Historians often regard the police as a modern
development, and indeed, many pre-modern societies had
no such institution. Most recent scholarship has claimed
that Roman society relied on kinship networks or
community self-regulation as a means of conflict
resolution and social control. This model, according to
Christopher Fuhrmann, fails to properly account for the
imperial-era evidence, which argues in fact for an
expansion of state-sponsored policing activities in the
first three centuries of the Common Era. Drawing on a
wide variety of source material-from art, archaeology,
administrative documents, Egyptian papyri, laws, Jewish
and Christian religious texts, and ancient
narratives-Policing the Roman Empire provides a
comprehensive overview of Roman imperial policing
practices with chapters devoted to fugitive slave
hunting, the pivotal role of Augustus, the expansion of
policing under his successors, and communities lacking
soldier-police that were forced to rely on self-help or
civilian police. Rather than merely cataloguing
references to police, this study sets policing in the
broader context of Roman attitudes towards power, public
order, and administration. Fuhrmann argues that a broad
range of groups understood the potential value of
police, from the emperors to the peasantry. Years of
different police initiatives coalesced into an uneven
patchwork of police institutions that were not always
coordinated, effective, or upright. But the end result
was a new means by which the Roman state-more ambitious
than often supposed-could seek to control the lives of
its subjects, as in the imperial persecutions of
Christians. The first synoptic analysis of Roman
policing in over a hundred years, and the first ever in
English, Policing the Roman Empire will be of great
interest to scholars and students of classics, history,
law, and religion.
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