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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
orations is Cicero’s personal animus. He refined what was clearly his favourite
political term of abuse and by lending it his rhetorical authority endorsed its
use by later ardent polemicists.
Not long after Catiline’s fall, Cicero had to face another deadly enemy
among his political opponents. This was P. Clodius, who projected the
execution of the conspirators as an infringement of Roman citizens’ rights
of appeal, forced Cicero into exile and was a few years later killed in street
fighting against the thugs of Milo. Such a curriculum vitae made it almost
inevitable that Clodius figures as the second latro among Cicero’s enemies,
but he was not alone. 12 In his invective, Cicero worked himself to such a
pitch 13 that he put Aulus Gabinius and Calpurnius Piso, the consuls of 58,
in the same category as likely partisans of Clodius. According to him, the
pair were the worst people could remember; they were not consuls but
latrones, who not only abandoned him when he was in need but also offered
him up to the knife. 14 Against Clodius he exploited the full range of a
rhetoric that even in the field of insult was incomparable in its vocabulary,
variety and inventiveness: W. Will has been able to assemble around 50 to
60 terms of abuse. 15 There is no need to pursue this any further here as we
are concerned only with the introduction into and development of the term
‘bandit’ in Roman political discourse.
We do not have far to go. The third politician of this period to be
calumniated by his opponents as a latro was, apparently, Julius Caesar. In
the light of what happened to Catiline and Clodius it is hardly a surprise.
This time, however, Cicero was not involved. Indeed, it suggests a certain
degree of respect on his part with regard to the Dictator that he maintained
such restraint – at least with regard to his deployment of the term ‘bandit’
– even after the Ides of March. This word which, in the meantime, had
become widely applied as a term of abuse, was applied to Caesar by Lentulus
just before the outbreak of the Civil War. 16 In the following year, we are
told, Pompey had recourse to the same image in an address to his troops
before the battle of Pharsalus. According to Appian, Pompey attacked his
adversary, Caesar, as ‘a single individual who, like a bandit, is aiming at
supreme power’. 17 The same author also has the tyrannicide, Brutus, resorting
to the bandit label. In the speech in which Brutus addressed the people
of Rome following Caesar’s assassination, the two dictators, Caesar and Sulla,
were portrayed as being on the same level, since both had deprived the
Italians of their goods and chattels by right of conquest and by the customs
of banditry. 18 For a bandit of the stamp of Caesar the booty was, of course,
the entire state; the means of his misappropriation was the army – his robber
band. The latter comparison helps confirm I. Opelt’s point that statesman
and bandit stand at different ends of the same spectrum. 19
Under the Second Triumvirate, Cicero once more clashed publicly with a
political opponent. This was the confrontation which, not least because of
his unrestrained verbal attacks, 20 caused him to be declared an enemy of the
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