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

by Emma Southon

This tiny act was a shattering moment for a lot of senators and it obviously resonated with later sources because those sympathetic to Caesar try to come up with reasons why he couldn’t stand.

My personal favourite is Cassius Dio’s. Dio is an unapologetic Caesar fan. He shows his hand early in his account when he states that Cassius and Brutus destroyed the only stable government Rome had ever known and killed Caesar out of jealousy and stupidity. Even Dio struggles a bit with Caesar’s refusal to stand for senators; he is, after all, and he might have mentioned this once or twice, a Roman senator himself. So he states ‘some said that’ Caesar had been suffering from diarrhoea that day and had therefore been unable to stand and greet the senators lest he have an unfortunate accident.

The useful thing about having sources which are not traditionally Roman and which are removed in time from the events they describe is that they can be remarkably perceptive about what was going on in 44 BCE between Caesar and the senators, even while they are baffled or appalled by the murder itself.

It’s easy to distance ourselves from the past and write ‘the civil war lasted four years’ and forget how unbearable those four years were for the people of Rome while half the men were off killing one another, with no knowledge of when it would end.

Tyranny could be tolerated if it was disguised; Caesar kept making it obvious.

The Senate built their whole identity on the fact that they had overthrown their kings and created the perfect Republic. Yeah, it was a bit broken right now but that didn’t mean that they had been wrong to get rid of kings. That was their absolute best cultural achievement. Even better than conquering every city they ever came across.

Marching off against Parthia was a good sign that a Roman general or emperor was getting too big for his boots, but this time a very specific anxiety arose.

In 44 BCE, a rumour arose that the books contained a prophecy that the Parthians could only be defeated by a king of Rome and that Caesar was going to use this information – which no other Roman would be able to check – to get the Senate to grant him the title of king, possibly king of one of their provinces.

Statues were a public space in which the inhabitants of Rome could express their opinions about political figures. It was common for anonymous people to respond to the actions of politicians, celebrities and even emperors via the medium of graffiti on statues. A rude couplet on a golden statue was the Saturday Night Live or Twitter outrage machine of the time.

Statue graffiti was a way of learning public opinion about a person or issue. So, finding a diadem on Caesar’s most golden statue was a disturbing sign that certain people within Rome might actually want Caesar to be king.

It was at the festival of the Lupercalia, held on 15 February, which culminated in the brilliant spectacle of all the most famous men in the city getting naked, slaughtering a sheep, oiling up all shiny, and then running through the city hitting women with bits of leather. For fertility, of course. People loved it. Everyone came out to watch and cheer and be hit by a nude senator for luck. A fantastic day out for all the family. And of course, Julius Caesar was there, sitting in his gold and ivory chair, raised above everyone else in the Forum where the run culminated, wearing his bright purple toga and his bright red boots.

Their versions of the incident are that Caesar and Antony were testing the people of Rome. Much like when governments ‘leak’ new policies in order to test a reaction without embarrassment, Caesar was ‘leaking’ the idea of him being a king.

Cicero wrote a letter to his best friend Atticus (it’s cute that they all have best friends) on 8 June 45 BCE – ten months before the murder – from Marcus Brutus’ holiday home in Antium and already the beginnings of a plot are obvious. Brutus was already concerned that he was unsafe and Cassius felt the same.

Roman aristocratic liberty is not the same as our liberty. Our liberty is freedom for all from oppressive restrictions on our lives and behaviours. Roman aristocratic liberty was the freedom to fight among one another, according to the rules, to achieve political power. These were men who owned people as slaves – loads of people – legally kept women as minors and made legal distinction between the invented categories of patrician and plebeian.

They also, according to Appian, believed that killing Caesar in the Senate House, which was a religious space, would make it clear that their actions were done on behalf of the state of Rome and not for personal revenge. It was this too which persuaded them not to kill Antony.

Cicero would later sigh heavily over this decision, writing that they acted with the bravery of men but the strategy of children.14 Which is true. It was a desperate and pathetic attempt to make the murder of a popular leader look like an acceptable act and to save their own reputations.

In the end, the two Brutuses and Cassius really wanted to come out of the murder looking like heroes who could be given consulships, or at the very least a decent province to govern for a while.

Caesar, of course, liked to tell everyone that he was descended from the goddess Venus, while the Romans believed themselves to be descended from Aeneas, who escaped the sack of Troy. No other sources liked that one, though.

The traditional omen, however, is the fortune teller who warns Caesar to ‘beware the Ides of March’ in Shakespeare’s play. Shakespeare lifted this from Plutarch and it also appears in Appian, Suetonius and Dio. He is called Spurinna.

The Senate House wasn’t the white togas and white columns place of quiet dignity that is portrayed on TV. It was a bustling place full of constant chatter. Caesar kept walking to his fancy chair, unaware that Antony had been detained outside and that the murder plot had already swung into precise action.

Gaius Julius Caesar died having received twenty-three stab wounds in a pool of blood, his own and others’, in the Senate House.

The Roman aristocracy were torn apart by their reactions to the murder. Cicero, for example, was vocally on the side of the killers. He wrote, in a much later piece called On Duties, that killing a tyrant was no more than the amputation of a rotten limb. It was not murder to kill Caesar, in Cicero’s opinion, because the tyrant had given up his humanity. It was an unfortunate and unpleasant act but not murder. Of course, Cicero himself had murdered Catiline as an enemy of the state in 63 BCE, against Julius Caesar’s arguments and without a trial, so he is defending himself as much as the assassins.

Matius believed that Caesar had been the Republic’s last hope, asking, ‘If a man of his genius could not succeed, what hope is there for anyone else?’15 Moreover, Matius had no time for Cicero’s philosophising. It might be ethically right to kill a tyrant in principle, but in the actual situation in which they found themselves, he did not believe that it was a good idea to kill Julius Caesar.

The public definition of Caesar’s homicide changed too. In the first days after the murder, it seemed that the murderers would get their wish: they were granted forgiveness by the Senate led by Antony. The homicide was briefly an assassination for possibly honourable purposes. The killers would be unpunished because they had not committed a punishable act. The peace didn’t last. Against the wishes of the murderers, and entirely undermining their aims and goals, the Senate granted Caesar a public funeral.

Antony used his eulogy to recite the decree of the Senate in which they had voted Caesar his highest honours and the pledge the senators had made to protect Caesar. In that moment, the mood changed and Caesar’s death became, in the minds of the people of Rome, truly a murder. And they were enraged.

What Cassius and Brutus failed to realise, or stupidly ignored, was that the process of senatorial murders, of mob killings on the street sanctioned by the government, of arbitrary death sentences and civil war had changed the world they lived in. They thought that they could be classical heroes like the Brutus who overthrew the kings, forgetting that Brutus overthrew the kings with the help and consent of (almost) every single other senator, having made his case in public in the Forum.

The Senate were no longer a cohesive whole, and the people were no longer completely downtrodden and disenfranchised. A new world had been ushered in by two centuries of murder and these murderers were the last to realise it.

Salona had been a Roman city for centuries. Rich and peaceful, it apparently felt like the kind of place where wealthy ten-year-old girls could go skipping off by themselves for the afternoon. We know that Julia Restuta was wealthy because this trip turned out to be her last.

Her parents, rich and heartbroken, did the only thing they could: they raised an enormous headstone for her which outlined the whole sorry story. Under a tiny bust of Julia’s face, the inscription reads: ‘To the spirits of the dead and to the most unfortunate Julia Restuta, murdered at the age of ten on account of her jewellery. Her parents, Julius Restutus and Statia Pudentilla, [set this up].’

The same can be said for Prima Florentina, who was sixteen when her husband Orpheus threw her into the Tiber, or Domitilla who was fourteen (and just four months married) when she was kidnapped, assaulted and killed by some ‘men from Pontus’, or Grattius who was murdered by muggers on the Via Salaria between Rome and Castrum Truentinum.2 These people weren’t senators or the children of senators, they weren’t important in the politics of the city of Rome, or descended from ancient, aristocratic families, or owners of immense estates in Ameria, or friends with consuls. They were those who, in George Eliot’s words, ‘lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’.

The only thing we know about Prima Florentina is that her husband murdered her. The only thing we know about Julia Restuta is that she died in a mugging that went horribly wrong. Their epitaphs seem to exist simply to draw attention to the terrible manner of their deaths and that is probably exactly their purpose.

There’s a very good chance that these epitaphs were the only justice that the relatives of Julia and Grattius and Prima ever received. The only way their parents could force the indifferent universe to hear their agonised howl of grief was to inscribe it into stone. Prima’s parents were able to name and shame the man who took their daughter from them, but he was probably never tried or punished.

The Roman world had no official police force to do investigations, and no Child Protective Services to prosecute a case. It had no long-term prisons and no state-sponsored public defender. All it had was a self-help system that forced the families of the victims to investigate, prosecute and – sometimes – punish crimes.

The first is that murder was not a crime in the Roman legal system for a surprising amount of its history. By this, I mean that the state of Rome had absolutely no interest in when, how or why its citizens were killing each other.

The second issue is that the Romans never developed a concept of manslaughter or murder committed in the act of another crime. So, even if the men who killed Julia Restuta had been identified and captured, they probably wouldn’t have been prosecuted for murder anyway if they hadn’t actively meant to kill her.

Romans being Romans, a fundamentally pragmatic people, they decided to set up a committee to deal with the situation. This committee, of ten men with consular imperium, put together ten tablets of laws and then bolted on another two tablets the following year.

As far as anyone can tell, the first law the Romans wrote down, on tablet one of their epoch- and civilisation-defining law code, the basis for Western law for millennia, was: ‘When anyone summons another before the tribunal of a judge, the latter must, without hesitation, immediately appear.’ As I say, they were a remarkably pragmatic people.

While the internet likes to suggest that you can read the Twelve Tables and offers a number of lovely extant-seeming translations, what we actually have is numerous decontextualised snippets and allusions to the Twelve Tables, most of which are considerably more cryptic than is ideal.

They’re full of mundane things like how debts have to be paid within thirty days, judges have to make decisions before the sun has set on the court, women mustn’t scratch at their faces during funerals, a tree is worth twenty-five asses† if it’s illegally cut down, and so on.

In the fragments of the tables that remain, the lawmakers instead appear to have been more interested in emphasising when homicide was lawful rather than delineating when it was unlawful. For example, one of the clearest fragments states that if someone is caught while in the process of theft and killed, then that homicide is lawful.

We also see a number of ways in which the Roman court, as representatives of the Roman city-state, were allowed to kill their citizens, including by throwing them off a big rock, scourging them, throwing them in the Tiber in a bag, something odd that no one understands involving a dish and a girdle that may or may not be a death penalty, being burnt to death, being sacrificed to Ceres, or being beaten to death with rods (that last one was the punishment for writing mean poems about other people).

Punching a free man’s teeth out, however, just cost three hundred asses.

It reads: ‘Who deserves to be pardoned more than a man who has killed by accident . . . for there is a law in the Twelve Tables “if a weapon escapes from a hand . . .”’.4 There it ends. This is the kind of inconvenient survival of source that I take as history trolling us.

Roman law had no particular interest in legislating morality at the beginning. That was the situation until sometime in the third century BCE, possibly around 286 BCE, when a Tribune named Aquilia got the Lex Aquilia passed via a plebiscite (basically a referendum). We know of this law because it survives in a text from late antiquity called Justinian’s Digest.

The Lex Aquilia is one of these and it dealt with property damage. It was concerned with the circumstances under which someone who damaged someone else’s property had to pay compensation, which seems unrelated to murder until you look at section one of the law, which goes like this: Where anyone unlawfully kills a male or female slave belonging to another, or a quadruped included in the class of cattle, let him be required to pay a sum equal to the greatest value that the same was worth during the past year.

(There are also a couple of sentences on whether an elephant counts as cattle. Conclusion: no.)

This is what the commentary on the Lex Aquilia is: a series of nasty and brutal ways in which men, women and children unlucky enough to be enslaved to the Romans could be maimed and killed, both accidentally and on purpose.

In the Lex Aquilia enslaved people are beaten while ill, thrown from bridges, poisoned, stabbed, strangled, starved, trampled by mules, eaten by dogs and burnt. Reading it is like finding Patrick Bateman’s diaries: a sickening litany of violence committed casually, and this is why the Lex Aquilia has been seen as a murder law.

To a Roman reader, though, reading the Lex Aquilia is akin to reading a list of ways in which tables might be damaged. Because this isn’t a murder law, it’s a property damage law. To the Romans, enslaved people weren’t people who can be murdered any more than cows and sheep were people.

A person who kills an enslaved man, woman or child has to pay their owner their value. It is the owner who has been injured by their death and the owner whose loss must be made good.