Law and Order

Sources

Lack of Police. By almost any modern standard Roman politicians look like a tough and moralistic lot. It is surprising, then, that they seem to have had almost no interest in what one would think of as crime fighting. “Law and order” appears neither as a campaign promise nor as a subject for more abstract political theorizing. There were nearly no state prosecutors nor police, and the minor exceptions prove the rule. Under the Republic, several magistrates had the authority to prosecute wrongdoers before the assemblies. But these magistrates all had many other duties, and this trial procedure was too clumsy to have been used except in a few important cases. Under the Empire a city-watch was founded, but it was small (six thousand men in a city of roughly one million) and included no detectives to investigate crimes already committed. And even if the Romans had had a police force, it would presumably have been interested mainly in what were thought of as “public” offenses—i.e., not most of what one calls crime.

Reliance on Symbolic Order. How then did Romans respond to crime? Members of the law-writing class, that is of the elite, were protected by fortresslike houses and private security. Armed bodyguards were common, especially in the dangerous countryside. Ordinary citizens had to rely on less systematic forms of self-help: dress or chants designed to shame offenders, private prosecution, presumably sometimes direct violence. To keep discrete private disputes from turning into a general breakdown of social order, Romans depended on the stabilizing force of a few, mostly official, authority figures. Magistrates had special dress, attendants, and insignia, including the fasces, an axe bundled with rods symbolizing the state’s power to punish. Potential alternative sources of authority—from astrologers to would-be usurpers—were dealt with in harsh, exemplary fashion. This system seems to have worked to some extent, but had at least two weaknesses. The authorities’ tenuous grasp on order produced a fear of alternative authorities, a fear that gave rise to seemingly paranoid conspiracy theories. Even when “proper” authority remained unchallenged, it only worked locally. In particular, the spaces between towns went largely ungoverned in a “wild West” fashion. Bandits roamed the

countryside in some numbers and were a prominent danger in the Roman imagination. It was a problem the Romans never really solved.

Sources

Tim J. Cornell, “Police,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 1204–1205.

Michael Grant, History of Rome (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978).

Wilfried Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).