ABSTRACT
Robert Sablayrolles analyses the military and paramilitary forces of Rome individually, with a closer look at the firefighters, to whom, he had devoted an extensive monograph a few years before, and their antecedents. The urban forces, according to the French scholar, never came to represent a homogeneous unit, even if 'collective habits' were established among them. Wilfried Nippel is interested in public order in Republican Rome. Thus, one can justify the poor consistency of the paragraph 'The new forces of order', which presents the features of the Augustan plan. Without any hesitation, the author expresses in a very generic way the view that the "praetorian and urban cohorts made up the new military apparatus for maintaining law and order in Rome and Italy". In the late 1950s, Edward Echols devoted long article to the policing of the city of Rome. The aim of his study was to look back through time to find the beginnings of the idea of police.
