Toward a Model of Conspiracy Theory for Ancient Rome

Abstract

Although the term conspiracy theory does not appear in my Conspiracy Nar ratives in Roman History, one reviewer remarked, It was hard not to misre member Pagan's title as 'Conspiracy Theories in Ancient Rome.' l Given the preponderance of conspiracies in ancient Rome, conspiracy theory is a reason able expectation; however, so self-evident is the impact of conspiracy on the political life of the Romans that they scarcely engaged in a discourse of con spiracy theory that was not embedded in some response to a specific political crisis. As a modern sociological phenomenon, conspiracy theory was not part of the vocabulary of the ancient Romans; they did not attempt a formal defini tion. Conspiracy demanded action, not theory. Therefore the study of con spiracy theory in ancient Rome demands its own methods?and yields its own results. In this essay I build a model of conspiracy theory based on a wide array of ancient sources and suggest some of the consequences that conspiracy theory had for Roman society. In the absence of a term for conspiracy theory in Latin or Greek, I adopt a sociohistorical approach that moves beyond isolated political events as narrated by individual historians so that I can illustrate how conspiracy forms a substantial part of the Roman mind-set, as evidenced in a variety of