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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
revolutionaries and whosoever abandoned the protection of acting within the
law in order to pursue a struggle for political ends needed to pay their way,
if necessary by robbery. This again points up the basic link between ‘bandit’
as literally understood and ‘bandit’ in one of the many meanings that came
to be applied to the term. 9 But who and what were the Jewish leistai?
2 Leistai in the period leading up to the Jewish War
In his investigation of social relations in Judaea before and during the
Jewish War, Richard Horsley proposes that ‘the Jewish revolt against
Roman domination may be the most vivid and best attested example from
Antiquity of a major peasant revolt preceded and partly led by brigands.’ 10
In other words, Horsley wants to take the leistai, mentioned by Josephus in
countless episodes from the 130 years or so preceding the Jewish War, as a
key example of the likely applicability of Eric Hobsbawm’s model of social
banditry to even Greco-Roman society. In short, the Jewish leistai in the
period before ad 66 were, according to Horsley, social bandits par excellence.
I cannot agree with this interpretation.
Let us first consider Hobsbawm’s criteria for the concept of the social
bandit. 11 The habitat for the appearance of this form of protest is an agrarian
society in transition from a pre-state tribal organisation to a more sophisticated
state-like structure, with a differentiated social hierarchy and an essentially
capitalistic economy. Here, social banditry develops among the peasantry
as a pre-political form of protest by individuals or by small groups against
living conditions rendered unbearable by excessive taxation, arbitrary acts of
government and other forms of injustice (real or perceived). Unlike common
criminals social bandits are not social outsiders, but enjoy the trust, respect,
protection and, at times, the active support of the peasant community from
which they spring. Their gangs for the most part consist of no more than 10
to 20 men, who restrict their activities together to their immediate locality.
Apart from their fighting for a return to traditional arrangements regarded
as good and, generally, for fair dealing between human beings, social bandits
have no specific reform programme and no sense of identity. In particular,
they develop nothing aimed at the violent abolition of or change in existing
conditions of government, amounting to revolutionary upheaval. Social
bandits are occasional, adventitious raiders. According to Hobsbawm’s
theory, revolutionary movements – those aiming at the toppling by force of
the current order – come later. Social banditry is an earlier stage in this same
historical process. Social bandits and social revolutionaries do not occur
together; indeed, they are mutually exclusive.
Let us next consider the degree to which Hobsbawm’s notions of social
banditry really suit Jewish social relations during the later Second Temple
Period. It is clear that certain of his criteria are fully applicable to Jewish
leistai. For peasants impoverished by excessive taxation, facing uncontrollable
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