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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
shown that they always fall into one of these categories. To be blunt, the
historical bandits are no different from the fictional. 27 It must be said that
such similarity should not lead to the conclusion that the fictional bandits
were drawn closely from life, but rather to the exact opposite, that in the telling
of their stories the historical bandits were made into romantic figures.
It is the main contention of this study that historians made historical
bandits look like bandits in novels, not that novelists modelled their bandits
on those in history. Both fictional and historical bandits were the projections
of contemporary ideas. The nature and function of these ideas will be examined
below.
We can get closer to social reality in Antiquity by means of the legal
texts, as found in the Corpus Iuris Civilis and in textbooks by the classical
Roman jurists. These show that the state regarded banditry as a social and
legal problem. From the repeated concern of the legal texts with the criminal
act of ‘robbery’, as evidenced in imperial rescripts and constitutions, we can
see periods in which banditry clearly reached a threatening level. In particular
(and something which we know from contemporary experience), intensification
of punishment reveals at least as much about the helplessness of the
state as about its decisiveness. Further information comes from inscriptions
recording the violent deaths of individuals at the hands of robber bands. We
are provided with particular and detailed information concerning banditry,
theft and other forms of criminal behaviour in the Roman period by the
Egyptian papyri. However, I will postpone discussion of these areas until
Chapter 1.
The number and character of the sources have further consequences for
the methods by which the topic of bandits can be pursued. Summarising
this review of the material, I would again emphasise that our knowledge of
Roman robbery and banditry rests on two types of information: first, on the
(few) reports of concrete instances and, second, on the utterances of ancient
authors, generally based on no specific case and never to be taken at face
value.
The first major problem with regard to methodology is that the number
of reported cases is almost zero relative to the number that we can roughly
estimate as having occurred. It is thanks to a more or less accidental reference
by a single author that we know that Ephesus, in the imperial period,
possessed an archive in which were stored the city’s criminal records. 28 Of
course, we are almost entirely lacking in such sources. A happy exception
to this rule is provided by the records of the police archives of a community
(a nome) in Egypt under the early Principate, dealt with in Chapter 1
(pp. 25ff.). There is simply not enough information for empirical research.
Likewise, the depth of information given for a particular case is usually so
shallow that it cannot serve as a model for a larger number of apparently
identical or similar instances.
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