A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

by Emma Southon

Gaius was forced to flee the city and got his enslaved attendant, Philoctetes, to stab him.

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We have so much information about Julius Caesar, including his own writings about his activities as a general which – in an unbelievably annoying move – he wrote in the third person, that we almost can’t handle it. But we have only five sources for his death, none of them contemporary.

Cicero’s words. He is a historian’s wet dream, or he would be if he wasn’t so deeply unreliable, but he never wrote about Caesar’s death. He wrote about before, and he wrote about what Mark Antony did after, but never about what happened on the Ides of March 44 BCE.

Similarly, archaeology tells us that Romans did not routinely murder little baby girls because they ‘valued’ boys more. That myth, persistent as herpes, comes from a single letter from Roman Egypt and a whole lot of assumption.

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One of the things that archaeology can tell us, for example, is that infant and baby skeletons are almost never found in cemetery settings; they are found buried in domestic settings. People whose babies died (or who killed their babies) buried them quietly, often in small pots, in their gardens and courtyards.

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