Arms, Secrecy, Citizenship, and the Law: State Security in the Ancient World

This paper presents a critical reconsideration of the Latin term arcanus in the works of Tacitus, in order to offer some new insights into the historian's attitude towards the Principate as a mode of government. It will focus in particular on the four occasions where the neuter substantive “arcana” is used by Tacitus to refer to secrets related either to the state or to imperial government (Hist. 1.4.2; Ann.

The Georgics is a key text in the development at Rome of a discourse about security that deserves greater philological attention than it has yet received. While securitas first appears as psychological tranquility in Cicero, by Velleius Paterculus the word’s meaning approaches our “national security” (spem… perpetuae securitatis aeternitatisque Romani imperii, 2.103.4) (Instinsky). The interval marks the transition from republic to empire.

This paper uses a close reading of an Athenian inscription (“Athens Aids Eretria” = Tod 154 = IG II² 125) to challenge long-held assumptions about Greek mercenary service and its relationship to the “decline” of the fourth century polis.

Debates over the relationship between an armed citizen body and the possibility of government tyranny dominate current American political discourse. The rhetoric on both sides of the issue often centers on the Second Amendment and the intentions and political philosophies of the framers of the Constitution. The founding fathers’ political theories, however, were greatly influenced by their interpretations of ancient Greek and Roman history (Wiltshire 1992; Richard 1994), especially the frequency and intensity of stasis in Greek city-states (e.g.

Athenian lawsuits against laws and decrees are often treated as ancient parallels to the modern remedies against unconstitutional measures: the graphai against unlawful decrees (παρανόμων) and against making law that is “unfitting” (νόμον μὴ ἐπιτήδειον θεῖναι) defended the politeia much as the US federal courts deal with laws and decisions at odds with the Constitution.