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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
the potential of its inhabitants. 14 Viriatus became a herdsman and a hunter
more or less automatically and so, equally through no choice of his own, a
bandit. 15
In the Roman period, herdsmen were traditionally regarded as bandits
and troublemakers (usually specifically as cattle thieves 16 ). Their reputation
for this dated back to the second century bc when significant uprisings,
from the coniuratio pastorum (connected with the Bacchanalian scandal) 17 to
the Sicilian slave wars, 18 were disturbingly linked with herdsmen. Pastores
maintained their bad reputation into the later imperial period. Two particular
herdsmen who suffered from this taint were the emperors Maximinus
Thrax and Maximinus Daia. The first, according to his biographer, was a
herdsman and a leader of a band of young men in his youth, who waylaid
bandits and protected his own people from attacks. 19 The latrones the later
emperor ambushed will have been little different from him and his gang:
both sides probably regarded each other as bandits. In the context of a
primitive pastoral society, into which the source tradition sets the young
Maximinus, life revolved around cattle raiding and its prevention. The rise
of Maximinus Daia is depicted in similar terms. A contemporary hostile to
him as emperor claimed that Maximinus had only recently been snatched
from his cattle herds and from the woods and then promoted from soldier to
officer to military tribune and finally to Caesar. This explained his poor rule
as emperor: how else could it have turned out when a herdsman was given
responsibility not for animals but for soldiers? 20 In both cases, emphasis on
their pastoral origins served as a means of defaming ‘semi-barbarians’ on the
imperial throne. 21
The topos of pastor did not have exclusively negative resonances. It was
ambiguous and could without raising eyebrows also conjure up romantic
associations, especially when set in the mythical past. Similarly, herdsmen
and bandits were more or less synonymous. The herder of myth was, however,
allowed his banditry as a legitimate means of earning a crust. 22 Herdsmen
of this sort were held to be strong, frugal, uncorrupted, upright and
independent; in short, they were pure of character. 23 Pastor embodied a
‘noble savagery’ 24 as represented in the Roman tradition in particular by
Romulus; 25 but not only by him: ‘of the ancients the most illustrious were
all shepherds’. 26 In the case of Viriatus, the bandit herdsman, it was the
positive Romulus-style associations that soon predominated. By the time of
the Principate, at the latest, the positive associations had entirely suppressed
the negative ones, as is shown by the equating of Viriatus with Romulus by
an historian of the imperial period. 27
‘Herdsman, huntsman, bandit, general’ (pastor, venator, latro, dux), the
various stages of Viriatus’ career as recorded, without exception, by various
authors, appear to be ordered not so much chronologically as causally. 28
Other ‘bandits’ of the Roman period enjoyed a similar progression. In a
telling passage Florus summarises the career of Spartacus the slave leader:
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