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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
1
REAL BANDITS
1 Introduction
This chapter deals with latrones, robbers or bandits, in the proper, legal,
sense of the word: ‘real’ bandits. By contrast, all other sorts of latrones, dealt
with in the following chapters, will reveal themselves as bandits in a figurative,
metaphorical sense – ‘specious’ bandits. What all the latter have in
common is that, as a result of involvement in political events, they were
vilified as latrones by official or semi-official circles in Rome. However, the
significance of the designation of different types of politically motivated
agents as latrones becomes clear only after it has been established precisely
what, and according to which contemporary criteria, a ‘real’ bandit was. The
first task of this study is therefore to describe the state of real banditry
within the Roman Empire.
As explained in the Introduction, it is not possible to study the phenomenon
of latrones using statistical methods. For example, any attempt at a
chronological presentation would require over-simplification and misrepresentation.
The result would be an unfaithful approach to the characteristics
of the various stages and regions of Roman history, which would in any case
lead to such vapid conclusions as that political and social crises led to a rise
in criminality. The questions posed must therefore be simple and precise:
what was the role of robbers and bandits (in the sense of ‘real’ bandits) in the
everyday life of the Roman Empire; how pressing was the threat that they
posed; and how did their contemporaries perceive this danger?
In pursuing the answers to these questions we must proceed in several
stages. First to be examined is what constituted a ‘robber’ in the opinion of
Roman jurists. This is because the basic Roman understanding of the term
‘robber’, non-political or political, is rooted in the legal sources. Next to be
assessed are the non-legal sources, as far as these permit generalisations about
latrones in the life of the Roman Empire. Having looked at the measures
which the Roman state took against latrones, I will then focus on a discrete
group of texts concerning common crime in the life of a single generation in
a single village of a Roman province. This narrowing of perspective allows
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