After the death of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., the Roman Empire, which for centuries was ruled as a Republic, thereafter was ruled by emperors.

By then the Roman Senate had lost most of its power. However, because most Senators spent their time talking and talking and talking and never got anything done, it was kind of democratic.

Members of the Senate included the Emperor Caligula’s horse. (How democratic can you get?)

.

Every Emperor enjoyed absolute power and sometimes got to be worshiped as a god. Yet even that arrangement was kind of democratic because people could bribe the guy without feeling guilty about it. Furthermore, the Emperor’s privilege of divinity did not preclude the risk of assassination. All too typically, the godly guy got done-in by his own guards. Think of it as a draconian form of term limits.

Another divine drawback was that the Emperor had plenty of godly competition. In fact, the ancient Romans had so many gods that the Emperor was outranked by even the Roman god of bacteria. And deservedly so. Robigus, the Roman god of mold and mildew, was a fearsome deity. Albeit, the Emperor could “divinely” order the Roman Army to a massacre thousands of people — but Robigus could turn your shower-curtain green. Which god would you put your faith in?

I say support bacteria. It’s the only culture some people have.

Since the Emperor had some trouble exerting his magical powers — even his guards did not always obey his “do not kill me” spell — he needed spies. Indeed, he needed enough spies to watch the entire Roman Empire. To that extent the Emperor needed not only spies but a spy agency. And he needed it right away, already in place and operating.

So to whom did the Emperor turn? The Roman Army? The police? Gossip columnists?

Dismiss your naïveté. He turned to corn dealers.

Does that need an explanation? My fellow citizen, today you are served by an eminently wise government which on a regular basis assists you by quietly removing some amount of money out of your paycheck. The government has ascertained that you, having earned that money, would prefer to waste it upon something utterly selfish and vain instead of donating it to the public good, via the government treasury. But the government prefers not to berate you. That would be tyrannical. So with all the charm of a bureaucracy, it removes that money from your paycheck without you having to ask. Later, after you file your yearly income tax statement, the government sends you a gift. Too many people self-servingly call it a “refund.” But it’s really a gift.

Paying taxes in the Roman Empire was a little bit different. Not many people had oodles of money to throw away. But a great many people did have something to do with corn. Corn was grown, picked, stored, sold, bought, moved, eaten, and — when people discovered that their local corn dealer was spying on them — abruptly vomited.

Imagine a farmer at that joyous time, tilling his fields of corn. A frumentarius appears. No, not fermentation. A frumentarius, the plural form of which is frumentarii, the Latin word for corn dealers. Upon his arrival by horse or chariot, the frumentarius greets the farmer. Then the frumentarius cites an Imperial decree. Then he points to his accompanying soldiers, then points to an accompanying wagon, and then advises the farmer, very persuasively, to fill the wagon with corn.

The farmer asks, “What about payment?”

To which the nice frumentarius replies, “Yes, of course. For the wonderful benefits he has bestowed upon you, you are paying our beloved Emperor. Lucky you!”

Ah yes, the beloved Emperor. That god who kept changing due to assassination. That Emperor who never visits the farmer but whose engineers built that darn road the frumentarius keeps showing up on. That Emperor whose taxes have funded the building of bridges, aqueducts, coliseums, palaces. Indeed, quite colossal palaces, where the Emperor enjoys orgies. Orgies the farmer is never invited to. The Emperor must have assumed the farmer was too busy growing corn. Still, an invitation would have been nice. Something suitable for framing.

So the farmer, now facing his neighborhood frumentarius, has a choice. Fortunately, either way, the nice frumentarius will help him. If the farmer permits his corn to get confiscated, the frumentarius will haul it away and leave the farmer in peace, which is better than leaving him in pieces. Or the farmer can just say no. He still loses his corn, but the frumentarius, full of understanding, will gladly ensure that the farmer gets the very best weapons and combat training available so that, in the future, the farmer can defend himself. Why? Because the farmer gets to be a Gladiator. But what if the farmer is a pacifist? No problem. The frumentarius will help him become a zoologist. Feeding lions at the Coliseum. Once.

Ah yes, the beloved frumentarius, almost as popular as the Emperor himself. Or so it must have seemed after the Emperor Hadrian assigned to the frumentarii the extra mission of spying upon every peasant, plebeian, and patrician in the Roman Empire having anything to do with corn. At that time your personal repertoire of facial expressions included a ready “happy face” for your local frumentarius. If you uttered any complaints in his presence, especially when he was confiscating your corn, he might feel hurt. And tattle-tale. All the way to the Emperor.

Ouch. Yet this intriguing arrangement (that is, an arrangement full of intrigue) failed to make the frumentarii an effective spy agency. Spies want to know what people really think. But most people become conspicuously silent whenever they see a toga-wearing guy riding around in a chariot, followed by a bunch of guys dressed as Roman soldiers and with wagons full of corn. If you saw that today, parading through your neighborhood, would you say what you really thought? I doubt it.

The Emperor Diocletian doubted it too. So he disbanded the frumentarii. But Diocletian still wanted a spy agency. Indeed, he wanted a better spy agency. So to whom did he turn? To the Roman Army? The police? Gossip columnists?

Dismiss your naïveté. He turned to mailmen.

Hence the real reason why dogs bite mailmen.

Did you assume that dogs and mailmen have never had a closer relationship? Actually, there was a time when they were the best of friends. But upon the mailman’s betrayal, the dog sensed the change almost immediately, the hurt feelings too deep to heal. No more dance parties, no more exchanges of gossip. Not even token wedding invitations. Woe to the person not even a dog will forgive. That said, please ask your canine to stop sharply reminding today’s postal person about that betrayal suffered so long ago. After all, somebody has to deliver your bills.

Imagine postal spies in togas, sliding scrolls into mailboxes, keeping an eye out for the family dog.

Bark that image away. It never happened.

Imagine a Roman version of the Pony Express: the toga-flapping postman on horse-back, riding from station to station, switching repeatedly to a fresh filly, juggling scrolls, chased by outlaws, shooting back with his six-shooters, err, by throwing his javelin. Once.

Spur that image away. It never happened.

In reality, the Roman postal system was a giant geographic network of bed-and-breakfasts, the places so mediocre that you paid extra for the breakfast, along with horse-stables and wagons for rent. It was boring. Very boring. But it was appreciated by the Roman governors and their families whenever they could finagle the Imperial treasury into paying for their vacation trips. The Emperor was happy to oblige, until he found out. He issued orders that only official Imperial business justified charging the treasury. His orders were obeyed until people resumed disobeying them. The exciting part was that give and take.

Another bit of excitement was reading somebody else’s mail. It got read because the postal couriers, thundering along their routes at 20 miles per hour — when they cared to ride that fast — had plenty of time to kill. (And sometimes not just time. Ouch.) On one occasion a governor’s wife wrote to her friend that the Governor was spending all of his time partaking in long baths and other hedonistic Roman pleasures. Later, when the Governor wrote to the Emperor to ask for a vacation, the Emperor ordered him to stop exhausting himself with pleasure and get to work. Guess who handed the Governor that Imperial reply? Probably the same guy who had privily perused the wife’s gossipy letter.

“Oh, you’re back. I missed you so much, it was almost as bad as having you here.”

You might be surprised to learn that the Greek word for messenger is aggelos. From it we get the word angel. Of course, the Emperor Diocletian’s messengers were not angels. More like an amalgamation of mailmen, postal inspectors, highway patrolmen, and secret police. Officially they were empowered to inspect anything on the postal network and, incidentally, almost anything else too. They were called agentes in rebus, a term which means “agents revealing a picture puzzle.” The puzzle was the Roman Empire. The pieces were each agent’s individual impressions. When their collective reports were combined, that sum picture created a mental mosaic of what was going on inside the entire empire. It was a technique little different from what spy agencies do today.

“Greetings! I’m new in town. What’s in this tavern that’s really yummy?”

“That depends, stranger. Are you a corn dealer?”

“Nope. I hate corn. I live for pomegranate juice.”

“Great! Join us for a drink! We were just talking about what a worthless bum the Emperor is! We’re going to launch a rebellion!”

“Really? Wonderful! Please tell me all about it. Oh, by the way, what are your names? If you can’t trust a complete stranger passing through town, who can you trust?”

When ordered to by the Emperor, the Imperial agents could be quite ruthless in ferreting out evidence of somebody’s treason, real or imagined. Not that the Emperor needed much proof. So paranoid was the Emperor Constantius II, he ordered a guy executed just because Constantius had a dream about him. Another guy got executed after Constantius discovered that the guy owned a purple tablecloth. Constantius was afraid the guy might wear it as a royal robe.

Having such a boss, were the agentes in rebus essentially good guys or bad guys? They became quite feared throughout the Roman Empire. Yet, interestingly, they had no official power to arrest or torture people. Those powers belonged to other departments. At a time when every level of government was infested with corruption, and when society at large mirrored that corruption, the Imperial agents at least had the mission of discovering lawbreakers.

Imagine a Roman official walking past a farm where a poor farmer is tilling the fields with his horse. It was illegal for that Roman official to “confiscate” the horse for his own journey. In that situation the agentes in rebus were the good guys.

“Hey you! That’s not your horse! Who said you could steal a farmer’s horse? You droning fen-sucked joithead! If we catch you stealing another horse without the Emperor’s permission, we’ll tell the Emperor! He gets all worked up over people with purple tablecloths! Imagine what he’ll think of you!”

Saint Augustine later wrote that two of his friends, Ponticianus and Evodius, were former Imperial agents who became Christian converts. Conversion was a brave thing to do at the beginning of the third century anno Domini (A.D.) when the agentes in rebus were created, for you could actually get killed for being a Christian. Only a few years later, however, everything went topsy-turvy, because that was when Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire. By the beginning of the fourth century A.D., you could actually get killed for being a non-Christian.

Quid pro quo.

The word pagan, which for centuries has meant non-Christian, comes from the Latin word paganus, which translates as farmer. That’s because Roman farmers were the last Roman subjects to accept Christianity. Christianity at that time was a religion found mostly in the cities. Yes, there was a time when being a Christian was considered urban chic. And if you ventured into the countryside, what did you find? Religious fundamentalists. But they weren’t Christians.

And people say history is boring.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),

Reginald Dipwipple

Secret Agent Extraordinaire