latrones - Get a Free Blog

IMPERIAL CHALLENGERS: BULLA FELIX AND MATERNUS
Postumus. Clemens replies, ‘As you turned yourself into a Caesar!’ We
owe our knowledge of this to Tacitus who, as we shall see, subtly shaped his
account of the false Agrippa Postumus into a merciless critique of Tiberius. 65
However, this incident is also described, in a slightly abbreviated form, by
Dio. His narrative, virtually identical to that of Tacitus, 66 contains the same
striking exchange. 67 This, in its turn, is very similar to that between Papinian
and Bulla Felix. 68
The close correspondence between all three passages suggests that Dio
took the motif of the quick-witted challenger from Tacitus (or, from a
source that drew on Tacitus) and applied it to Bulla. 69 Indeed, Bulla’s case is
comparable to that of Clemens in many important respects. Both challengers
exploited a situation in which they controlled the moral high ground to
make their opponents, the emperors Tiberius and Septimius Severus, aware
of their own failings and inadequacies. Both could, as charismatic leaders,
count on the support of respectable followers. Both could be taken only by
deceit. Both could re-cast their own defeats as triumphs over an emperor.
And both are described in the texts with careful sympathy. 70
But reference to a direct or indirect link between Tacitus and Dio is not
all that can be made of the theme of the impudent bandit. We have to
recognise that not even Tacitus, or any other historian of the early Principate,
was the creator of this motif. In Cicero’s De Republica there is a fragment
recording a scene from an encounter of Alexander the Great with a pirate. It
centres on the following exchange:
Questioned by Alexander as to the ill deed by which it was that he,
with his single ship, had been impelled to become the scourge of
the seas, he replied, ‘By the same one as impelled you to become the
scourge of the whole world.’ 71
As the sea bandit saw it, Alexander was another just like himself. Apparently
the same was true of the Scythian envoys, who reproached the Macedonian
king saying: ‘But you, who boast that you have come in pursuit of robbers,
are in fact the robber of the whole world.’ 72 It seems that Alexander had
justified his campaign of conquest as the bringing to justice of brigands.
The theme of Alexander as the bandit par excellence was finally adopted by
Seneca: ‘But he [Alexander] was from his youth a robber and a devastator of
nations, as much a menace to his friends as to his enemies.’ 73 And Alexander
himself, as a departed spirit, debating with the dead Hannibal in the Underworld
as to who was the true king, while claiming this distinction as his
own disparaged his rival as a bandit. 74
The feisty outlaw who exposed the ruler as one of his own is a recurrent
theme, the role of which was to question prevailing concepts of legitimacy. 75
The episodes in which it was set were intended to alert readers to the
circumstance that even the laws which made states states and rulers rulers
119