THE EARLY EVIDENCE

In the Persa of Plautus a sycophant, a professional parasite, speaks disap­provingly of quadruplatores and their gains, and wishes there were a law to make the successful accuser give half his proceeds to the public purse.^[390] The precise status and importance of quadruplatores remains disputed, because there is very little evidence; they seem to have received one quarter of the estate of the person they successfully denounced.^[391] Their activities under this name continued into the first century, as we know from an allegation of Cicero's concerning Verres.^[392] It is quite clear that they are the forerunners of the delators as known to us a century or more later.

So, from as early as 200 BC, those who laid information could be seen as something of a pest, both as acting maliciously, and as motivated by the hope of reward. Actions were presumably brought by such delators under statutes like the lex Cincia of 204 BC, limiting gifts, including advocates' fees, or the lex Voconia of 169 BC, putting bounds on female inheritance, or under sumptuary laws, such as the lex Fannia of 161 BC, limiting dinner parties, or the lex Aemilia of 115 BC, which was also linked with restrictions on exotic music. One must ask, of course, how else were magistrates to learn about these offences against bonos mores, or about frauds on the grain supply, or the sexual misconduct of apparently respectable matrons; the interested parties would seldom wish these breaches to be known. The magistrates, among them the urban and peregrine praetors exercising civil jurisdiction, were probably inclined to trust their own judgment as to the authenticity of a denunciation; the need for a way of checking calumny may have been slow to emerge.

Informers were vital in Livy's portrayal of a scandal of 186 BC, shortly after Plautus' time.

C.