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BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
question as to whether the ‘bandit’ concerned and described as such in the
sources was (a) a real bandit: considered as such by himself and by people on
the margins of society or (b) a product of literary stylisation: the creation of
an outsider’s judgement, the target for the projection of views alien to his
own social circles.
I feel that this oversight is particularly characteristic of those works written
after Hobsbawm’s study, and in line with its conclusions. In criticism
of these, though surely not excessively so, it may be said that Hobsbawm’s
social bandit has become the favourite of those who would impute to the
lower social classes – not only those of the time before the Enlightenment
but even those of Antiquity – a hidden potential dynamism in the shape of
some awareness of the way in which they were repressed and an active desire
for violent and directed change in their personal fortunes and in the circumstances
which determined the life of their class. 44
With regard to contributions to Roman history on the theme of latrones
which have followed in the wake of Hobsbawm and have taken his views
into account, pride of place must go the works of Brent Shaw and Anton van
Hooff. In 1984, in his ‘Bandits in the Roman Empire’, Shaw gave us a wideranging
article, full of material and ideas, which may still be regarded as
the basic work for any treatment of the subject. Shaw was able to exemplify
or refine a number of his earlier ideas in two later pieces: a paper on ‘The
Bandit’, which he wrote for a collection of essays – in Italian and German –
on social types in the Roman period; and a study of ‘Personal power in
Josephus’, in which he dealt with ‘tyrants, bandits and kings’ as directly
associated categories. 45 I will refer to the second of these in Chapter 5.
In the first part of ‘Bandits in the Roman Empire’ (pp. 8–23), Shaw offers
a summary review which points up the phenomenon of the latro as an
everyday albeit varied manifestation of life in the Roman period. This
will be more closely examined in Chapter 1 (pp. 17ff.). 46 The second part
(pp. 24–52) is devoted to answering the questions (p. 24): ‘Who became a
bandit? And why? How did this peculiar form of social violence arise? And
what is its significance as a mechanism of social and political definition in
archaic states?’ Strongly influenced in his methodology by the concept of
the social bandit, Shaw gives particular attention to the last of these – the
significance of the latro as ‘a mechanism of social and political definition’.
Earlier (p. 4) he defines latrones as ‘men who threatened the social and moral
order of the state by the use of private violence in pursuit of their aims’. As
far as the Roman state was concerned, the bandit was (p. 23) ‘a non-person’.
Shaw, however, sees him not just as the expression of a destructive potential
at the edge of society but rather (p. 8) as ‘integral to the functioning of
imperial society’. This is a straightforwardly positive evaluation of the latro
as a component of the Roman social order, possessing his own social functions
and therefore capable of being categorised as a component element of
his society. In this respect Shaw compares bandits to slaves (p. 8). My own
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