What is "informers"

Usage examples of "informers".

In the late summer of the year that I returned with my family from my British trip, I worked with Paccius Africanus and Silius Italicus, two famous informers at the top of their trade.

Her brothers nowadays formed the junior sector of Falco and Associates, a little-known firm of private informers who specialised in background investigations of the family type (bridegrooms, widows and other cheating, lying, money-grubbing swine just like your own relatives).

To be asked about their noble signatures by a pack of harrying informers would seem outrageous.

True, Metellus had been exposed - but he had fallen victim to an informer, and informers notoriously target victims unfairly.

To me, informers on duty are solitary grousers, not given to domestic chat.

Her household was once so wealthy that informers did not scruple to cite her family as having an 'extravagant lifestyle'- though her son says nothing so reprehensible and un-Roman really happened.

If we were to go out into the Forum Romanorum now this minute, and ask passers-by to define informers, I believe their answers would include: immoral patricians, men who are intent on rising rapidly despite lack of personal talent, men without principle, and lowborn toadies hanging around the skirts of power.

They might suggest that informers target victims for their own benefit, under cover of serving society by cleaning it up.

They would say that informers ruthlessly attack their victims, using means that are often of doubtful legitimacy.

Worst of all, remembering the excesses and abuses under emperors like Nero, a creature now 'damned to the memory' for his appalling crimes, people would fear that the role of informers may be still that of secret, subversive informants, whispering poison in the ear of the Emperor.

One of the first acts of his administration - before Vespasian himself even returned to Rome from Judaea as Emperor - was to require all senators who had acted as informers under Nero to swear a solemn oath about their past actions.

I was criticised for beginning this discussion of informers, but now, gentlemen, you can see why it is entirely relevant.

When I first saw the provision, I can tell you my thought was that informers have a bad reputation for chasing legacies and that this was an example.

We could behave like true informers: since it spoiled our case, we could hide this.

If the two informers knew all along who killed Metellus, everything since had been a set-up.