In republican Rome the deployment of violence by private individuals was often necessary and was routinely regarded as respectable - so long as its frequency and intensity remained within socially manageable proportions.

This was not because Romans were unusually aggressive by nature or remarkably sharp-elbowed, but rather because the use of force in Roman society was deemed a matter of individual prerogative and, sometimes, an individual's duty.

This sensibility was, in practice, crucial to the maintenance of public order and the preservation of justice. Devoid of anything like a modern police force, Romans relied on self-help for their personal safety, the security of their property and the enforcement of their rights. This reality is reflected in Roman legal language: taking a man to court, for instance, might require physical compulsion through seizing him by the hand (manus inectio). And, in practical terms, especially among the lower classes, who appear to have viewed official intrusions into local justice with some apprehension,^{[803] [804]} the application of local - and traditional - remedies to criminal behaviour constituted the natural state of affairs. Which meant that lawbreakers might be confronted by their neighbours with menacing and shaming ridi­cule or physical violence such as stoning. A thief could receive summary punishment on the spot. Victims cried out for aid, not to any state apparatus but to their community. And their fellow citizens had a moral obligation to come to their rescue.

Neighbourhoods were the basic and essential environments of daily life for most Romans. Consequently, neighbourliness (vicinitas) was cen­tral to Roman sensibilities and an important motive for mutual support and cooperation. An urban neighbourhood shared a local identity and possessed its own internal organisation, including local, if unofficial, dignitaries.^[805] The urban landscape of Rome was also articulated by colle­gia, voluntary associations of men sharing the same trade, the same neighbourhood and the same cult.^[806] It is this community that, in the first instance, offered modest Romans aid and assistance when endan­gered or, what was surely preferable, a venue for sorting out local disputes when individual assertions of personal rights clashed.

The institution of clientela - the relationship between a patron and his clients - provided another unofficial venue for resolving disputes, by submit­ting them to a patron's arbitration, or for securing, through a patron's influence, representation at law. Clientela was central to daily life in repub­lican Rome: in a world wanting any form of public welfare, the assistance of the aristocracy was very often indispensable for the poor, and, for their part, patrons competed with one another in amassing clients, whose sheer bulk was deemed an indication of a grandee's social and political clout.^[808] By helping his clients to cope with their difficulties, a patron accumulated gratia (‘grati­tude'), an inevasible debt which Romans took deeply seriously. No aristocrat could take the support of his clients for granted, however, and our sources make it clear that clientela was anything but a static institution. Still, by offering his clients a degree of protection, a patron could hope to secure for himself loyal supporters who might aid him when he asked. Even for members of the elite, personal security very often depended on self-help. Which is why, in order to keep themselves safe, members of the aristocracy did not rely solely or even principally on clients, who most of the time were busy with their own lives: they employed private guards.^[809]

The strong-armed contingents in elite retinues are rarely mentioned in our sources, perhaps because the presence of bodyguards was too ordinary a feature of daily life to call forth comment. Notices tend to cluster in accounts of predicaments fraught with personal peril, contexts that hardly lend themselves to dispassionate reporting.

Gang Violence in the Late Roman Republic included the same Reatines. But it is far likelier, as Andrew Lintott concluded, that these men were ‘little more than hired thugs'.^[810]

Gladiators, too, played a part in personal protection - for those who could afford to buy them. When Titus Annius Milo clashed with Publius Clodius Pulcher on the Appian Way, Milo's entourage, in addition to his wife and friends, included ‘a large train of slaves, some of whom were gladiators' (Asc. 32C). For his part, Clodius, also accompanied by friends, had an escort of thirty slaves, all of them armed with swords (Asc. 31C). Milo's forces, in the event, prevailed. But his retinue may have been more than usually large. Travel was always dangerous and Clodius was a very rich man: Asconius tells us that his entourage ‘conformed to the custom of those travelling in those days' (Asc. 31C), and so presumably his bodyguard was of a size and quality deemed more than satisfactory. Even in the city, as we have seen, aristocrats kept themselves safe with personal guards, sometimes, even there, with gladiators.⁹ But outside emergencies, an aristocrat's guards will have remained unarmed, and their numbers will have been swelled only under extraordinary circumstances. Nonetheless, their presence reflected the Romans' expectation that violence was always a possibility as well as the Romans' insistence that they possessed the right to meet force with force in a legitimate cause.