The problem of mass enslavement

We are almost ready to move on to the next phase of the repetundae legislation, the formalisation in statutory form of the partial fusion of repetundae and maiestas that had surfaced over the decades preceding the lex Calpurnia.

The first matter to claim our attention is the restoration of liberty, restitutio libertatis. Volkmann argues that the only successful attempts to invalidate mass enslavements were, first, in respect of the Ligurians who were freed by order of the senate after the collapse of the commission investigating Popillius Laenas; second, in respect of the Greeks of Abdera, Coroneia and Chalcis enslaved by a consul and two naval commanders in 171-170; and third, in respect of Heracleia in 67.⁵⁹ But the last-mentioned liberation, arising out of M.Aurelius Cotta’s devastation of Heracleia in 70, may have followed Cotta’s trial for peculatus, embezzlement of public money, rather than for repetundae.⁶⁰ If so, and if the liberation of the Ligurians occurred in spite of, and not because of, the commission against Laenas,⁶¹ then Abdera, Coroneia and Chalcis are the only unequivocal examples of liberation occurring as a result of verdicts in repetundae proceedings.⁶²

In all three cases the culprits—Licinius Crassus, Hortensius and Lucretius Gallus—were tried by the people and the penalty took the form of substantial fines. Now, this group of three contemporary processes (171-170) marks the only time in the pre-Calpurnian period that the government employed the tribunician process rather than the special commission.

The experiment of 171-170 was of course casuistic. Coming at the start of the Third Macedonian War, it was devised specially for the Greeks, to fortify Rome’s image as the protector of Greek freedom against the demonised Macedonians. The experiment was not repeated, but in 149 the reform lobby remembered the efficacy of a solution grounded in a permanent jurisdiction that did not have to be specially activated every time.