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About Roman spies? There's a lot of hype on the internet about this. They relied on informers, first and foremost. Deserters and local people were just as important in terms of information as anything more formal. The Frumentarii were not an intelligence class or agency, they were grain merchants whose wide ranging contacts put them in a unique position to pass on rumours and intelligence, and were co-opted as spies at one point though never formally so. They were eventually replaced in this role by the custom created Agentes In Rebus, a real bona fide intelligence service (as far as I know, the first ever) Peregrinii were not a formal spies either, because the word simply describes foreigners, though as an intelligence source may have been useful from time to time. Exploratores were legionaries used as scouts, though sometimes they did covert activity mostly of a military nature. They were not seperate units though formations of them sometimes persisted. Speculares were legionaries used as spies, deliberately, tasked with intelligence gathering as required.