Ari Bryen, ACLS New Faculty Fellow in Rhetoric and Classics, will be "workshopping" the first chapter of his book.

Discussant: Samera Esmeir

The book is called: Violence in Roman Egypt: An Interpretation.
The chapter is called "Ptolemais Complains."
The series in which the book will appear is "Empire and After"

Basically, the project asks: What can we learn about life in an ancient empire from the way that people experience, describe, and complain about pain and injury? Petitions preserved on papyrus give us stories about being injured, but do they do more than document the fact that neighbors fight? Can we use them to reconstruct a bottom up view of what it means to live in an imperial society? In what ways can accounts of pain – and the redemption/socialization of pain through petitions – contribute to a historical account of empires?

Reception to follow.