ABSTRACT
As we shall see, the first veterans arrived in Karanis in the Domitianic period and from then until the first decades of the third century, veterans and their families formed a significant proportion of the population of the village and of the region as well. It is, however, apparent that the scale of the Roman presence in the North-East Fayum was not representative of the situation in Egypt as a whole. There are very few veterans or even Romans attested at Oxyrhynchus, though the number of papyri from that city is greater than that from Karanis and Philadelphia combined. In the second century, the percentage of the population of the Oxyrhynchite who had military connections was between a tenth and a twentieth of that at Karanis. In the same period, less than 5 per cent of the population of the Oxyrhynchite was Roman. Recent work on the material from Soknopaiou Nesos has shown that that village also had a very small Roman element.1 The veterans of the army were not evenly dispersed across Egypt and although some veterans lived separately from any veteran community, the distinct concentration of veterans requires explanation.
