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REAL BANDITS
of their arms. 48 According to Juvenal, the best defence against highway
robbery was simply to travel with empty pockets:
When you go on a night journey, though you may have only a few
small treasures with you you’ll take every stirring shadow, each
moonlit reed for a sword or cudgel. But the empty-handed traveller
whistles his way past any highwayman. 49
Seneca expresses the same thought briefly and epigrammatically: ‘If you are
empty-handed, the highwayman passes you by; even along an infested road,
the poor may travel in peace.’ 50
Epictetus, on the other hand, recommended against travellers’ journeying
alone, advising instead that they seek security in the entourages of the most
important people they could find, preferably those belonging to public officials.
51 By these criteria, surely the ideal protector on a journey would have
been Hadrian, who certainly travelled frequently with full pockets and with
more than a dog to guard him. However, even he would not have been able
to give a travelling companion the security that, according to Epictetus,
might be expected of him and his peers. When the future emperor, at that
time still a tribune of Legio XXII Primigenia, journeyed from Mainz to
Cologne to bring Trajan news of the death of Nerva, he fell victim to a
carefully planned attack on his carriage, and had to finish his journey on
foot. 52 In 151 or 152, a similar misfortune befell M. Valerius Etruscus,
legatus exercitus Africani, probably while travelling from the headquarters of
Legio III Augusta. He was making for the coastal city of Saldae, for a meeting
with T. Varius Clemens, procurator of Mauretania Caesariensis. He later
described an unpleasant incident that happened to him en route: ‘I set
out, and on my way I suffered attack by latrones. Stripped and wounded, I
escaped with my escort.’ 53 Not even a high-ranking soldier travelling with
an armed guard was safe from bandits.
Indirect indications of the danger that travellers faced from highwaymen
may be won from study of what the Empire did to prevent or counter this
threat. The topic has been so closely researched that all that is needed here is
to run through its most important elements. 54 Augustus tackled the increase
in armed robbery and banditry (explained explicitly, at least for Italy, as
resulting from the civil wars of the late Republic 55 ) by the systematic siting
of highway police posts (stationes). Tiberius continued his predecessor’s work
in this respect. 56 In North Africa, Commodus ordered the construction of
‘lookout towers for the protection of travellers’. 57 On the middle Danube,
the same emperor fortified ‘the whole bank with new towers and with garrisons
posted to guard places which could be used for bandit attack’. The
‘bandits’ (latrunculi) whose ‘crossings’ were supposed to be interdicted by
the burgi, probably came from the far side of the Danube, and may therefore
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