The Complaint of Hermias: Dispute Settlement and Social Norms in the Second Century BC
Mai Ishida
Journal of Sino-Western Communications 8 2 2017年12月
[査読有り] The well-known lawsuit from the Ptolemaic period, the ‘Trial of Hermias’, shows us how the dispute was settled at the final stage in the presence of a royal official, the epistates of the nome. Hermias, a military officer from Kom Ombo, had submitted petitions to various authorities, laying claim to his house against the Egyptian funerary priests, the choachytai. This paper examines the litigants’ strategic discussion based on their different cultural and social backgrounds, thereby revealing the factors affecting the dispute settlement. Three main factors were involved in this case – the power of the government official who received petitions, the plural legal order in which the royal ordinance, the native law, and the Greek law coexisted, and the social norms especially at the local level. The author aims to deal with this conflict between the individual and the group as the reconstitution of the order of the local community. This case was finally resolved through negotiation rather than the trail in the court. This reflects how the new institutions and the ancient customs complemented each other in the Ptolemaic society.