Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World by Goldsworthy Adrian

Author:Goldsworthy, Adrian [Goldsworthy, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

EVIL MEN

According to the legal expert Ulpian:

It is right for a competent and conscientious governor to see to it that the province of which he has charge is peaceful and quiet. He will achieve this without difficulty if he carefully ensures that evil men are expelled, and hunts them out. He should hunt out sacrilegious persons, brigands, kidnappers, and thieves, and punish each one according to his crime, and he should also bring force against those who harbour them, since a criminal cannot escape detection for long without their help.34

The passage ties in with Fronto’s recruitment of Julius Senex for his experience in hunting bandits, as well as stating quite openly the Roman assumption that people living near the scene of a crime were expected to help the authorities or be held responsible for protecting the criminals.

Modern scholars routinely describe banditry as endemic within the Roman Empire, and occasionally extend this to the entire ancient world. They tend to depict the imperial authorities as incapable of eradicating it, perhaps even of keeping it under control.

Some go further and see the princeps and his representatives as unconcerned about such things unless it threatened their persons, other people of importance, or the workings of administration and taxation. It was simply a reality of life, accepted by everyone as inevitable. Laws tended to rank death or abduction by bandits alongside natural disasters such as fire, storm or flood – what would now be termed ‘acts of God’ – when it came to liability for damages.35

One of Pliny’s earlier letters mentions the disappearance of an equestrian friend while journeying in northern Italy. The man’s son was searching for him, but Pliny was pessimistic about his chances, remembering Metilius Crispus, a young man from Comum who had vanished some years earlier. Pliny had secured him a commission as a centurion in a legion and given him 40,000 sesterces to equip himself in the style appropriate for an officer, but on the way to join the army he vanished; ‘whether he was killed by his slaves or along with them, no one knows: at any rate, neither Crispus nor any of them were ever seen again’. Some slaves understandably tried to escape from a life of servitude – in Bithynia Pliny discovered two who had tried to hide by enlisting in the army, something only open to the freeborn. Loyal slaves offered protection on a journey, but the chance to disappear in some quiet spot gave them more chance of escape than at home, especially if they worked together. It is revealing that the slave-owning Pliny considered that being murdered by one’s own slaves was as likely as murder at the hands of bandits. Roman law decreed the execution of an entire slave household when even one killed or tried to kill his master – something Nero enforced, even though many senators felt it cruel to punish the innocent along with the guilty. Runaway slaves, like army deserters, were seen as likely to turn to banditry.36

Some

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