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

by Emma Southon

After god knows how long, a cry went up from the Aventine Hill where Remus and his pals waited. Six vultures had appeared. A sign the gods favoured Remus as the founder of the new city. Elated, he set out with his closest allies to the Palatine Hill where his brother Romulus was grimly waiting. Remus gave his news to Romulus, but at that moment another sign appeared. Twelve vultures flew over the Palatine. The gods had decided that Romulus would be the founder.

Eventually, in an act of ultimate contempt, Remus leapt over one of the rising city walls on the Palatine, inciting Romulus into an uncontrollable fury. He attacked his brother and stabbed him to death and declared, unrepentant, that this was what would happen to anyone who ever breached his walls. And thus, in murder, Rome was founded.

Tarquinius’ son Sextus Tarquinius raped an aristocratic woman named Lucretia. Lucretia responded by calling a family meeting, explaining what had happened and then driving a knife into her own heart. Her family saw this as honourable and praiseworthy in the extreme, and, full of righteous rage and grief, they took to the Forum and displayed her body as that of a murder victim. They demanded Tarquinius and his son be overthrown and exiled.

The Romans designed the Republic to deny power to individuals and to prevent, through the means of shared power, checks and balances, any single man from becoming a tyrant. It was the Romans’ proudest achievement and it was founded in the unjust death of a woman.

Whenever there was a transformative moment in Roman history, there was a murder. A person died, usually bloodily, and, in the space where they once lived, something entirely new emerged.

Rome was an unusually murder-y place. But for most of Roman history murder was not a crime.

The symbol of the Roman state was the fasces – a bundle of sticks containing an axe. The sticks represented the power of the state to beat its citizens, and the axe represented its right to kill them.

Few other societies have revelled in and revered the deliberate and purposeful killing of men and women as much as the Romans.

Our Western obsession with murder as a titillating and enormously entertaining outlier makes us extremely odd in the grand cultural scheme of things. No other society has built media empires on such mountains of dead and mutilated women.

they had mountains of dead real men. Murder was a very literal sport. They took enslaved men and prisoners of war, forcing them to fight one another in an arena until one died violently in front of a screaming crowd of highly entertained people. Regularly.

The Romans also had an institutionalised, domestic and utterly pervasive form of slavery that is hard to get your head around as a modern person who believes that every person is equal. Enslaved men, women and children were everywhere in Rome. Aristocratic homes had hundreds of people living in them who had been enslaved by the Romans. Even poorer homes might have had one enslaved member of the household. The Roman state ran on the labour of enslaved men doing the administrative and physical labour necessary to run a huge empire and build massive marble buildings covered in pretty paintings every four hundred yards.

No Roman ever looked at their slaves and at their freed slaves (who remained part of their household) and thought, ‘Hang on a minute. These are people!’ Instead, they treated these men, women and children with whom they shared their houses as though they were chairs.

Until I started researching this book, I – like you probably – used murder and homicide interchangeably. It turns out that they are not the same thing. Homicide is the act of killing someone under any circumstances. Any time a human kills another person, that’s a homicide.

most forms of homicide are illegal, and there are lots of them. The lowest forms are called involuntary manslaughter in English and US law, and culpable homicide in Scottish law, and a bunch of other things in other places. They are incidents where maybe the perpetrator didn’t mean to kill that other person, but still someone died and it was definitely their fault.

Then there’s voluntary manslaughter. This is when you meant to hurt the victim but not to kill them. Maybe you meant to punch them in a fight but when they went down they cracked their head and died.

After all these – and gosh is English law very specific and detailed about these – comes murder. Murder is defined in England and Wales as ‘where a person (1) of sound mind (2) unlawfully kills (3) any reasonable creature (4) in being (alive and breathing through its own lungs) (5) under the Queen’s Peace (6) with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm’. All six conditions have to be met in order for a homicide to be considered a murder in an English court.

Americans like to complicate this further by separating murder into first and second degrees, and then adding extra complications by letting each state decide what constitutes first-and second-degree murder.

What I’m getting at here is that murder is a constructed act. The only black-and-white part of a murder is the bit where one person killed another, and that’s actually the homicide bit.

murder is a label we apply to some forms of homicide, and that label changes over time and across space.

Murder is the interpretation of an event, interpreted by individual people, which makes murder an emotive label, no matter how much legalese it is couched in.

There are a few reasons why we know so much about Julius Caesar’s murder. The first is that the Romans themselves wrote about it a lot, and left us pleasingly detailed descriptions of the Ides of March and its aftermath.

All this means that Julius Caesar is more myth than man; he is a story that is told. His murder is not remembered as a bloody human act conducted by forty frightened dudes in ungainly dress who were so confused that they only got twenty-three stab wounds in (an almost fifty percent fail rate if you think about it).

his murder was not a standalone incident. It was one of a series of astonishing political murders in the late Roman Republic that, together, show us how very odd political murder was in the Roman world at this time, and how it changed.

Tiberius Gracchus was a genuinely extraordinary man, mostly because of his death. His death marked the demise of the Roman Republic as much as Caesar’s, because it was his death which started almost a hundred years of open warfare in Rome. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that senators took to stabbing the hell out of each other with disturbing frequency for almost a century – very frequently in the centre of the city.

The populares were populist politicians who courted the people’s vote with handouts, while the optimates were high-born patricians and wannabes who literally called themselves the ‘best men’ and believed that the people should be kept as far away from government as possible.

As Rome expanded its power and influence into Italy throughout the fifth century BCE, the poor saw each victory as an opportunity for them to claim some land of their own – after all, they were fighting in the armies that were conquering these Italian neighbours.

Or, even more cruelly, pretended to set aside land for ‘public use’, and then rented it to themselves for ludicrously low rents, leaving the landless Romans still landless and adding to their ranks those poor Italians who had suddenly been conquered by these fighty bastards from Rome.

tension over this land ownership issue seethed constantly in Republican Rome and there was a very real split between the power held by the people of Rome in their tribes which they exercised through voting, and the power held by the Senate of Rome which was exercised through senatorial decrees.

The city was losing its ability to feed itself. So much of the land in and around Rome had become leisure land for aristocrats and pretty gardens and immense villas that Italy’s food production had dropped.

By 133 BCE, Rome had conquered Italy, destroyed Carthage and colonised North Africa, and had just conquered Greece and Macedonia. It had been fighting expansionist battles for a solid two centuries and was not planning on stopping for a long time, which meant it needed Roman bodies in the army and newly built navy. Lots of Roman bodies. But there was a problem: service in the army was technically supposed to be a privilege limited to property-owning Roman citizens and Rome was running out of disposable men who owned land.

So that’s three problems facing the government of Rome. The easiest way to resolve these issues, as far as our protagonist Tiberius Gracchus was concerned, was to redistribute the land. Settle landless Roman citizens on Roman land to farm it and basically all three problems were solved in one fell swoop, with the added benefit – for Tiberius Gracchus – that Tiberius Gracchus would be a hero to the Roman people for the rest of time.

Tiberius the Elder was not of patrician stock but was highly distinguished. He was consul twice, a successful general and became Tribune of the Plebs, during which time he used his veto to prevent the great general Scipio Africanus from being prosecuted after he was accused of taking bribes from the Seleucid king Antiochus III. Scipio was so delighted he immediately betrothed his daughter Cornelia to Tiberius without bothering to consult either his wife or his daughter.

Tiberius the Younger was, as it happens, a remarkably boring Roman. He’s even the most boring member of his family. His mum got statues dedicated to her for being, essentially, the best Roman mother ever. The dad was the subject of a famous story: one day he found two snakes in his house, a male and a female (apparently he was an expert at sexing snakes because I’ve just Googled it and it’s hard. It involves the words ‘probe’ and ‘cloacal vent’.). He did the first thing that any good Roman chap did when confronted by an unusual situation and found a fortune teller to explain it. The fortune teller told him that he had to kill one snake and release the other (it is unclear why; fortune tellers never explained themselves). However, if he let the male snake go and killed the female, his wife would die, but if he released the female and killed the male, he would be killing himself.

Tiberius’ brother Gaius was an absolute riot, said to be the first person in Roman history to pull his cloak open and expose his shoulder while speaking, which is both pointless and a bit sexy. He also had a full-time personal musician who would follow him around and play music: calming when he was getting too angry and excitable if he was getting too sleepy. What a guy!

Tribunes held enormous power in Rome; they were supposed to be the elected representatives of the non-patrician people of Rome and Tiberius apparently took that seriously. Having identified land redistribution as the solution to Rome’s problems, he got stuck in and proposed a commission.

Basically, he called together all the disenfranchised of Rome and offered them the chance to vote on whether they wanted to be given some free land or not.

The Greek historian Appian, writing many centuries later after the winners had been conclusively declared, outlines the complaints of the rich alongside the complaints of the poor and suggests that they are equal, which makes for some fun reading.

The rich, suddenly concerned that they might lose, resorted to the Romans’ favourite insult: they accused Tiberius of wanting to be a king. Sadly for them, again, Tiberius Gracchus was convincingly not a tyrant. He was too virtuous for that. But he gave great speeches which roused the people to believe in a better future for themselves.

As was immediately demonstrated by his colleague in the Tribuneship, Marcus Octavius. As he concluded his speech, Tiberius stepped aside and ordered an official to read aloud the law to be voted on. Octavius stepped forward and ordered the official not to. He vetoed the vote. There was a screaming row between Octavius and Tiberius and the Assembly was adjourned.

Before things got out of control, Tiberius shouted that he would reconvene the Assembly yet again and this time he would be asking the people to impeach Octavius and ‘decide whether a Tribune who acted against the interests of the people should continue to hold office’. So he did. And he won. Octavius was voted out of office and meandered off into obscurity and Tiberius’ agrarian law was passed.

Pergamon was a very rich and large city in Turkey, where Roman rule was beginning to creep in violently. Attalus had watched the long horrific wars in Greece and Macedonia and had seen the Romans brutalise everyone in their path so he hoped to spare his city and his people.

The first attempt at voting was interrupted when Tiberius appeared to be winning and his opponents got in the way. The votes were erased and everyone started again. Now Tiberius appeared to be losing, so his supporters interrupted and the whole thing was called off. Tiberius returned to his house, where people congregated shouting lamentations and encouragement through his window all night.

Then, when Tiberius was leaving the house, he badly stubbed his toe on the doorframe, breaking the nail and filling his sandal with blood. This might have been because people had kept him up all night with the shouting and lamenting, but doors and doorways had great symbolic significance for the Romans, and they saw this as the gods telling Tiberius to go back to bed.

many members of the Senate, the most grand and august body of Roman government, were trying to persuade the consul Publius Mucius Scaevola to use his imperium (supreme power) to kill Tiberius and officially execute him, without trial, for trying to take their stolen land. Mucius Scaevola refused.

The person who finally broke was, astonishingly, the Pontifex Maximus, the head of the college of priests who oversaw state religion. Admittedly, the priesthood wasn’t exactly a spiritual calling in Rome, but it was still a bit like the Archbishop of Canterbury going full Rambo when Scipio Nasica lost his patience, stood up in the temple and shouted, ‘As the consul is a traitor for letting the whole Empire and its laws collapse, I’ll fix this.’ (I’m paraphrasing a bit, but so were the Roman historians, who weren’t there either.)

As the supporters of the Senate and the rich surged forwards, Tiberius’ supporters tried to hold them back and the Senate began to swing their homemade clubs. This had got out of hand. It had transcended a simple riot as soon as the Senate themselves came in and started hitting. As wood shattered bones and blood began to flow, the Republic was being inexorably mutilated along with the faces of a lot of Roman people.

As Nasica swung his chair leg into the heads of those trying to protect Tiberius, he shattered the façade of democracy and republicanism that allowed the people of Rome to believe they had a voice and power in their government.

Wood came down on his head and Tiberius died. He, along with hundreds of others, was beaten to death by a mob of the richest men in the West. He hadn’t reached his thirtieth birthday. Murder had been introduced as a solution to Roman political arguments and it could never be taken back.

For all the weaselly attempts by later Roman historians to make Tiberius into some kind of deranged traitor to the Republic, it’s pretty clear that what they mean is class traitor. He tried to undermine the controlling power of the rich and force some limited form of equality on them and they hated it.

Everyone knew that there was no power balance between the Senate and the people of Rome. Democracy was a charade. There was just the Senate and they would kill to keep it that way. And there would be no consequences when they did.