The Ancient Roots of Doing Time
People knew about incarceration. Seneca, the Roman philosopher and dramatist (and court counsellor), argued that punishment should be proportionate to the crime, and resisted the notion that every offense required execution. Some crimes, he claimed, called for little more than “a private rebuke followed by public disgrace”; others warranted exile, chains, and imprisonment. In an inscription from the third century C.E., a prisoner named Theodorus thanks the gods after having served a term of twenty-two months in a civic prison—proof that “doing time” was not an invention of the modern era. Graduated, reform-minded incarceration, Larsen and Letteney insist, was present more than a millennium before the Foucauldian model says it was born.
Indeed, some of the most enduring myths of antiquity—often retold, even more often depicted—make sense only against the backdrop of long-term imprisonment. The tale of Pero and Cimon, for instance, is as potent as it is oddly Freudian: Pero, a young woman, visits her starving father, Cimon, in a prison and sustains him with her own breast milk. The scene appears in Roman frescoes, including a surviving example in Pompeii, and after the Renaissance it became a staple of Western art—Rubens, naturally, offered his own disturbingly fleshy version. The story continued to be cited and pictured as an exemplar of Roman charity, but the fable couldn’t have taken root if the idea of Cimon’s long sentence hadn’t resonated with an ancient audience. (The famous Gospel episode featuring Barabbas—the prisoner whom Pilate offers to exchange for Jesus—depends on the plausibility, for a second-century audience, of prolonged imprisonment with the possibility of parole.)
Ancient prisons, of course, had their own distinctive character. Most were underground, like the Tullian in Rome—buried chambers with little light or air, and only the most rudimentary latrines. (One imagines a Foucauldian history of sewage and sanitation, which might prove more pivotal in the shaping of civilization than law or punishment.) Certainly, the stench of antique prisons is the dominant note in the ancient reporting. And, although the microbial mechanisms of disease were unknown, it was obvious that these circumstances were insalubrious in the extreme; a set sentence could easily become a death sentence.
Even that condition, though, is familiar from the debtors’ prisons in Dickens, depicted in the midst of Victorian prosperity. The atmosphere of ancient prisons recalls the ones in “Little Dorrit” and “The Pickwick Papers”: situated in the middle of the city, with a relatively transparent membrane between the streets and the cells, allowing affluent letter writers and provisioners easy access to those inside. There was a kind of constant civic bargaining between guards and prisoners, depending on social status or, more to the point, the money that one had for bribes and favors.
In the end, Larsen and Letteney make their polemical point unambiguously plain. “The modern prison,” they write, “is not a new construction but an old and haunted house.” For all the differences between ancient and modern practice, they conclude, “some aspects of incarceration have appeared in every Mediterranean society for which we have historical data.” Turning decisively against Foucault, they write that incarceration may be “a facet of every hierarchical, complex society.” In other words, it’s always been with us.
What’s at stake in this study is more than the truth or falsity of Foucault’s account of modern incarceration. It is our picture of history itself, and of how incommensurable one period truly is with another. Under the influence of Foucault and his contemporaries, many scholars treat the so-called dialogue of the dead—the imagined passage back and forth between eras—as a kind of pious fiction. Where the third Annales school spoke of mentalités, a shared cast of mind or sensibility, Foucault proposed a more radical concept: the episteme, a matter not of shared psychology but of the governing rules and structures that determine what can be thought or said at any given moment. We are as closed off from the ancients’ mind-set as firmly as they are from ours; their assumptions and tacit expectations about the order of things are lost to us.
It seems possible that prisons existed almost as an afterthought to Roman theories of law. In Andrew M. Riggsby’s “Crime and Community in Ciceronian Rome,” for instance, we are given detailed studies of some of Cicero’s surviving legal arguments in defense of Romans accused usually of high crimes, like extortion and conspiracy. There seems enormous and striking contemporaneity in the kind of reasoning Cicero uses—sometimes appealing to the letter of the law, sometimes to a larger framework of social good, so that an accused who can be shown to have done much good in the past ought to be acquitted of a presented misdeed. But there are few references to what will happen to the accused after they are convicted or acquitted. The supple flexibility of Cicero’s arguments is immensely impressive, and so is the sense that the jury—albeit a selective one, of high-ranking Romans—will really listen to the arguments as arguments, and that the still animating republican idea of the rule of law, rather than the diktat of the emperor, genuinely matters to the outcome. But the aftermath is blurred. Capital crimes entail execution or exile, presumably, but the notion of state retribution seems absent from the discourse of individual defense. (Cicero himself, of course, eventually ended up executed, headless and handless, a victim of the new imperial ideal of justice.)
