ABSTRACT
Following Domitian’s death, where our story ends, there was a brief moment of rejoicing. Nerva released all who were on trial for maiestas and restored those exiled for the same offense (Dio 68.1); at the same time, he executed all the slaves and freedmen who had conspired against their masters (which no doubt included those who had acted as informants). In addition, he prohibited all slaves and freedmen from denouncing their masters, and prosecutions for maiestas were abolished. Many of those who had made their living through informing were executed, and the retributions did not end entirely until Trajan’s spectacular punishment of delatores in the arena after Nerva’s death (see below, pp. 305-6). But the history of delatores does not end with our study at the year 96. The presence of delatores was to continue through the Byzantine period. If Tacitus could speak of a Baebius, a Carus, or a Catullus Messalinus in his own age, in a later age the senate, sitting as a body, could still demand the punishment of delatores, as it did in the wake of Commodus’ assassination in 192. The senate’s refrain related in Commodus’ vita (cited above) seems almost formulaic, and by the time the vitae in the Historiae Augustae were written, it might well have been. If the pages of Tacitus are replete with the likes of Domitius Afer, Suillius Rufus, and Eprius Marcellus, the pages of Ammianus Marcellinus also present us with sinister courtiers such as Paulus Catena (“Paul the Chain”), a notorious informant in the time of Constantius and Gallus (14.5.6-8).
