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POLITICIANS AND PRETENDERS AS LATRONES
the outlying regions of Isauria to veterans. These grants were conditional on
the male children of the settlers entering the army at the age of eighteen,
in order to prevent them turning to banditry. 136 Consciously or not, this is a
return to the policy of Pompey the Great, whose own settlement programme
had likewise sought to stop the poverty stricken inhabitants of the area from
becoming the dependants of local moguls.
If, therefore, in the case of Lydius and Palfuerius we can suppose two
different ‘bandits’ who, during the reign of Probus, exercised power in Isauria
and its surrounding regions, our picture of the effects of the third-century
‘Crisis’ in southern Asia Minor becomes correspondingly more intense. The
appearance of local men of power, described in the sources as ‘bandits’, may
be seen as a typical manifestation of crisis in the area.
6 Conclusion
Consideration of the employment of latro to mean ‘domestic political arch
enemy’ has introduced us to a set of people beginning with Catiline and
ending with emperors and usurpers of Late Antiquity. To be emphasised is
the particular contribution of Cicero to the creation of this specialised usage.
The constant elements in the Roman picture of the common, contemptible
bandit – poverty, need, an appetite for booty and violence, together with
audacious courage and pride – were also used to designate bitter, political
foes as latrones. An important finding is the break in the application of
the concept from Augustus to the third-century ‘Crisis’. This period may be
regarded as picking up the threads of the fall of the Republic, and of the
characterising features of its political polemic. This links both eras as episodes
of crisis in Roman history.
Among the chief propagandisers of the bandit theme were the panegyrists
and the senatorial historians, the former as political mouthpieces of rulers
under challenge, the latter generally as critics of barbarian- and soldieremperors.
In literary terms, emperors as latrones and bandits as latrones are, in
their individual traits, indistinguishable. Physical strength, lack of education,
rude manners, unbridled sexual activity and a pronounced capacity
for drink are the marks of such ‘bandits’ with, preferably, birth in simple,
pastoral societies. Even when something good could be said about them, it
was drawn from the repertoire of the ‘noble savage’, in the form of simplicity,
courage and a sense of fairness. In official and semi-official usage latro
became jaded to some degree, and this led it, like the similarly employed
tyrannus, to being employed impersonally as a technical term for usurper.
Complementing all this in external politics were situations in which the
bandit motif was applied to self-styled men of power at the margins of
the Empire, unaccepted by Rome. In chronological terms, this phenomenon
occurred in the same periods which produced most of the evidence for it in
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