Historical background

During the last hundred years of its existence the Roman Republic was in constant turmoil. The clashes in the wake of the Gracchian reform legislation had set a pattern of political violence which was to lead, eventually, to the downfall of the old order.

"who possessed by temperament and education refined sensibilities and a horror of internecine strife, encouraged violence, if it was undertaken by the boni in defence of the established order against the audaces and improbi who sought to disturb it.... The Romans of the Republic seem genuinely to have considered it an essential constituent of libertas that a man should be allowed to use force in his personal interest to secure what he believed to be his due. So, when a conflict could not be resolved constitutionally, it was not surprising that the frustrated party employed violence, and this in turn frequently could not be countered except by further partisan violence. This vicious circle continued until the military force which was finally summoned to break it moved the conflict to the higher plane of civil war".^[3363]

In the provinces, people lived in constant fear of being extorted and exploited by corrupt governors and their agents. Being in a position of supreme authority, unchecked by a colleague or tribunus plebis, a provincial governor was often tempted to use his term of office to recover financially from the election campaigns fought at home, and to prepare his private purse for those that were yet to lead him to even higher office. The leges de rebus repetundis⁸ (the mere volume of which is in itself an indication of the size of the problem) did little to ameliorate the situation: Rome was far away, and even if the worst came to the worst, a guilty governor could always slip away from Rome to the sanctuary of a provincial town.⁹

2.