| Summary: | This dissertation investigates concepts of violent and criminal character and behavior that existed in the ancient Roman world from the first century BC to the fourth century AD, both in light of recent scholarship on criminal law in ancient Rome and in light of modern criminological attempts to understand and explain criminality. It is neither an exhaustive survey of Roman concepts of violence and criminality nor an attempt to reconstruct any one Roman viewpoint on crime. Instead, it focuses closely on four different types of Roman and Graeco-Roman explanations for violence and criminality: explanations centered on a transgressor's beastliness, monstrosity, or inhumanity; explanations rooted in the problems of human society; explanations linked to the external natural forces of the universe; and explanations based on physical and physiological abnormalities. The main sources examined are Cicero's pro Milone, pro Sestio, pro Roscio Amerino, pro Cluentio, and de Officiis, Lucretius' de Rerum Natura, Seneca's Letters, Manilius' Astronomica, Firmicus Maternus' Mathesis, Claudius Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, Polemon's Physiognomy, and Galen's That the Qualities of the Mind Depend on the Temperament of the Body. The aim of this investigation is two-fold. First, it can expand and enhance the focus of recent scholarly discourse on ancient Roman crime---both by examining Roman representations of and ideas about the people who committed criminal offenses, rather than examining the statutes or the judicial and penal institutions that were set up to deal with violations; and by using imperial astrological, physiognomic, and medical sources in addition to forensic and philosophic texts that have traditionally been the basis for scholarship on crime in the Roman world. And second, it can provide a historical background both for modern scholars investigating the causes of criminality and for modern historians investigating the history of criminological theory, the origins of which have generally been traced only as far back as the eighteenth century.
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