INTRODUCTION

Delatores are a vivid part of the image of imperial Rome;¹ 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.

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.^{[387] [388] 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.[389] Preference was normally given to the victim, but the victim's kin or indeed any concerned citizen might be heard. A potential problem was obviously the possibility that someone might use this right of accusation to pay off a private grudge; the problem was compounded when accusers were rewarded from the estates of those they successfully prosecuted. The employment of the term delator, as opposed to accuser or prosecutor, usually implies somebody without a personal stake who makes his denunciation in the hope of some profit for himself. The link between delators and calumny - taken in a wide sense: laying a charge, even a true one, is vexatious if you are doing it primarily for the rewards - is always in the background. Accuser (accusator) is the neutral term; informer (index) implies somebody on the fringes of the crime he denounces. Hence our earliest references to accusers who were not themselves victims are already pejorative.}

B.