ABSTRACT
By the year 16, L. Calpurnius Piso had had enough. In a show-stopping scene in front of the senate and Tiberius, he delivered a withering invective against the corruption of the courts, the power of money therein, and, above all, the excessive zeal of prosecuting attorneys: “For my part,” he concluded in his harangue, “I shall seek out some secluded and distant rural repose” (Tac. Ann. 2.34.1-2). Then, in what can only be described as high theater, he made to leave the senate chamber. Raising the scene to the point of melodrama, Tiberius intervened, urging Piso to reconsider. Piso ultimately heeded the emperor’s pleas, and stayed. Though they are the words of Cicero – quoted by Quintilian – one could well imagine Piso making the same observation: “A sword is stretched out against us sometimes by the laws themselves” (Inst. 5.14.35). Such an assessment is one with which few of Piso’s – or Quintilian’s – contemporaries would take exception, and the delator as someone who wielded that sword, exploiting the numerous laws and pushing them to their limits, is a phenomenon well attested in our sources under the Empire. Legislation such as the lex Papia Poppaea, lex Julia de adulteriis, and the various laws de repetundis, all provided grist for the delator’s mill. The pages of Tacitus and Pliny, in particular, are full of unprincipled characters whose attacks under such laws are depicted as abusive delations against fellow senators; the portrayal, however, is for the most part unwarranted. There is no disputing that delatores made life unpleasant for some under Augustus’ laws that attempted to legislate morality and family life; but the legislation, and the activity of delatores under it, had a deeper wellspring. The state’s intrusion into private life and morality was nothing new at Rome, where the censorship and various luxury laws were long-standing institutions, though there is no doubt that the further legal codification of personal behavior gave prosecutors additional material with which to work. Nor were prosecutions against alleged violators of the laws de repetundis anything new, although such laws may have been enforced with greater efficiency under
the Empire than during the Republic. Tacitus himself admits that one of the benefits of the Principate was that corruption in the provinces (if not eliminated) was now checked. On the local level, moreover, provincial governors found delatores useful in administering their provinces, and even the likes of Pliny – the delator’s bête noire – could not make do without them. In other areas of the law, delatores and accusatores were an abiding, and sometimes necessary evil: they were notorious, for example, for trying to lay claim to the legacies of others, although this was already something for which quadruplatores had made themselves infamous during the Republic. In some instances, such as their activities under Caesar’s law limiting interest rates, they represent a genuine attempt to check inequities with a view to preventing social unrest.
