Review of “Infamy: The Crimes of Ancient Rome” by Jerry Toner, pub. Profile Books 2020

book cover

Fierce punishments were a way of compensating for the low chance of detection, rather in the way that a huge jackpot compensates for the low chance of winning the lottery. There simply were not enough resources to do anything more than make a terrifying example of those few criminals who were apprehended.

This quote illustrates what Toner is best at: making telling comparisons with our own time but without judging a very different society by our own. He also knows when to be sceptical of written sources, especially famous ones, who in an age of low literacy were invariably educated and upper-class and whose viewpoint is necessarily skewed by their own experience. The likes of Tacitus and Suetonius were most interested in high-profile treason and murder cases, but ordinary folk were far more concerned about thieves, street muggers and con artists, just as they are now. By “Rome” in the title, Toner means the whole empire, not just the city, and he uses many examples of petitions and cases from the wider empire, notably Egypt, to illustrate the kind of crimes that bothered people and how they might use the law to redress them

The problem with doing so was, firstly, that the chance of catching criminals was small (the vigiles, or Watchmen, were mainly concerned with looking out for fires) and secondly, that if a criminal was caught, it was not usually up to the state to do anything about it, unless his crime was a political one. There were certainly laws against civil crimes like theft and violence, but it was for the victim to press charges, collect evidence and go to court with it, all of which might cost more money than the loss warranted, particularly if one factored in bribery and corruption in the legal profession. In one of the Egyptian petitions, the complainant, who seems to have been a fair amateur detective, explains that the thieves “broke through a window which overlooks a public street and which had been blocked up with bricks, probably using a log as a battering ram”. They had then, he deduced, removed his barley by means of a rope, whose traces he found on the windowsill. Nobody was going to deduce this and present it to a court unless he did.

There was therefore a disconnect between the ideals Roman law set out (many of which still underlie modern European law) and what it could actually do. This disconnect also applied to the large body of law concerning private morals. Ever since Augustus, emperors had been using the law to try to eliminate excessive consumption, luxury among the common people, adultery and whatever the emperor of the day regarded as sexual depravity. Most folk, predictably, regarded their tastes in food, dress and sex as none of the law’s business and ignored it.

Inevitably, the law’s practical shortcomings led to discontent among crime victims who saw no chance of redress, but Toner suggests that such discontent may have been mitigated by the fact that they had low expectations of the justice system in the first place. The number of curses against thieves, written on lead sheets and found all over the empire, notably at Bath, suggests that many had little hope of recovering their property except by divine intervention - and if even that failed, they could console themselves with the thought that at least the offender might be visited with the unpleasant symptoms specified in the curse. These are always way out of proportion to the crime, which may indicate not so much the victims’ intrinsic cruelty as their frustration at not being able to right their wrongs.

What was causing crime was, as might be expected, poverty and inequality, the latter particularly in cities like Rome, where poor and rich lived close enough to compare each other’s lifestyles. As much as anything, the law was there to uphold this status quo, which contained elements of built-in inequality that feel alien to us, notably slavery. Slaves had very few legal rights, though some emperors would intervene on their behalf against excessively cruel owners (Augustus prevented one such from feeding a slave to his moray eels for breaking a vase). Since they counted as property rather than people, it was, for instance, impossible in law for an owner to rape a slave; he was simply making use of his possessions. This strikes us as shocking, but as Toner points out, things have not changed as much as we like to think and there is still a disconnect between what the law asserts and what it can do, not to mention who is in a position to make use of it:

“We might like to think that the modern world has improved because slavery is now illegal in every country, but according to one estimate, there are almost thirty million slaves in the world today, a far higher figure than Rome ever possessed. […] A Roman would probably argue that the modern Western lifestyle requires similarly drastic inequalities in order to be maintained. Over 70% of the world’s population live on less than $10 a day and half of global wealth is held in the hands of the top 1%. The eight richest men own as much as the poorest 3.6 billion. It is a level of inequality that is, if anything, far worse than existed in the Roman world. We in the West simply keep our low-cost producers out of sight, housed in factories in faraway countries. At least the Romans faced up to the social hierarchy that helped generate the wealth and leisure that allowed them to enjoy themselves at the baths and games. I suspect the Romans would feel that their values and ours were in many ways the same; a belief in the pursuit of personal fulfilment and wealth, regardless of the cost to others.”

This is a provocative and challenging statement, but hard to dispute. And though readable and accessible, this is a properly scholarly study with all the necessary apparatus behind it — Toner is after all a Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics, Churchill College, Cambridge.