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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE<br />
shown that they always fall into one of these categories. To be blunt, the<br />
historical bandits are no different from the fictional. 27 It must be said that<br />
such similarity should not lead to the conclusion that the fictional bandits<br />
were drawn closely from life, but rather to the exact opposite, that in the telling<br />
of their stories the historical bandits were made into romantic figures.<br />
It is the main contention of this study that historians made historical<br />
bandits look like bandits in novels, not that novelists modelled their bandits<br />
on those in history. Both fictional and historical bandits were the projections<br />
of contemporary ideas. The nature and function of these ideas will be examined<br />
below.<br />
We can get closer to social reality in Antiquity by means of the legal<br />
texts, as found in the Corpus Iuris Civilis and in textbooks by the classical<br />
Roman jurists. These show that the state regarded banditry as a social and<br />
legal problem. From the repeated concern of the legal texts with the criminal<br />
act of ‘robbery’, as evidenced in imperial rescripts and constitutions, we can<br />
see periods in which banditry clearly reached a threatening level. In particular<br />
(and something which we know from contemporary experience), intensification<br />
of punishment reveals at least as much about the helplessness of the<br />
state as about its decisiveness. Further information comes from inscriptions<br />
recording the violent deaths of individuals at the hands of robber bands. We<br />
are provided with particular and detailed information concerning banditry,<br />
theft and other forms of criminal behaviour in the Roman period by the<br />
Egyptian papyri. However, I will postpone discussion of these areas until<br />
Chapter 1.<br />
The number and character of the sources have further consequences for<br />
the methods by which the topic of bandits can be pursued. Summarising<br />
this review of the material, I would again emphasise that our knowledge of<br />
Roman robbery and banditry rests on two types of information: first, on the<br />
(few) reports of concrete instances and, second, on the utterances of ancient<br />
authors, generally based on no specific case and never to be taken at face<br />
value.<br />
The first major problem with regard to methodology is that the number<br />
of reported cases is almost zero relative to the number that we can roughly<br />
estimate as having occurred. It is thanks to a more or less accidental reference<br />
by a single author that we know that Ephesus, in the imperial period,<br />
possessed an archive in which were stored the city’s criminal records. 28 Of<br />
course, we are almost entirely lacking in such sources. A happy exception<br />
to this rule is provided by the records of the police archives of a community<br />
(a nome) in Egypt under the early Principate, dealt with in Chapter 1<br />
(pp. 25ff.). There is simply not enough information for empirical research.<br />
Likewise, the depth of information given for a particular case is usually so<br />
shallow that it cannot serve as a model for a larger number of apparently<br />
identical or similar instances.<br />
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