Policing

Ulpian followed his exhortation to governors to maintain the peace with some instructions:

This he will easily obtain if he zealously sees to it that his province lacks wicked men, by himself seeking them out. For a governor ought to seek out blasphemers, bandits, swindlers and thieves and punish them in proportion to their crimes, and bring compulsion to bear upon those who aid and abet such men, as without aid a bandit cannot remain hidden for long. {’’On the Duties of the Proconsul’’ bk. 8 = D. 1.18.13.pr.)

The ability of Roman governors to act on such admonitions was probably even more limited than their desire to do so. Such criminals as dwelt outside the urban fabric could easily escape the rudimentary institutional mechanisms of Roman rule {B. D. Shaw 1984a and 2000). When preparing for his ultimately abortive governorship of the heavily urbanized province of Asia in 153/4 ce, the orator Fronto asked a friend, one Julius Senex, to join his staff‘‘not simply for his loyalty and diligence, but also for his military zeal in the hunting and suppressing of bandits’’ {Ant. 8.1). We may doubt whether Senex would have achieved much. High-ranking Romans were known to disappear during journeys even within the Italian peninsula {Pliny Ep. 6.25); in the early third century, the famed bandit Bulla Felix and his band of hundreds apparently eluded capture within Italy for two years, during a period when the emperor Septi-mius Severus not only lived there but had recently sent heralds ‘‘throughout Rome and Italy’’ to invite the populace to attend his Secular Games {Herod. 3.8.10). If Bulla really was caught, asleep in a cave, on information extracted from his lover, his case will highlight all the more the limitations of Roman policing {Dio 76.10).

Governors could, of course, summon the army to their aid. In some areas, locally garrisoned soldiers clearly performed a policing function, but as a tool the army was as powerful as it was imprecise. Without a doubt, the vast majority of policing was performed by local authorities {Sperber 1970). Of course, Roman authorities gradually insinuated their own ideals and practices into the codes of conduct that governed such local ‘‘keepers of the peace,’’ and in Egypt may have done a great deal to organize them {Bagnall 1977). So, for example, Antoninus Pius as governor of the province of Asia ordered local policemen to interrogate criminals only in the presence of a stenographer and to forward a transcript, together with the prisoner, to

The magistrate who would try the criminal (Marcian ‘‘On Criminal Proceedings’’ bk. 2 = D. 48.3.6.1); the abundant juristic literature on this topic can be set alongside evidence supplied by martyr acts, in which Christians occasionally force civic magistrates to adhere to the regulations of their Roman overlords (Acts of Pionius 15.1-5; but cf. Lopuszanksi 1951).