularly distance, centrality, and network cutpoints – indicate that Aphrodito's social network had a very low degree of hierarchy and was relatively decentralized. These results lend support to the picture of Aphrodito's social network drawn in the previous chapter. Coming from a century we picture as having rather rigid social hierarchies, this evidence opens the door to reconsidering the realities of village life throughout late antiquity.

I have already argued for the importance of strong, multiplex ties in Aphrodito village society. But the evidence supporting those results was incomplete at best, based upon a handful of well-known people. Faced with the riches of Aphrodito's papyrological corpus, modern scholars have naturally gravitated towards the most obvious characters and story-lines: Dioskoros the lawyer-poet; Phoibammon, his entrepreneurial in-law; Aphrodito's interactions with Upper Egypt's political elite.

Byzantine Egypt produced social networks of differing shape and size. This book explores two of those networks. The first network in this study is nome-wide, that of the Oxyrhynchite nome's elite office-holders and families. This study examines the process by which one of those elite families grew its estates and influence to considerable proportions. The evidence available to us reveals this network's tendency towards hierarchy and social centralization. The second network in this study is that of a single village. This study looks at Aphrodito's self-styled “small landowners,” farmers, shepherds, craftsmen and others. It then measures the levels of interconnectivity among and social distance between these groups. This picture shows a remarkable degree of social parity and decentralization.

These two pictures are not mutually exclusive.

From the start, I have stressed that both traditional prosopography and network analysis create divergent social pictures of Oxyrhynchos and Aphrodito. Aphrodito village society had a powerful face-to-face element, in which social ties developed along pre-existing lines. Analysis of the strongest ties in the Girgis prosopography highlighted the importance of corporate links – particularly among the community of landholders and the community of shepherds – and did not uncover particularly strong links of a subordinating nature, such as patron–client. Analysis of Aphrodito's petition to the empress Theodora strengthened this impression. The Aphrodito villagers presented themselves by group, naturally taking social action with those to whom they already had corporate ties. Contrary to what Gagos and van Minnen have argued, an unprejudiced reading of the sequence of names in that petition suggests a relatively relaxed approach to whatever social hierarchies existed.

The structural characteristics of the Aphrodito network as a whole support this impression. An average distance through the entire network of under three degrees of separation suggests that Aphrodito's social world was relatively small. We must also remember that distance only measures ties attested in the documentary record. It is for that reason impressive that Aphrodito should appear so small on paper. Certainly, in any village society, most people would be familiar to one another by sight or by reputation. By this measure, Aphrodito's world would have been even smaller than the documentary evidence suggests.

INTRODUCTION

Social networks in Aphrodito look much different from those of Oxyrhynchos. Aphrodito villagers acquired new property from, established lease agreements with and married people already familiar to them through previous social and economic connections. These were arrangements between social equals, men who held the same status or belonged to the same guild. The Aphrodito evidence suggests a relatively even distribution of horizontal social ties throughout the village's social network. This is in sharp contrast to the hierarchical, vertical ties found in the Oxyrhynchite evidence. In Chapter 1, I argued that missing evidence from hypothetical Oxyrhynchite village archives would not overturn the impressions formed about the nome's social networks based on the view from the city itself. Here, I make a parallel argument: Aphrodito's village-level social structures were independent of larger nome-wide structures in the Antaiopolite. Discovery of new papyri from Antaiopolis would still leave us with an Aphrodito rich in multiplex ties between social equals.

What specific patterns in Aphrodito's social interactions are documented in the papyrological record? How did prominent figures in Aphrodito conduct their business? To whom did they turn for assistance and advice? What social connections were behind their land acquisitions and other economic activities? Questions like these are the stock in trade of the sociologists and anthropologists who developed social network analysis. Time and again, our study of Aphrodito answers these questions by highlighting strong, multiplex social ties.

INTRODUCTION

The Apions were the largest and most influential of the great Oxyrhynchite families. The growth and spread of their estate through the Oxyrhynchite nome transformed the region's social geography. Their estate's economic activities – both land ownership and fiscal responsibility – connected them to a considerable percentage of the nome's population. I argue below that the Apionic bureaucracy had ties to roughly 15 per cent of the nome's population, over 10,000 people, at a conservative estimate. How the family gained this level of prominence has never been satisfactorily explained, but the analyses in this chapter provide helpful clues.

Network analysis of Apionic toponyms indicates that the Apionic estates did not grow outward from a rural, ancestral core with a specific regional focus. Rather, Apionic places appear everywhere in the Oxyrhynchite topographical network, linked as much to each other as to other places beyond Apionic reach. Moreover, network measurements of centrality show that the Apions were most important in locations that were in some cases relatively obscure. These conclusions, taken in combination, enhance the picture presented in Chapter 1, that the social and economic ties of the Oxyrhynchite elite created considerable hierarchical centralization throughout the nome, a centralization driven from the city itself.

Because the Apionic oikos is the best-documented institution in late antique Oxyrhynchos, if not in all of late antique Egypt, it represents a singular opportunity for exploring the region's social connectivity.

We do not know much about the posthumous ancient reception of Tacitus' work, beyond that his books did not disappear entirely. One of our few data concerns the emperor Tacitus:

As always, the testimony of the Historia Augusta calls for caution, but true or not, the story is interesting. It presents the worst fate that Tacitus' work can imagine for itself, and an end it was designed to avoid. The historian who strove to show that his work owed nothing to the regime's authority and influence, indeed that he had produced it in the face of institutional obstacles presented by the existence of principes, had in the end to be rescued from oblivion by an emperor, whose supposed intervention is far too much like the authorizing signature Josephus sought from Titus (Vit. 363) as proof that he had been right in his portrayal of the Jewish War.