INTRODUCTION

Delatores are a vivid part of the image of imperial Rome; it is probable that they feature in any history covering the Principate. The picture is of low-born men, who had contrived to rise in the world through the rewards of their informing, pandering to the fears of imperial tyrants with unjustified accusations of treason, thus putting at risk the lives and estates of those honourable senators who scorned sycophancy; the implications are of calumny and greed. These men – accusers, informers – fall into the interesting area where law and history touch, and the word identifying them has even been accepted into the vernacular – delators, délateurs, delatori. But how far is the image true, and in what way? Tacitus is the chief foundation of our universal picture, but there is room to question both the reality and the context of what he says. We shall return to Tacitus.

There is no doubting the real existence of delators as an element, indeed an essential element, of Roman legal procedure. The noun delator comes from the term nomen deferre, the process of laying a name before the magistrate; this was an essential first step in any trial before the quaestiones perpetuae, introduced in the later second century BC, although the noun is not evidenced before the Principate. In the absence of any state prosecution service it was up to some adult (male) citizen to bring any appropriate charge before the criminal or other relevant courts.