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INTRODUCTION
findings lead me to agree with Shaw, but only partially. While Shaw sees the
latro basically as a concrete social type, equally basically he seems to me to
be an artefact of literary imagination. 47 As such, a product of contemporary
perceptions, the figure of the latro indeed fills a social role. I trust that what
I have said about Bulla Felix in the third section of this Introduction and
my detailed study of his case in Chapter 6 justify my criticism of Shaw, and
show the latro as a literary figure, a projection of social aspirations.
A few years after Shaw’s ‘Bandits’, Anton van Hooff’s ‘Ancient robbers:
reflections behind the facts’ (1988) was published; it is derived from his
‘Latrones famosi’, published as early as 1982. 48 According to van Hooff, his
researches ‘attempt to describe ancient robbery in the terms of Hobsbawm’s
concept of “social banditry”. 49 In this respect, my criticism of Hobsbawm
may be extended to include van Hooff ’s contributions to the debate, insofar
as he too regards what we are told about latrones as basically authentic.
This methodological problem occurs clearly in the following quotation
from van Hooff’s ‘Ancient robbers’: ‘Sometimes the robbers of attested cases
act in a “topical” way; they “authenticate” the topoi of ancient banditry.’ 50 If
the results of my studies of particular cases are correct, this statement needs
to be amended by changing ‘authenticate’ to ‘constitute’. Roman tradition
labelled historical characters latrones and their deeds latrocinia, and to this
end laid against them charges drawn from the repertoire of the bandit story.
Apart from the problem which I see in the issue of the validity of the social
bandit, van Hooff’s ‘Ancient robbers’ systematically explores the term latro
and offers fundamental perceptions for which I am here very grateful.
According to van Hooff ’s categorisation, for the Romans, the term bandit
represented: usually ‘an evil’; ‘a term of abuse’, in the sense that will be
considered in Chapter 4; a ‘bringer of a peripeteia’, i.e., an unforeseen but not
unusual stroke of misfortune, examined in Chapter 1 (p. 19); and finally the
figure of the ‘respected robber’ which, inter alia, is the main character of
Chapter 2, concerning Viriatus, and Chapter 6, on Bulla Felix.
To conclude this survey of research, the most significant finding of what
follows may be summarised as follows: the bandit, as encountered in the
sources from the second century bc to the third century ad, should be seen
not as a social type but as a literary convention.
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