I found Tryphon's
story in a great book: "The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean
Jewish Peasant" by John Dominic Crossan. The author is one of the most important scholar of the New
Testament and of the so-called "Historical Jesus". While not all of
his ideas are still mainstream in the Academy, he remains a fundamental author
who has written beautiful as well as very important books.
In this book
Crossan, among other things, also tries to reconstruct the environment and lifestyle
of Jesus and his family and among the various examples of people of the same
social class uses Tryphon, on which we have extensive documentation.
But how do we get
a "vast" record of a Mr. Nobody? Who ever wrote about him? Who told his life? No one in particular, many
different people wrote about him. We often forget one thing about the Roman
Empire: it had an advanced and efficient administration and administration means
bureaucracy, and bureaucracy has always meant paperwork and paperwork.
I have in my
house a wooden box, full of the “important” documents: succession, land
registry documents, tax returns, and payment receipts a couple of legal
proceedings. I guess everybody got a similar collection.
Tryphon also had
his own collection of important documents and it survived. If you had never
heard of Tryphon before, may you have
heard the name of Oxyrhynchus. It was a city, quite important in ancient Egypt,
south of present-day Cairo, and it is famous because for more than a century
archaeologists have been digging and studying its landfill. Yes, you have heard
well, its landfill: from the garbage of a civilization you discover many
things, especially when the hot and dry climate of Egypt perfectly preserves
many things, including papyrus.
Oxyrhynchus is a
mine of ancient texts: he has given us lost works of Pindar, Saffo, Alceus,
Archilocus, Menander, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides,not to mention the
fundamental texts for the history of archaic Christianity, several Apocryphal
Gospels, the lost works of Irenaeus and together with all these famous names
has given us endless, more banal, piece of papers: from shopping lists, to
private letters, a precious mine,
largely still to be studied. And, among all these papers there are the
important documents jealously preserved by Tryphon.
Tryphon was born
in 8 AD under the reign of Octavian Augustus, and has two younger brothers: Thoönis
and Onnophris. He had taken the same ame of his
grandfather who was the head of the family and who every year listed in a
census list his entire extended family in order to define the amount of the head
tax. In these lists we discover the name of his grandmother, Timotos, and of his father and mother,
Dionysus and Thamounion and of two
uncles Didimus and Thoonis.
The names of the family suggest that the family of Tryphon was of Greek origin, settlers arrived in Egypt in ptolemaic times or at least of Egyptians now hellenized. The documents also make us understand that the family's activity was that of wool weaver, not, the much more valuable, Egyptian linen.
Another important
point that we must bear in mind: despite all these papers there is no evidence
that any of them were able to write or even just read. All these documents are
written by professional scribes. In fact, we certainly know that Tryphon could
not write on his own, because it was specified in several papers.
Almost certainly Tryphon
had no formal education and we know that he started working as weaver before he
was 14 years old, the receipts of the taxes paid are quite clear (I will not
sit there to stress and bore you on all the various taxes paid, a sad topic and,
already at that time, ignobly complicated).
He also marries Demetrous,
daughter of Eraclides, in his early 20s. It was not a lucky marriage: among the
cards we find nothing less than a complaint made by Tryphon to Alexander,
Strategos of Oxyrhynchus,in 35 DC: he
accuses his wife of leaving the house taking away items of his own, worth for 40
drachmas, with the help of his mother and demanding their return.
In a way that can
recall certain modern causes of separation, in the Tryphon complaint, he goes
far to point out that he has always treated his wife well and that he has
always provided her with "luxuries" that went beyond his economic
possibilities, but that she still chose to leave taking away stuff not hers!
Despite Tryphon's
accusations and laments, perhaps Demetrous had her good reasons, since we
discover that only a few months later Tryphon begins to live with another
woman, Sareus, daughter of Apions.
It is not a
marriage, it is a “trial” cohabitation, regulated by a written contract (not
between Sareus and Tryphon obviously,
given the times, but between Tryphon and her father), complete with a monetary
guarantee to be used for the maintenance of the woman, but that Tryphon would
have to return with as much as 50% interest, if the relationship had stopped.
We do not know
whether the threat of having to pay more than 100 drachmas of penalty, contributed
or if perhaps this time things were better, but they did not split up. They
have a first daughter in 37 AD, which Tryphon recognizes taking charge of her upkeep, with a document written in a surprisingly
modern way, and finally, after 7 years, they officially marry.
Life seems to be
going well: the only problems seem to be a complaint for an attempted
aggression and, we can guess, the death of his father, Dionysus, since Tryphon
begins to act as the head of the family by signing the apprenticeship contract
of his younger brother Onnophris with another weaver, Abaros.
In the same
period the other brother Thoonis leaves the city, as we can understand by other
documents requesting him be deleted from the residence and from the tax lists.
Around 40 DC Tryphon
and Sareus have another son, a male, Apion, but Apion will be the subject of a series of
events, which make us understand fully how different their world was from ours.
Sareus, in 45 AD,
is being sued in front of Oxyrhynchus Strategos, such Tiberior Claudio Pasión, on charges of kidnapping or rather,
technically, the theft of a young slave!
The documentation
of the legal proceedings is quite complete, with all the affidavits of the
various parties involved and allows the events to be reconstructed.
Shortly after
Apion's birth, Sareus takes an infant slave to nurse, upon payment. The newborn
had been abandoned (in a drain, the documents
say),a sad event that was common at that time and in those places, and he had
been taken as a slave, so provided the law for those who cared for an abandoned
newborn, by a certain Pesuris, who had entrusted him to Sareus to be nursed
together with his son Apion.
The thing ends up
in court, between stamped papers and lawyers (Theon and Aristocles, very appropriate names for
lawyers) and in the end Tiberius Claudius
Pasión agrees with Tryphon and his wife: dead baby is the slave and the child still
alive is their son.
The troubles do
not end there, however, among the papers we find other complaints of Tryphon against Pesuris who in his opinion continues to
persecute him and to hinder him maliciously, to which is added complaints for
assault on Sareus by a woman fomented always by Pesuris.
At the age of 42,
in 50 AD, Tryphon is discharged, with an official document of the Prefect of the
Lower Egypt, from any future military service due to his eyes problems (the
document speaks of cataracts).
If health doesn't
seem to help him, the rest of life still looks positive, a second son (Thoönis)
is born and business seems to thrive
enough to allow him to buy two more frames.
In 55 D.C. at the
age of 47 we finally have another important document. Tryphon buys from his
cousin "half of a three-storyhouse" bordering the house he had
inherited from his mother and located on the corner between the street called Temegenouthis and the Shepherds' Street, the price is of 426 Silver Drachmas
(plus a 10% tax for the transfer of ownership... the world has not changed).
The peculiarity
of this document is that it allows us to take a deeper look at Tryphon, to
identify him with confidence the scribe describes him in detail:, of middle
height, fair, having a long face and a scar above his eyebrow and another on
his right knee
After that the
documentary trace disappears, at the age of 62 Tryphon vanishes again into the darkness of
anonymity. We don't know anything else about him and Sareus and their children.
Perhaps the rest of their lives is hidden in papyri still to be deciphered and classified
or perhaps they are still safe under the sand of the desert.
What we can say,
however, is that these documents open an unexpected glimmer of light not on an
emperor, a conqueror or some other great man, who moves on the stage of history,
but on a normal family, on their life behind the scenes of the great story. With
their joys and sorrows, his little slats and his small and great successes. A
life that sounds at times as modern as ours and in other moments exotic if not
alien.
A normal life,
but not trivial.
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