A substantial collection of sources indicates that women constituted a considerable part of the travelers in the first centuries of the Roman Empire, a period in which traveling became increasingly popular with various social classes. These travelers have left traces of their experiences en route in personal letters on papyri and ostraca, in graffiti and on votive inscriptions. Classical scholarship has long ignored these sources, even though they offer us a unique insight into female experiences and self-representation. Recent excavations on and near the trade routes in the Eastern and Western Desert of Egypt, along which units of the Roman army were positioned in military outposts, protecting and controlling the area, have uncovered letters in which women – most of them of lower rank – discussed their concerns about traveling from and to the military camps of their husbands, fathers, or brothers. When combined with other sources such as papyri and graffiti, these documents give insight into the mobility of the female relatives of soldiers in Roman Egypt. They tell us something about the reasons why they decided to undertake journeys, the distance they covered (some while being heavily pregnant), where they stayed, and the dangers they encountered during the trip.

This chapter introduces slavery during the three centuries of Ptolemaic rule in Egypt for which papyri, recycled in mummy casing or discovered archived together, provide a wealth of texts in both Greek and Egyptian Demotic. Greek settlers brought a developed form of slavery to Egypt. Traditional forms of dependence, however, continued in domestic as in temple contexts, where sacred slaves were dedicated to a god. The terminology of slavery is scrutinised and Greek city law codes examined for information on slaves. The third-century BC archive of Zenon provides many details on where slaves came from and how they were acquired. Slaves are mainly found in a domestic context but there is some evidence for workshop employment, especially in textiles; evidence for their use in agriculture is minimal. To gain their freedom slaves might benefit from testamentary grants but running away was the more usual method.

This chapter focusses on the theme of justice in the expectation of intercession by the Roman emperor in judicial and non-judicial contexts. The chapter takes a wide range of evidence to chart the locations for imperial intercession, which includes images of justice on provincial coinage, asylum seeking by slaves at statues and images of the emperor, and quasi-fictional vignettes of encounters between the emperor and subjects in the context of embassies. Expectations of justice and fears of arbitrary judgement appear together in discourse.

Although it is sometimes argued that Latin loanwords were simply accented like Greek words, the reality was more complicated. We have evidence from the grammarian Herodian (via the epitome of pseudo-Arcadius) that Latin words sometimes had different accents from Greek words with the same terminations. There is also an accented papyrus showing a Latinate accent on a loanword. But Herodian also tells us that some Latin words did change their accents in Greek; there is no hard-and-fast rule for predicting which these were, and all available evidence must be examined on a case-by-case basis.

The final chapter explores the reception of songs lost and then recovered in papyri finds within their own fraught material context, focusing on Archilochus’ Cologne Epode and Timotheus’ Persae. How does the experience and narrative of loss, discovery, and recovery inform our sense of the bodies in these poems, so concerned themselves with the loss of limb and grasping touch?

This book opens with some introductory notes on the two ecumenical synods, marking the discrepancy between their importance in the festival world of the Principate and the obscurity they have fallen into in present-day scholarship. This is mainly due to the extremely fragmentary source material on their history and organisation. The ecumenical synods are mainly known from inscriptions, often heavily damaged, and papyri from Egypt. These diverse sources present us with a complex and often contradictory view. The most important documents for this study are decrees drawn up by the synods, their correspondence with emperors and membership certificates. A great variety in names and titles further complicates our understanding of the synods. Nevertheless, there are a number of basic elements that recur in the documents promulgated by the synods themselves, which are discussed briefly. The final part of the introduction sets out the structure of the book as well as the basic principles that form the core of the argumentation.

This chapter reveals the extent and variety of Roman anatomical literature beyond Galen. Many texts are completely lost or fragmentary; the chapter analyzes those that remain and reconstructs and contextualizes the nature and contents of those that do not. Rufus and the pseudo-Rufian texts are considered, including his experience with dissection and evaluation of evidence in Rufus vis-à-vis Galen’s assertion that Marinus was responsible for reviving anatomical activity. Detailed analysis of Marinus’ anatomical work is followed by the anatomical work of Quintus and his various students comes next, with discussion of Antigenes, Aiphicianos, Satyrus, Numisianus, Heracleianus, Pelops, Aelianus, and Lycus. The chapter then turns to anatomy in the pseudo-Galenic Doctor: Introduction, and then papyrological evidence for anatomical writing. Finally, it describes the Roman anatomical world in general, including how medical and philosophical sects approached anatomy, with discussions of the Erasistrateans, including Martianus, the Pneumatists, including Aretaeus, the Empiricists, the Methodists, including Soranus, the Stoics, the Peripatetics, and the Platonists, including Apuleius.

The Fayum oasis is key to our knowledge of houses in Roman Egypt. The villages and necropolises there have long attracted investigators focusing – in a more or less scientific way – on written documents, especially papyri, and material remains. Recently renewed research, including surveys and excavations, has supplemented the earlier evidence with new archaeological and textual data of the Hellenistic and Roman occupation of the area. This chapter gives an overview of what is known of the housing of the Fayum during that time. By integrating archaeological housing evidence from Fayum sites with papyrological information, this chapter aims to demonstrate that only an approach taking into account both the material and textual sources can result in a comprehensive picture of the appearance, layout, value, inhabitants and occupation history of individual buildings (for example, change of ownership through sale or the division of a single house among various house owners) within the context of entire village quarters. Moreover, this interdisciplinary method allows an improved understanding of the house types that coexisted on the Fayum sites during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and situates the Fayum evidence in the context of housing in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean.

This chapter brings together Greek documentary papyri from family archives in and around the town of Tebtynis in the Fayyum, with the archaeological record for housing across the region. In so doing, it presents a case for understanding the ownership, transactions and leasing of houses, or parts of houses, as a means to develop or preserve social status and standing in these towns and villages. The chapter explores transactions in the papyri between known individuals, against the context of the observed physical life cycle of houses and their associated outside space. It concludes that, for those individuals of specific social status (primarily gymnasial), both close and extended kinship ties were an important part of the considerations when financial transactions took place involving housing. Such activities were crucial to the operation of social positioning within the middle and upper echelons of these relatively small communities in the Fayyum. The extent to which these patterns may be said to be typical of similar elements of kinship and social structures across Roman Egypt is debatable, but the approach taken by this chapter provides a means of exploring these relationships further.

Within the last fifteen years there have been two additions to Sappho’s corpus (the Cologne fragment on old age, published in 2004, and the more recent Brothers and Cypris poems, published in 2014) both discovered in Greco-Roman Egypt. Notwithstanding this fact there is a general tendency to treat Egypt as idiosyncratic: useful when some aspect of a recovered text fits a scholar’s notion of Sappho’s poetic practice or ancient reception in the Archaic or Classical Period, but otherwise dismissed as irrelevant in taste and in patterns of survival. To test this assumption, I consider the survival of Sappho’s poetry from two perspectives: what ancient Greek sources outside of Graeco-Roman Egypt reveal about literate (as opposed to performative) reception of Sappho and how papyrus and parchment sources recovered from Egypt nuance that picture. My conclusion is that reception outside of and within Egypt is remarkably similar, that it is not possible to make a case for more than a specialized readership in either location, and that ancient readers read Sappho no more frequently than other lyric poets who do not, however, command the modern attention.

Chapter 17 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho gives an account of the papyri of Sappho discovered over the past century as historical artefacts in their own right – what do they tell us about who was reading Sappho, and where and when was this reading taking place? What do we learn from them about the transmission and eventual loss of her poetry?

Chapter 16 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho investigates how the poetry of Sappho came to the world of the Alexandrian Museum, placing her transmission scholarly schematisation of the Greek literary heritage that took place within that period.