“The weaker form of disjunction [of the recalcitrance of the terrain to control by the primitive instruments of communication at the disposal of the archaic state] was found throughout the empire, especially in mountainous highlands where geographic isolation was compounded by the presence of a well-developed economy of transhumant pastoralism as, for example, in Italy, Sicily and Sardinia. In this context Hobsbawm is surely correct to claim that it is the very fixity of peasant farmers which makes them so eminently exploitable. His corollary that any type of movement is in and of itself provokes an element of freedom congenial to banditry is more than adequately attested in antiquity. It is this movement that is critically important in regions of diminished Roman control.
In addition to pastoral nomads, highland shepherds represented a social group that was integrated socially and economically into the wider imperial system and yet which, because of it economic organization, was freed from most political constraints. Hence the equation "shepherd equals bandit" comes close one that is true for all antiquity. Indeed, the very type of organization that characterized highland shepherd communities enabled them to constitute the driving force behind the three Sicilian uprisings, the largest slave uprisings documented in all ancient history.
The crime most frequently attributed to shepherd-bandits is that of rustling (abigeatus). It was so inextricably associated with bandits that it was not regarded as common theft (furtum) but a much more aggravated type of crime. Rustling therefore incurred the most severe penalties. The emperor Hadrian decreed to the provincial council of Baetica (southern Spain, where the problem was endemic) condemnation to the mines or execution was the normal penalty.
But there were problems with such an absolute system of penalties since the bandits obviously had wide links with parts of society that were considered legitimate. Such links bound them to the powerful and wealthy in whose employment they were found. Consequently the law was compelled to recognize this wider power networks that encompassed bandit-shepherds, landowners and receivers in a regional market in animals and private protection. An exception then had to be made in the case of those receivers who were none other than members of the landowning elite. If culpable middlemen were of higher social status (honestiores) they were only to be relegated (a lesser form of exile) or suffer loss of their status and/or property.
But attempts to control highland brigandage by these and other means brought no final long-term solution. By the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. the central government was driven to desperate measures in Italy itself in an attempt to control shepherd bandits in the southern regions of the peninsula: Lucania, Picenum, Samnium, Apulia and Calabria. It struck at the central natural advantage of the shepherds - their freedom of movement. Specifically the government sought to deny the use of horses to them. All persons "except senators and high-ranking imperial officials, administrators of provinces, veterans, decurions and others performing imperial service under arms" were denied the use or ownership of horses. Collaboration with landowners is explicitly recognized as part of this system of highland banditry since the domini are specifically warned against providing horses to potential bandits, in this case their own shepherds. Finally, in recognition of an almost congenital disposition to banditry in these highland zones, the state warned all persons, including the wealthy, against sloughing off unwanted children on shepherds, in the certainty that they too would be raised as future bandits.”
- Brent D. Shaw, “Bandits in the Roman Empire.” Past & Present. No. 105 (Nov., 1984), p. 29-30.
