A petition to the epistrategos Hierakion from Aurelia Aretous alias Herounous, acting with her guardian, complaining that Horion alias Pemous and his son Heron seized grain land she inherited near Moirai in the Hermopolite nome, expelled her tenants, stole her irrigation machine and interfered with her wheat. She asks that they be summoned before his court and that she recover the rents and the machine.
In English machine translation
To […] Hierakion, the most excellent epistrategos,
from Aurelia Aretous also called Herounous, daughter of Heron, citizen, with her guardian Aurelius Athenodoros son of Herodianos. My petition, lord, which requires your intervention, has a brief statement. There came to me by inheritance from my aforementioned and deceased father, according to the will which he left, in the komogrammateia of Moirai of the great Hermopolite nome, grain lands of twenty arouras and more, and […] I took possession, collecting the rents […] which they paid in the manner, as I said before, as also my father […]. But in the present year one Horion, […] called Pemous, and his son Heron, […] unreasonably (?) attacked these lands without any law and without any authority and without my knowledge and consent, […] by right or by local violence, and drove out our […] cultivators who had long been farmers of the lands […], and, most unjust of all, sowing not the whole of the lands but a part, they have left the rest unsown. And not only this, but coming into my courtyard they found my irrigation machine, which I have for watering the crops, and took it away without any reason; and besides this they dared many other things. For after I had measured out all the dues owed for the past year, they found my heap of wheat […] which I kept for the burial of myself and of my family and of the […] they pledged (?) […] they themselves abused me in every way […] despising me as a weak woman […]. My lord, [since] so many and such great outrages [have been committed] against me, I ask that you be moved to intervene and to hear me against my opponents, and to order the strategos to summon them before your court to give account of the charges against them, so that through your intervention I may obtain […] justice and recover the rents of the lands owed […] and the machine together with the […], from which the dues owed to the most sacred treasury will also be preserved, and […].
Farewell.
The epistrategos was the senior Roman official over a group of nomes. The 'irrigation machine' (hydrantikon organon) was probably a water-lifting device such as a waterwheel.
Working translation of the DDbDP edition, made with Claude Opus 5.5 from the edition and the catalogue records shown below (catalogued as Petizione all’epistratego). It has not been reviewed by a papyrologist: check the edition before citing. Restorations follow the edition; […] marks lost text and (?) an uncertain reading.