A Lexical Study of the Language of Physical Violence in the Zenon Archive

The study of the documentary papyri has proven fruitful ground for linguistic research of the Greek language in the Koine period (III BCE to VI CE). Little of this research, however, has been lexical in nature; that is, considering the meaning of individual words. Similarly, little of the lexicography of post-Classical Greek has successfully integrated papyrological evidence on a significant scale. This has left a critical gap in our understanding of the Greek language. A recent current of research, however, spearheaded by scholars such as Lee, Muraoka, and Aitken, has begun to make progress in this field, and lexical research in the Greek documentary papyri and of the post-Classical period more generally is of growing interest in the scholarly community. The present study places itself in this current of research, taking as its subject the vocabulary of physical violence in the Zenon Archive. The Zenon Archive, a 3rd century BCE archive of administrative documents, is the largest known archive of documentary papyri and has thus served as a valuable source of evidence in previous linguistic research. This study covers the twelve verbs or verbal expressions used to describe the twenty-two clear references to physical violence in the archive. Of these twelve, six demonstrate little to no development from their pre-Koine meanings: μαστιγῶ (and its compound προσματιγῶ), τύπτω, ὑβρίζω, ἐπιτίθημι, and παραλαμβάνω. The other six, however, do show clear evidence of development: the related group of expressions προσφέρω τὰς χεῖρας, ἐπιφέρω τὰς χεῖρας, and λαμβάνω τὰς πληγάς, παροινῶ, ἀποβιάζομαι, and προσπηδῶ. The analysis of these terms across a series of individual word studies, drawing parallels from contemporary literary and papyrological sources, demonstrates the important role of the documentary evidence in contextualising developments visible in the literary sources, as well as drawing out developments unique to the language of the documentary papyri.