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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
discuss why this was so more fully below. Suffice it to say that this state
of affairs has resulted in the fact that this book, though originally intended
to be a straight narrative of bandits and robber bands in Roman Antiquity,
has turned out very differently: the source material is insufficient for such
a treatment. For example, if one wished to write a history of banditry by
ordering such information as there is chronologically, by province, 4 one
would be constantly gambling on filling in gaps of hundreds of years and
hundreds of miles with what amounted to empty rhetoric. All this would
entail a compression of time and distance wholly unjustifiable in the light
of the many centuries of Roman history, the numerous peoples and regions
of the Roman Empire and the changing phases of stability and crisis. It is
for this reason that the marginal groups of ancient society are not a valid
subject for statistical enquiry. 5
A preliminary examination of references to latro and its Greek equivalent,
leistes (leistai), results in a further realisation, that writers of the Roman
period used these words to express a range of concepts, quite different from
those of the original meanings of ‘robber’ and ‘bandit’. Ancient readers could
of course relate them to all their different nuances without further explanation.
Modern readers, on the other hand, find it difficult to understand
precisely which sort of latro is under discussion. To ensure an objective
appreciation of the sources, the modern observer must therefore resist the
temptation to see in every mention of latrones or leistai a literal reference to
bandits. 6 Roman usage of the term was indeed generally metaphoric: the
person labelled a latro was often in fact no bandit, but rather (to simplify
the issue) was only being compared to one. Historians have often missed
this point and it is the most important reason for the misunderstanding of
Roman latrones (cf. below pp. 9ff.).
Over the course of time, the frequent use of the robber metaphor for
various types of people led to even the ancient writers being no longer aware
that the usage was metaphorical. They used latro not as a figure of speech,
but as a word with many meanings of which, in any particular instance, they
had just one in mind.
These precursory observations on source tradition and terminology expose
the relationship between what one may aspire to accomplish and what one
can accomplish, and so allows me to formulate the aim of this work. The
guiding questions are simply: Whom did the Romans see as latrones, and
what did they understand by latrocinium?
In order to justify such a treatment of the topic, two further grounds may
be cited. First, the cases uncovered by examination of the sources throw up
a mass of problems to do with social and intellectual history and the sources,
the resolution of which promises advances in understanding beyond the
framework of more narrow enquiry. Second, in the Roman tradition the latro
appears in many shimmering colours and shades, making it necessary to
establish whether the latrones we are told were historical figures constituted
2