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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
supernatural potency. 33 It may, therefore, be simply fortuitous that both
slave leaders bore names that had an attractive ring. On the other hand,
given the symbolic baggage carried by each of these, it should not be ruled
out that our sources unwittingly recorded both leaders under names which
their bearers assumed just as deliberately as they later did the regal names
Antiochus and Tryphon.
Salvius-Tryphon was active in eastern Sicily. In the west, Athenion and
his rebels put themselves under his general command. Athenion 34 is never
expressly termed latro in the sources, but this would have been redundant
given Diodorus’ statement that he was a Cilician, complemented by Florus’
assertion that he was a herdsman ( pastor). 35 As in the case of Cleon, either of
these characteristics could, from the Roman point of view, be synonymous
with latro; together, they amounted to a representation of a particularly
fearsome bandit. It suited this picture that Athenion was presented as ‘a
man of outstanding courage’, 36 who had killed his master, freed his fellow
slaves from their prisons (ergastula), recruited and trained a slave army,
crowned himself king and then proceeded to take villages, cities and fortresses.
37 Thus Athenion did not embody the pure form of latro like Cleon.
Rather, he amounted to a combination of Eunous and Cleon. The Cilician
pastor likewise legitimised his position in the eyes of his followers by calling
on the gods. 38 He also laid claim to supernatural powers and wore a diadem
as a sign of his royal authority. 39
All usurpers were of course characterised by their anxiety to lend credibility
to their elevation by means of external trappings. What Diodorus relates
could therefore be dismissed out of hand as sheer invention. The occurrence
of close similarities – sometimes down to the smallest detail – between his
reports of Eunous-Antiochus and Cleon on the one hand and of Salvius-
Tryphon and Athenion on the other, makes it more or less certain that he
was using literary stereotypes. 40 The two ‘chiefs’ are portrayed as divinely
sanctioned monarchs bearing Hellenistic names and are portrayed as representatives
of a decadent eastern ruler-type. By contrast, Cleon and Athenion,
the two ‘lieutenants’, both Cilicians, are made out to be latrones. Common to
all four was that, as latrones or as rulers, they represented the population of
the Hellenistic world in the Roman West, in both instances with a negative
connotation. 41
The boundaries between historical fact and literary convention again mix
and merge, making it almost impossible to decide which details are real and
which the products of fiction or literary tradition. Otherwise, returning to
Athenion, the slave leader was characterised by his ‘venting his rage upon
the masters, but still more violently on the slaves, whom he treated as
renegades’. 42 What Florus says here corresponds well with Diodorus’ information
that Athenion imposed absolute discipline upon his underlings. He
recruited only the best of these into his army and forced the rest to stay
where they were and perform their usual tasks with diligence. It was this,
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