Lack of Police. By almost any modern standard Roman politicians look like a tough and moralistic lot. It is surprising, then, that they seem to have had almost no interest in what one would think of as crime fighting. "Law and order" appears neither as a campaign promise nor as a subject for more abstract political theorizing. There were nearly no state prosecutors nor police, and the minor exceptions prove the rule. Under the Republic, several magistrates had the authority to prosecute wrongdoers before the assemblies. But these magistrates all had many other duties, and this trial procedure was too clumsy to have been used except in a few important cases. Under the Empire a city-watch was founded, but it was small (six thousand men in a city of roughly one million) and included no detectives to investigate crimes already...