ABSTRACT
On the Ides of March, 44 B C, Julius Caesar lay dead at the base of Pompey’s statue, slain by three and twenty wounds. In the hand of the murdered dictator, according to one tradition, was a tablet given to him just moments before, containing information about what was now a fait accompli (App. BC 2.116). The episode both highlights and prefaces one of the essential functions of delatores during the Principate, in which they played a role in protecting the immediate security of the princeps and the state. Denouncing and prosecuting those who posed a threat to the physical survival of the princeps or threatened armed revolt against the state, the most perilous and acute forms of opposition imaginable, delatores were one of the effective munitions in the imperial arsenal. Their work, however, as Domitian noted, was only appreciated when it met with failure (Suet. Dom. 21). Yet even those conspiracies which did succeed stand in the realm of the nebulous – no doubt due to the secretive nature of such conspiracies, their organization and leadership. Thus, a conspiracy such as that of Scribonius Libo under Tiberius, or Piso under Nero, still leaves gaps which do not allow for a full understanding of a plot’s organization, the motives of the conspirators, or even their leadership. Of the delatores who betray the plots and prosecute the perpetrators in its aftermath, more is known. Some were hardened careerists, such as Vibius Serenus the Younger and Suillius Rufus; others, detested though they might be, were simply at the right place at the right time. Flavius Milichus, Antistius Sosianus, and Volusius Proculus arguably
fall under such a rubric. Nor was this a new phenomenon in Roman annals. There was as much a need to protect state security through similar means under the Republic as there was during the Principate (see Appendix 3). The essential difference was that the state’s defense now depended on the protection of a single individual whose person had to be guarded; as the civil strife of 69 showed, the consequences of the failure to check rebellion and conspiracy until it had succeeded could be as bad, if not substantially worse, than enduring “the worst of emperors.”
