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Although the term conspiracy theory does not appear in my Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History, one reviewer remarked, "It was hard not to misremember Pagan's title as 'Conspiracy Theories in Ancient Rome.' "' Given the preponderance of conspiracies in ancient Rome, conspiracy theory is a reasonable 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 conspiracy 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 definition. Conspiracy demanded action, not theory. Therefore the study of conspiracy 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 genres.2 Conspiracy theories implicating women or slaves create and sustain the social, economic, and political status of-and attitudes toward-these marginalized groups. Thus conspiracy theory lets us glimpse something of the construction and maintenance of elite Roman social forms.
Epistemological considerations complement this sociohistorical modeling of conspiracy theory in ancient Rome. Three aspects of conspiracy raise fundamental contradictions about knowledge: silence, punishment, and evidence. Silence is a necessary ingredient for a successful conspiracy, yet it hinders the transfer of knowledge that can bring a conspiracy to light. To punish conspirators who have been apprehended before committing a crime is to risk punishing innocent men. Evidence for a conspiracy often derives from witnesses whose motives are suspect. From a collation of these ethical dilemmas emerges a composite model of conspiracy theory as it was embedded in Roman society.
So far I have avoided what I mean by conspiracy theory. We all bring to the term a sufficient comprehension based on a set of preconceived (and...