CONCLUSION

The subject of the SC Silanianum was an emotive one for the Roman elite; its subject was the process that would ensure their safety (it was hoped) when alive and, at worst, avenge them when violently dead.

As time passed, different elements in the investigative and punitive process became confused. Slaves were liable to judicial torture, because slave evidence in criminal cases was always taken under torture; in addition, under ‘ancient custom’, they were liable to punishment, for failure to protect. It followed that the familia of a murdered man, resident under the same roof, or close enough, in some sense, to intervene, and who failed to help, would suffer the death penalty, whatever the degree of individual guilt, and regard­less of whether the identity of the murderer had been discovered. The result was the infamous execution in 61 of Pedanius’ familia of 400 slaves, includ­ing, it appears, women and children, the last a direct violation of rules on the liability of minors.^[169]

In a parallel development, the application of the quaestio was extended to other elements in the familia, including freedmen.

It would be going too far to assume, on the basis of two examples, Nero and Marcus Aurelius, that emperors were less inclined to judicial severity than the Roman Senate of the early empire or the courts. Hadrian, indeed, provides one counter-example, ruling that slaves capable of assisting their masters should do so, even at their own risk, as slaves must learn not to prefer their own safety to that of the master; a slave girl may not be physi­cally capable of taking on a murderer, but she can cry out for help.^[170] But emperors were not driven, as senators were, by waves of collective emotion, or even panic and, while senators had friends, like Titius Aristo, who knew the law, emperors could employ the best lawyers available on their advisory councils, to give them learned, but also dispassionate, guidance.

By contrast, the behaviour of the Senate and of such judges as we know of is consistent in its resolve to maximise the scope of the SC Silanianum and its efficacy as a deterrent. Pliny’s colleagues, scared as they doubtless were already by the death of Dexter, would also have recalled the murder of Larius Macedo, battered to death by his slaves in the bath-house, the occa­sion, noted above, of Pliny’s comment that even kind masters were not safe from their brutish slaves.^[171] The Senate’s contribution to court-made law was the product of emotion, even panic; the effects were profound and not always salutary. Yet, rational or not, they contributed by their decisions to the evolution of court-made law, one element that would contribute over time to the increased judicial severity evidenced in Late Antiquity.

Finally, the story of the SC suggests questions of how we should read law in literature. Students of Classics are familiar with the techniques of liter­ary allusion. Perhaps we should look harder at legal allusions as well, the web of connections silently woven by and within the consciousness of the Roman reader. Allusion can play strange tricks with chronology. Tacitus’ Annales were aimed at a readership alive in the second decade of the second century and aware of recent controversies on the SC; readers in c 120 of his account of 61 (and Nero’s exemption of the freedmen) would have been conditioned by their recollections of the Dexter case in 105. And one jurist, more than any other, was associated with how the SC Silanianum was read and implemented. When Tacitus gave Cassius’ speech pride of place in his account of the executions in 61, the message was that he, like Cassius (and, later, Ulpian), saw masters’ fears of their slaves as the prime motive for the implementation of the law as deterrent. And it was surely no coincidence that Titius Aristo, Pliny’s addressee in 105, was Cassius’ pupil. Decades after his death (c 70 CE), the austere ghost of a man, who embodied the stern values of a lost Republic, was, for both Pliny and Tacitus, still a force to be reckoned with.

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