Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Your wife in your name: P.Oxy. LXII 4340 Bagnall, Roger S Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Summer 1998; 39, 2; ProQuest pg. 157 Your Wife in Your Name: P.Oxy. LXII 4340 Roger S. Bagnall fi:.0NG THE DIVERSE GROUP of documentary papyri prepared by the late John Shelton and published in P.Oxy. LXII} pride of place may perhaps go to a third-century papyrus with a pair of letters about business matters, one each from Petosiris and Thaesis, written in the same hand and ad­ dressed to a woman named Didyme. They raise a number of difficulties, most saliently an apparent reference to "your wife" in a letter addressed by a woman to a woman. That apparent reference stimulated a query to the on-line papyrology discus­ sion group from Bernadette Brooten, who had recently argued for the existence of marriages between women in the Roman period,2 wondering whether papyrologists thought that the newly-published Oxyrhynchus papyrus might reflect such a marriage. (The edition had, without argument, suggested that the reference was just a slip.) Subsequent discussion with Pro­ fessor Brooten stimulated the writing of the remarks below, which try to provide a fuller argument that the editor was essentially correct in seeing an error on the writer's part in lSee my review of this volume in CR n.s. 48 (1998) 149-153. In what follows I consistently refer to "the editor," not to disguise his identity, but because in a posthumous publication of this sort I cannot distinguish Shelton's work from the alterations of the general editors. 2Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago 1996). Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 39 (1998) 157-167 © 2000 GRBS 157 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 158 YOUR WIFE IN YOUR NAME speaking of "your wife."3 First, however, I seek to provide a more secure date for the papyrus, to explain why the Greek of the letter might justify the supposition of an error, and to clarify some problems in the business dealings at stake. 1. Date The letters have been dated to the late third century by the editor on the basis of a price of wine. His argument runs as follows: "Line 21 mentions wine bought at sixty-four drachmas per /-lE'tprrCll<;. Comparable prices refer to KEpa/-lta, but the two terms are considered synonymous, see U. Wilcken, Gr. Ostr. I 761; a modification offered in P.K6ln V 220.7 n. deals with the tone of the words, not their metrological identification. Assum­ ing that this is in fact the case here, the price is well above the eleven drachmas charged per cerami on in VII 1055 (AD 267) but should be from a time earlier than 300/1, when three hundred drachmas is attested in CPR VI 12 .... Despite the fact that prices can fluctuate considerably in a comparatively short time, cf e.g. LIV 3773 introd. and lines 22-4 below, the differences in the amounts just cited are probably substantial enough to require a period of inflation to explain them." Wilcken's great work on ostraka has kept its value remark­ ably well over the course of a century; what he actually says, however, is more complicated than this citation would suggest. On the next page, in fact, Wilcken concludes, "Ich setze hiernach 1 npa/-ltOv = 1 /-l£'tPll't~<; oK'taxou<; = 2/3 /-l£'tPll't~<; ocooEKaxou<;." He takes the 12-chous metretes to have been 39.39 liters, and his keramion is thus 26.45 liters. But Wilcken was primarily concerned in this discussion with the Ptolemaic period, as is the note to P.KOln 220, and it is hardly to be as- 3Even more than usual I must stress that Professor Brooten must not be taken to agree with what follows, but I am grateful for the stimulus of our conversations "both electronic and ordinary" about this papyrus. I am also indebted to Alan Cameron for many observations in the discussions that accompanied the writing of his article (137-156 supra) and this one, and to Raffaella Cribiore for comments on an earlier draft. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ROGER S. BAGNALL 159 sumed that the keramion was an unvarying amount through the centuries of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Indeed, Dominic Rathbone pointed out in 1991 that "The name 'keramion', which just meant 'jar, amphora', was used of several different containers-cum-measures in Roman Egypt-hence the use of the adjectives 'monochoron' and 'dichoron'-and there co-existed choes and kotulai of varying sizes toO."4 Rathbone indeed argues that "keramion" in the Heroninus archive normally refers to the monochoron, and that the capacity of this keramion "can­ not have exceeded about 7.3 litres." He uses 7 liters as a rough equivalent. Such a figure is actually rather close to 2 choes (12 sextarii), which would measure about 6.5 liters, or one-sixth of the 12- chous metretes that Wilcken was discussing. Other keramia were in use in Egypt at various places and times; that in the fourth-century Dakhleh Oasis was probably 3 choes (9.72 liters).5 But generally we may suppose that the figure for the metretes given in P.Oxy. 4340 must be divided by somewhere between 4 and 6 in order to get a price for the keramion. That operation yields a figure in the range of 10.67 to 16 drachmas per keramion. A comparison with Rathbone's table of prices in the Appianus archive (466) and in other contemporary sources (467) shows that this range is consonant with the prices prev­ alent in the 250s and 260s, at all events before the large change in prices that occurred sometime not long before 276 (Rathbone 465). It is not certain that all of the non-Heroninos prices refer to the same size keramion that the Heroninos prices do, but most of them are not far from the 10-11 dr. range that the 2- chous keramion would cost if the 12-chous metretes were 64 dr. It therefore seems reasonable to assign the date ca 250-275 to 4 Economic Rationalism and Rural Society in Third-Century A.D. Egypt (Cambridge) 469. 5See R. S. Bagnall, The Kellis Agricultural Account Book (Oxford 1997) pp.47-51. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 160 YOUR WIFE IN YOUR NAME P.Oxy. 4340, with the terminus ante quem firm and the terminus post quem approximate.6 At all events, a date in the late third century, after the rise in prices ca 275, is out of the question. 2. Handwriting and Language The hand of the letters is the same throughout, although the greeting at the end is written much faster than the body, as is normal even where the same person has written the whole text. Most letters are well formed or at least fluent. Ligatures are not numerous, although connecting strokes from epsilon to iota and rho, for example, are common. The lines are reasonably straight. Overall, one forms the impression of an experienced writer, although certainly not a professional scribe. What is written in this form is another matter. The writer is by no means in flawless command of educated Greek; whether it is Petosiris or Thaesis, he/she omits syllables at least three times (1, 11, 31) and a relative pronoun once (23), as well as repeating one syllable in line 19.7 Violations of standard gram­ mar are frequent: £1tE~.l(PE~ (2), article for relative (6), mistaken cases (20, 25), acrnaSOJ for acrnasoll 'HpUK:A£i8n LEAJlWV. But even if the doubtfully read Elt' EIl(E) is right, we would not have a sequence of two datives as is supposed by the editor's text concerning Daphne. 11 Once in LGPN I, 16 times in lILA (most in southern Italy); only two clear attestations in the papyri (Clzr.Mitt. 155; P.Oslo II 34), if one leaves P.Mich. III 201 aside. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ROGER S. BAGNALL 163 the Herakleopolite would not be impossible here), but the ab­ sence of a preposition and, again, the placement of the word both weigh against it. Color, by contrast, is indeed attractive: ten bundles in green about the color of your cape.12 The major crux of the business comes in the second letter, that from Thaesis to her "daughter" Didyme: 16 1tapfDffiKa 'HpaKAtiDll~ LEA- IlffiV Kat Ka1tElDwAEt OtVOU IlE'tPll- 1a~ 'SSI Kat 10 1tPOAU1tOV KfPlla10~ a1tO­ {1tO} Ka1f -<;. none from verb forms; he suggests that the cause is the fact that both letters were sometimes omitted in pronunciation. In itself, however, EYPUljlf<; for EYPUIjIU<; is a much more common alteration; see Gignac II 348. 18 1 thank Revel Coles for an excellent color photocopy. 19It does not seem possible to construe ~ Y'UV~ (lOU ... as part of what was written (by Didyme, presumably), for it would then have no predicate and nothing to lead into 1!£1!pUKU. 2oFor detailed discussion and argument see Brooten (supra n.2) 320-336. For an opposing view, Alan Cameron, "Love (and Marriage) between Women" (supra 137££), showing that none of them is good evidence for Brooten's thesis. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 166 YOUR WIFE IN YOUR NAME The private letters of Roman Egypt are notoriously reticent about sexual and affectional matters, in part no doubt because they were not at all unlikely to be read by someone other than the recipient. 21 To find a plain reference to behavior that to most ancients would have seemed an outrageous travesty of normal canons of respectability, delivered in a matter-of-fact tone in a business letter which barely finds time for greetings, does not seem to me very likely. But it must be admitted that there are letters in which sarcasm, a joke, or elliptical allusion comes into play,22 sometimes to our puzzlement, and perhaps we should not a priori exclude that possibility here. (2) Could yuv~ have a meaning other than "wife"? Could it mean a female servant, for example, or some other family re­ lationship? Two difficulties arise: (a) For a female servant or slave to write in her mistress's name would suggest a spread of literacy that is otherwise hardly indicated in the papyri, where even free women of middle-class origin do not often write for themselves or avow literacy; and (b) the dictionaries know of no such usage; LSJ do cite examples where with a second sub­ stantive it can mean a female holder of some position, but no such second noun stands here. This possibility thus seems to me more remote than the first. (3) Something could have gone wrong with the construction. What could this be? In the direction of the editor's suggestion, but without claiming a simple verbal slip, it is quite possible that something like the following happened: Didyme wrote a letter in her husband's name-even one part of a pair like those here, with one in his name preceding and one in hers following? -to Petosiris and Thaesis, or to whichever one of them is ac- 21 For a discussion of the problems offered by the letters to a student of sexual behavior, see Dominic Montserrat, Sex and Society in Graeco-Roman Egypt (London 1996) 6-10. 22It is possible that P.Oxy. VIII 1160 is an example; see on this Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton 1993) 195-196 n.80; Montserrat (supra n.21) 153-154. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ROGER S. BAGNALL 167 tually doing the writing here. Responding, the writer addresses the letter to Didyme, but drifts into actually thinking of her husband, in whose name the previous letter was written, as the recipient-he was, after all, the supposed author, and probably the business being discussed here was in the letter written in his name. He can then refer to Didyme as "your wife" because he is thinking of her husband as the addressee. There can in the nature of things be no direct evidence for this hypothesis, but it may be psychologically more likely than the private joke sug­ gested in (1) above, and socially more probable than taking the phrase literally. It also fits very well the actual character of letter-writing, in which the person in whose name the letter was written was often not the one doing the actual writing. The business relationship revealed by these letters is clearly one in which the parties would know one another's handwritings well. May, 1998 Dept. of Classics Columbia Univ. New York, NY 10027 bagnall@columbia.edu