There were no police in Classical Athens, nor in Rome.
Lexi asked the other day who investigated crime in Athens. The answer is it was totally up to private citizens to investigate any crime and prosecute the criminal. A wronged person had to investigate his own crime, or if it was a murder then the relatives of the dead man. Rome had the same system.
This works for me beautifully. Nicolaos is as free to pursue crime as the next man, and there are no cops for him to tread on the toes of.
The system was open to abuse, and it was a particular problem in Rome. Rules were introduced such that successful prosecutors won part of the penalty fine, but losers could be sued for wrongful prosecution. This discouraged vexatious cases.
Athens did have a city guard for crowd control.
The Scythian Guard of Athens was created after the Persian Wars, when 300 slaves, supposedly Scythians (a barbarian people far to the north), were bought for the purposes of crowd control within the city. We know this from the works of two orators called Andocides and Aeschines.
One of the jobs of the Scythian Guard was to ensure enough people turned up to vote at the Ecclesia. With a quorum of 6,000 men(!), they sometimes had trouble getting enough citizens to hold a parliament. The Scythians solved that problem by dipping a long rope in paint, holding both ends so it was taut, and then sweeping through the agora to herd reluctant citizens towards the Pnyx, where parliament met. Anyone later caught with paint on his chiton was fined. I'm not making this up! It's described in the comic play The Acharnians by Aristophanes.
The dress code of the Scythians is surprisingly well known, for the simple reason that Scythians appear frequently on Athenian pottery.
The bow was the favored weapon of the Scythians, and they carried it unstrung when on patrol, as a baton with which to beat, which they would happily do if faced with a disorderly drunk. There are actual accounts of Scythians -- who were slaves, mind you -- beating badly behaved citizens in the street. It may seem odd the Athenians allowed slaves to push them around, but the reason is that it was illegal for one citizen to lay hands on another, but it was legal for a slave under approved circumstances.
The Scythians had no power of arrest, and they certainly had no ability to investigate a crime, but they would have made wonderful enforcers.
By the time of Nicolaos it’s unlikely the Scythian Guard were in fact all Scythian. Their numbers would have been replenished with whatever suitable slaves came to hand.
In the books, Nico has an uneasy relationship with Pythax, the brutally tough Chief of the Scythian Guard. Pythax has noticed that wherever Nico goes, a body tends to turn up. Not that he cares about the deaths, but littering is a serious misdemeanor.
"You want to watch yourself, little boy. You don’t want to go getting a reputation for violence.” Pythax cracked his knuckles.
This beautiful image comes from the Smithsonian Magazine, which some time ago did an excellent display on what the true colors of the ancient world were like:
