This book is about the maintenance of public order in ancient Rome, with special reference to the period of the Republic. It deals with the methods by which the rules designed to secure peace in the community were enforced. It elucidates the characteristic Roman responses to issues of public order, such as arose in the case of rule-infringements which could not simply be left for settlement (of whatever kind) between the parties concerned or to the decision of a court that one of the parties could call upon, but had to be dealt with through communal means of enforcement.

Scholars who have investigated problems of law and order in the Late Republic have often argued that the lack of a strong and politically impartial police force was a serious, structural weakness in Roman society. It turns out that the Roman Imperial period, with its new governmental agencies, did not remedy the alleged deficiency. Moreover, the same point could be made at the expense of virtually all pre-modern societies. The establishment of a police force in the sense of a specialized and impartial law-enforcement agency was an innovation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was the product of fundamental changes in individual and societal attitudes towards, and demands for, public order.