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INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
1 Preamble
Historians are increasingly recognising that outsiders and those on the margins
of communities are integral elements of every social structure, and that
they therefore have a significant effect on the historical process. Social historians
have taken this into account by paying greater attention to people of
lower social standing and members of marginal groups, alongside the upper
classes, who are in any case over-represented in the sources. 1
As a result, there is currently a developing interest in such historical
phenomena as poverty, exclusion and crime. Such curiosity, which has impacted
on many fields of study, can be understood on psychological grounds
as emanating from the need to explain the potential for crisis which has
arisen on the fringes of modern society, both within that fringe and with
regard to its relationship to wider social groups.
2 Problems and methodologies
In the fields of social history and the history of thought, robbers and bandits
are fascinating objects of study and those historians dealing with marginal
groups have given them an extraordinary amount of attention. 2 In the sphere
of Roman history there have been numerous enquiries on this theme. The
most important contributions will be cited at the end of this Introduction,
in the context of a survey of research. What these studies have produced is
extremely informative, but somewhat controversial and viewed overall, still
incomplete. The subject can, therefore, hardly be regarded as closed. But if
one is to engage with robbers and bandits of the Roman period, a serious
problem is raised by the question as to how precisely one should handle them.
The assembling of the references to latrones (or leistai) within the Roman
Empire soon leads to the sobering conclusion that Roman writers gave
banditry and other everyday forms of crime only cursory attention. It was,
indeed, a ground rule of Roman historiography that ‘it is not fitting to
draw out a history through the inclusion of insignificant details’. 3 I shall
1