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POLITICIANS AND PRETENDERS AS LATRONES
state and, on 7 December 43 bc cost him his life. His opponent was Mark
Antony, whom Cicero attempted to vilify by calling him a bandit, just as he
had done to Catiline and Clodius though probably more systematically. 21 In
his ‘Philippics’, Antony is represented once as a murderer, once as a second
Spartacus or Catiline, and almost 40 times as a latro. 22 As the bandit depicted
by Cicero, Antony reckons that he is doing a favour (beneficium) in
granting people their lives, 23 something which he, a ‘foul brigand’ (impurus
latro) is prepared to accept as one of the requirements of a ‘most loathsome
and savage tyranny’ (taeterrimus crudelissimusque dominatus). 24 Meanwhile, he
lives like ‘pimps and brigands’ (lenonum et latronum), in his private life indulging
in lecheries, in his public in murders. 25 What drives Antony the
latro is what drove Catiline: need for money and, consequently, lust for
plunder, which he hopes to satisfy by the confiscation of property. 26 The
utter prodigality of his brother, Lucius, completes Cicero’s sketch of the
robber band at the head of which Antony, like a ‘berserk gladiator’ ( furiosus
gladiator), wages war on his own country. 27 This brief glance serves to show
that the characteristics that Cicero attributes to Antony the latro all derive
from the classic repertoire of ‘the tyrant’. 28 The main purpose of the ‘Philippics’
was to warn people of Antony’s tyranny, and allows us to see that ‘bandit’,
as used in this context, is a synonym for ‘tyrant’.
There is just one variation of the use of the term ‘bandit’ in Republican
political invective, Octavian/Augustus’ attack on his opponent, Sextus
Pompey, 29 as a pirate. In his Res Gestae, Augustus the Princeps boasts of having
cleared the seas of pirates ( praedones). 30 By means of a verbal ambiguity
which can hardly have been unintentional, he leaves it to his readers to
construe the war against Sextus Pompey either as an orthodox war (bellum) or
as a war against slaves (bellum servorum). He himself, apparently, as is suggested
by a further reference, 31 saw the war as a servile war (bellum servile).
That bandits and slaves might make common cause was, especially since
the Sicilian slave wars, a very real Roman nightmare, 32 and the threat of it
justified all means against it. Anyone who tackled this danger might well
expect himself to be regarded a hero.
No writer of the day or of the years immediately following ignored
Augustus’ judgement of Sextus Pompey. According to Horace he, Lucan’s
‘Sicilian pirate’ (Siculus pirata), 33 threatened Rome with the fetters that he
had removed from renegade slaves. 34 Velleius Paterculus described him as
‘the freedman of his own freedmen, the slave of his own slaves’, 35 who
recruited his legions mainly from slaves and runaways, undertook banditry
and looting (latrocinia ac praedationes) to maintain these and himself and,
through crimes of piracy (piratica scelera), made himself the direct successor
of the very Cilician freebooters whom his own father had defeated. 36 So the
war against Sextus Pompey was categorised as a pirate war. Other than in
the passage of the Res Gestae already mentioned, we also find this in Pliny
the Elder. According to his ‘Natural History’, Agrippa, like Pompey the
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