INTRODUCTION – THE APHRODITO PAPYRI

Before turning to the evidence for the empire as a whole, the picture derived from the Apion papyri and other documents of an essentially ‘aristocratic’ focus requires a measure of nuance. At a local level, families such as the Apiones clearly wielded an enormous amount of influence and power in late antique Egypt. Yet, as the epistolary papyri inform us, even on the Apion family's own estates, the authority of the landowner and his representatives did not go entirely unchallenged. The power of the great landowner was always contestable, and there were always those willing to contest it. The papyri record that amongst those who sought to do so in the sixth century was a practising lawyer and jobbing poet from the Middle Egyptian village of Aphrodito known by the name of Dioscorus.

Two thematically and chronologically distinct papyrological dossiers survive from late antique Aphrodito. The later of these, dating from the Umayyad period, is derived from the bureau of a local Arab governor, Qurra b. Sharik (r. 709–14). For the earlier period, encompassing much of the sixth century, the extant papyrological dossier preserves part of the archive of one of Aphrodito's most prominent families, the descendants of a certain Psimanobet – ‘the goose-herd's son’. Although, as this name would suggest, the origins of the family were relatively humble, by the early sixth century, as two commentators on the Aphrodito papyri have noted, its male members had come to serve