CONCLUSION: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF DELATORS

And yet, interestingly enough, the literary figure of the delator was already beginning to fade in the lifetime of Tacitus and Pliny, and was effectively to disappear in the course of the second century.

In the literary sources there are approving remarks about the policy of various emperors towards delators. Tiberius quashed a proposed luxury law in AD 22;^[446] sumptuary legislation had always been hard to enforce, and must have been impossible without the use of delators. Nero restricted praemia, rather obscurely by three-quarters.^[447] Suetonius praised Titus for dealing severely with them, and they seem in his account to have been excluded from the protection of the lex Iulia de vi; their treatment proves they cannot have been the senatorial form of this plague.^[448] They were a pest under Domitian, although he exiled some, so Pliny praises Trajan for having exiled delators, not senators, and filled the punishment islands of the Mediterranean with these scourges;^[449] again the contrast with senators must mean that he was thinking of the fiscal delator.

Delators continued then to exist, as shadows in the literary sources, more clearly in the legal sources. One must remember that the role of all delators, whether fiscal or criminal, led to the enrichment of the treasury; this would never be popular. The legal sources portray only the anonymous delator to the fisc. The apparent lack of interest in criminal delation may have several causes. What was legally interesting about delators as such was not their accusations - which needed to go to trial - and still less their rewards, but the possibility of calumny; the SC Turpillianum did receive comment, even if not in the overtly criminal sphere. It was presumably a satisfactory piece of legislation, since it survived, interpreted but not substantially revised.

Further, criminal procedure changed during the Principate. In the first century AD the model of the ordo was dominant; Senate procedure was not bound by it, but it imposed its pattern nevertheless. Then, during the second century, there was a move to what is loosely called cognitio, away from an accusatorial and towards an inquisitorial process. The literary figure of the delator, the (relatively) independent accuser, disappeared; the people described by Ammianus as delators are themselves judges, or at least part of the machinery of justice; informers, humbler men, supplied them with the charges to be brought. The compilers knew only a penal procedure that was largely, not exclusively but largely, initiated ex officio, they may have chosen to omit obsolete technicalities. Finally, the role of the actual accuser, whether personally involved or motivated by greed, became a riskier function through the change in the definition of calumny: failure to make a charge stick, rather than charges made in bad faith.

The delators of literary drama, Tacitus' vexatious accusers, fade from the scene soon after their immortalisation, after a span of a century or so; they seem never to have been part of the reality of jurists qua jurists, although as senators the jurists may have recognised them all too well. Fiscal delators were part of the machinery of state, and they operated mostly under a separate fiscal jurisdiction. Delators in the Digest are not men of honour; they rank perhaps as garbage collectors, but they were still not criminals. For instance, Ulpian refers to the “unseemliness” of delatoria curiositas ^[451] which sounds rather like the worst sort of tabloid investigative journalism. Delators in the juristic view were boring, but important, linked not to penal but to fiscal law. In the Later Empire, delation in the old sense was generally forbidden,^[452] although some accusations, such as those of magic and soothsaying, or of the giving or taking of bribes by senior officials, were explicitly exempt from being classed as “delation”.^[453] In the juristic and literary sources alike, in the Later Empire it is calumny, not delation, that is prominent.