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to argue that dominion of the kind attained by the Roman Empire had in any case been no blessing. Life under its sway, he argued, had been characterized by fear, war, bloodshed, instability and the stress of constant ambition. Joy had been but fleeting, with what Augustine memorably called "the fragile brilliance of a glass." The free had been even more harmed than the enslaved, since the old empire had rendered the powerful Roman a slave to vices. And then Augustine remarked that kingdoms without justice were merely criminal gangs writ large. For "what are criminal gangs," he asked-in words that Atkyns echoed-but "petty kingdoms?" Spartacus's gladiators had flourished as a pseudo-kingdom ofprecisely this kind, fomenting "acts of brigandage at the beginning, and wars of piracy later. "33 Then came Cicero's anecdote: "For it was a witty and truthful rejoinder which was given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great. The king asked the fellow, `What is your idea, in infesting the sea? And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, `The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I'm called a pirate: because you have a mighty navy, you're called an emperor. `34

BothAtkyns himself and his intended readers (the MPs of the Cavalier Parliament) must have recognized this reference and understood its significance. It had been much quoted-often, as in Atkyns's case, without attribution-by all sides in the civil war. Indeed, once one is aware of it, one begins to see it everywhere in the politics of the period. The Levellers, for example, had demanded to know whether Alexander and his like were not simply "great and lawless thieves."35 Milton invoked it. In the 165osJohn Dryden, too, described Rome as "That old unquestion'd Pirate of the Land," protected by an Alexander (Pope Alexander VII) but now taught to tremble by Cromwell.36 And it is even possible that Atkyns got the story from his own printer, a remarkable soldier, political theorist, and pamphleteer named John Streater. It had appeared at the conclusion of James Harrington's Oceana, the founding manifesto of English civic republicanism, which Streater had printed in 1656, where it was once again made the occasion for a distinction between virtuous and vicious empire, the latter being "but a great Robbery "37 And that this was Streater's own view could be seen in his own pamphlets of the 165os. Indeed, Streater went further and linked the old tale to modern concerns about internal enemies. He maintained a distinction between what he called "Companies" and "Pyrates," on the basis that the former maintained the public good, the latter only a private. `And indeed," he added, "when those that are in Government mind but their private good only, they are no better then Thieves."38

Too much should not be made of this, but one can occasionally find Streater's notion of piracy in seventeenth-century legal or political writings. On this account, pirates were essentially members of any social institution the civility of which was not integrated with the broader commonwealth's. The point was that most collective groups, such as guilds, companies, or universities, maintained customary practices that both bound them together and secured them as harmonious elements in the commonwealth. A brewers' company supposedly would; so, in its own eyes at least, did the Stationers'. Pirates were then the exception to this rule. A pirate crew was a collective, all right, but it honored no propriety recognizable to the commonwealth at large, and it owed no allegiance to the common good. By these lights highwaymen were as much pirates as Blackbeard or HenryMorgan- and Milton, for one, translatedAugustine's story so as to liken kings, not to seagoing pirates, but to "highway robbers." It was perhaps for this reason that unauthorized reprinters too were sometimes called "highwaymen," for example by Defoe, who added that their existence was "a Reproach to awell-govern'd Nation."39

Atkyns was drawing on this idea, yet his own argument nevertheless had a unique