Thursday 10th February, 2010, 5.00pm
Seminar Room 4, New Arts Building

Labelling the Terrorist in Ancient Rome

Seminar by
Professor Jill Harries

Bio

Jill Harries has been Professor of Ancient History at St Andrews since 1997 and was Lecturer and Senior Lecturer here before that. She is the author of several books on the history of the Later Roman Empire and the place of ancient law in society; these include Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (1999), Cicero and the Jurists (2006) and Law and Crime in the Roman World (2007). She has also contributed to a volume edited by Tony Lang in International Relations on Rules and Conventions and the International World order and has been for many years involved with the James Wilson programme on Constitutionalism.

Abstract

This paper discusses the question of ‘state terrorism’ with reference to the historical example of Ancient Rome. It addresses three main questions :
1. Is exercise of ‘state terror’ admitted and justified by those who exercise it? If so, what is the nature of the justification?
2. Does the state do things, which its subjects or others outside its authority would regard as the infliction of unlawful terror,but argue that they are not unlawful (or terroristic), that they do not count as state terrorism, and therefore they do not require justification?
3. Is it possible to define the ‘terrorist’ objectively?

A particular issue of interest is the relationship between terrorism, the law and the lawful state. Ancient discourse associated terrorism, as we would see it, with banditry and ‘statelessness’. For Roman leaders, therefore, there was a fundamental distinction between the ‘lawful’ terror of the state, exercised for the general benefit of its citizens and the terror inflicted by the bandit and outsider, with whom no negotiated agreement was possible.