latrones - Get a Free Blog

REAL BANDITS
The fact that it was clearly an everyday occurrence to be killed by latrones
was exploited, as a reasonably plausible cause of death, by no fewer than
three Roman rulers as means of suppressing public interest in the fate of
people with whom they had quarrelled and had secretly done away with.
With this explanation, according to at least one of the two reports that have
come down to us, Octavian sought to hoodwink public opinion as to the
execution of the praetor Q. Gallius, which took place at his personal command
in 43 bc. 98 Likewise, Commodus is supposed to have attempted to use
the same trick to avoid drawing attention to himself after the disappearance
of a prominent person. 99 Finally, Caracalla was also accused of trying
to use the explanation that the person concerned had been killed by bandits
to cover up his ordering of the murder of a certain Pompeianus, grandson of
Marcus Aurelius. 100 There is, of course, no solid evidence for the historicity
of any of these charges. However, this is less important for our purposes than
the fact that Roman emperors (or Roman writers) could continue to deploy
the story of death by bandits as a likely explanation for the sudden disappearance
of individuals.
The material presented here provides a representative cross-section of
evidence concerning latrones, praedones, grassatores and piratae. In order to
demonstrate the permanent threat posed by banditry, I have deliberately
concentrated on the Early and High Empire, i.e., I have taken as examples
specifically those periods which are usually considered to be the high point
of Roman history. Such very general evidence says virtually nothing about
rates of delinquency, regional variations or the bandits themselves – their
social background, the reasons which made them choose the bandit life and
what happened to them. This deficiency can be compensated for, at least
in part, by looking at typical occurrences of everyday, petty lawbreaking in
one province of the Roman Empire.
4 Everyday crime in Roman Egypt
Egypt offers us the only chance of investigating everyday crimes, thanks to
the survival of papyrological evidence. There is the problem of the extent to
which conclusions drawn from the Egyptian material are applicable to other
regions of the Roman Empire; but the alternative is simply to ignore this
material completely, and this raises its own problems.
Egyptian evidence of lawbreaking in the Roman period, including that
of policing bodies, has long been the subject of extensive collation and
analysis. 101 The results of this work help us to select from the mass of source
material just that small group of texts which appear particularly suitable for
the purposes of this investigation, namely the description of typical forms
of latrocinium. In line with the main topic of this chapter, I have selected
a discrete and particularly illuminating group of texts concerning ‘real’ thieves
and bandits. They come largely from the reign of Tiberius when, in a passage
25