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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
besides ‘master craftsmen’ technitai can also denote experts in fine arts and in
the stage. It was in this sense that technites achieved fame of a sort through
Nero’s last words, also reported by Cassius Dio: ‘Oh Zeus, what an artist
perishes in me!’ 34 If ‘artist’ is also intended or included in what Dio says
about Bulla, this detail acquires quite a different resonance. A Bulla Felix
who detained and rewarded artists was making himself out to be an educated,
cultivated and generous monarch, with a court resplendent as a home
of the muses. The households of Hellenistic kings may have been his model.
The sharpest possible contrast to this subtle evocation of royal sensibilities at
a bandit ‘court’ was offered by the boorish soldier-emperors of the Severan
dynasty. Here it is sufficient to recall the advice that Septimius Severus is
supposed to have given his sons on his deathbed: ‘Enrich the soldiers, and
scorn all other men.’ 35 Dio’s (or whosesoever else it was who helped work up
the story) sideswipe, covertly criticising the monarchy of his day, struck all
the harder because the idealised negative of the Severans was to be found in
a bandit.
Using two examples, Dio then reports on the masterly daring with which
Bulla led state officials by the nose, demonstrating his superiority and teaching
them a lesson. 36 The first was occasioned by the capture of two members
of his gang, who were sentenced to be thrown to the beasts in the arena.
Disguised, Bulla appeared before the soldiers guarding the prisoners and
pretended to be a city official. 37 He commanded that certain named prisoners
be handed over to him. Among these were, of course, his comrades-inarms,
to whom he thereby restored life and liberty. The course of events here
will have been known to Dio’s readers, mutatis mutandis, from another act
of liberation. Under Marcus Aurelius, there was unrest among the Bukoloi,
herdsmen of the Nile delta, notorious as bandits. 38 The catalyst was, apparently,
the arrest of some of their number by Roman police officials. Under
a leader called Isodorus, a chosen group of men attempted a daring rescue.
We will return to the incident later. Suffice it here to say that the Bukoloi
took on other roles to release their comrades: they disguised themselves
as the prisoners’ wives to surprise the guards. Dio seems to have developed a
taste for having his bandits appear in fancy dress. And it looks as if he used
this imaginative device a third time – about which more, again, below.
Whether these events ever actually occurred, which has to be doubted, is
not really important in this context. What matters in both instances is the
impudent cunning used against the Roman state and its forces, likewise
demonstrated in the following scene.
Bulla again pretended to be someone else. This time he played a simple
robber – from the band of Bulla Felix. He gained access to a centurion commissioned
to destroy him and his men. Informing on himself, he promised
this official that he would deliver Bulla into his hands, if he accompanied
him to the bandit’s lair. It was the fate of the poor centurion, the trusting
representative of an incompetent military apparatus, to make himself a pitiful
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