ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a very common form of violation of the private territorium in antiquity: thefts from houses. It examines the evidence from Hellenistic and Roman Greece and the Greek East — being quantitatively restricted and considerably dispersed — has not been systematically treated, and it is precisely the period between the fourth century BCE and the third century CE. This topic has received considerable scholarly attention, as far as classical Athens, republican and imperial Rome and Hellenistic and Roman Egypt are concerned, mainly within the framework of various general or more specialised studies either on law and forensic oratory, or on political violence, criminality and self-help. Surviving Greek laws of the Hellenistic period rarely focus on burglaries, thefts from houses or intrusions into private residences. Burglaries and thefts from houses are rather underrepresented in the literary and epigraphic sources of the Hellenistic and imperial periods.
