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

by Emma Southon

And so he executed four hundred senators and sixteen hundred equestrians and simultaneously enacted the first true murder law, known as the Lex Cornelia de Sicariis et Veneficiis, which (very) roughly translates to the Cornelian Law on people who carry swords and also magicians.

For the first time, the Roman state decided that it could interfere in what had previously been private interactions between families. For the first time, the Romans legislated the lives and deaths of free citizens. Murder was invented.

So huge were the numbers of complainants, with their gripes about Roman governors stealing from their temples and raping their daughters, that a whole new judicial arm of the government had to be set up for them.

It exists because whatever law was being enforced by Gaius’ court is lost completely and we have no records of any of the trials that took place there so we have simply no idea what they were for or what they did. So, for the purposes of this quick overview, we’re going to ignore them. As far as the legal record is concerned, which is Justinian’s Digest, Sulla invented murder.

Sulla, on the other hand, decided it was only important to be very, very clear on the precise acts that he was legislating against, and so he explicitly outlawed killing people on purpose with arson, by giving false evidence or arranging for people to give false evidence in court, by presiding over a criminal trial with the intent of executing someone, by taking bribes so that someone will be found guilty, or – weirdly – by poison, and ruled that it was no longer legal to carry a knife or weapon in Rome with the intent of killing someone.

It is a murder law which is very clearly and specifically aimed at the elite ranks of Roman society who were, in the aftermath of a brutal decade of war, using the civil courts and armed gangs to harass each other and rid themselves of people who pissed them off.

The Lex Cornelia paints a picture of a scared and vengeful segment of society who had spent ten years killing one another on battlefields and absolutely were not over those wartime resentments.

It exposes a legal system that appears to be completely rotten with false evidence, corrupt magistrates and vindictive judges, and a Rome that is riddled with mysterious deaths by poisoning and plagued by gangs of armed men roaming the streets, all of which Sulla needed to fix.

Neither Julius Caesar, nor Augustus, nor Vespasian, nor Trajan got around to saying ‘hey, don’t kill people on purpose’ because that was, quite simply, not their job.

The difference is that, until Hadrian, the Roman legal system considered the individual to be the victim of a violent, personal crime, not the state. I can practically see you, dear reader, rolling your eyes at this brutally obvious statement because in modern vernacular we also see the person who has been killed as the victim and their relatives as the victim’s family.

Or, at least, as far as the modern Western state is concerned, there are two victims in every murder: the person who bled out on the floor and the dignity of the state.

Instead, it is the state that decides whether or not to prosecute and it is the state that appears as the plaintiff in court because, in criminal law, it is the state that has been harmed by the crime and the state that defines crime.

In Rome, however, murder was not technically a crime, in that it was not investigated or prosecuted by the government. No senators were spending their days gumshoeing around Rome and there were no state prosecutors or criminal prosecution service employees. The Roman state, at least until the dawn of the Imperial period, did not consider itself to be harmed, threatened or challenged when a man strangled his wife or stabbed a rival.

Dealing with a murder in the Roman world was less like CSI and much more like dealing with an uninsured person driving into your car, forcing you to take them to the small claims court to get them to pay for a new bumper.

What we see in these surviving laws is the evolution of the idea of murder as a crime, as something which harms the state and is to be regulated by the state, in parallel with the evolution of the Roman state into a centralised, military-backed absolute monarchy. This is not a coincidence.

This does not mean, however, that Romans were cool with killing during the early years. It just means that they didn’t think it was the state’s job to police it, except in extreme circumstances like when someone very rich or very famous was involved, or when a large number of people died.

parricide refers to the killing of any ancestor – any member of the family of a generation above the murderer – but in Roman law it applies to any family member, including patrons. Romans were weird about parricide, in that it is the only form of murder we know that was definitely included in the Twelve Tables, deriving from a law believed to have been set by the second king of Rome – Numa.

Romans, unlike virtually any modern society, had little to no legal interest in stranger murder but a unique and deep-seated cultural horror of murder within the family.

The Roman fear of being killed by their kids – and Roman here is short for ‘Roman men of the aristocratic classes’ – is so well discussed among historians that it almost feels a cliché to write about it.

It is, you’ll note, significantly more exhaustive than the laws concerning bog-standard non-familial murder, which worked hard to be as useless as possible. Outside of the law, however, we don’t really see people killing their first cousins on their mother’s side or their grandmothers.

One day our vernacular interchangeable use of murder and homicide in comparison to the careful wording of our laws will confuse the hell out of future historians.

Also, in a twist that is one of the more irritating of Roman behaviours for your historian here: the Romans sometimes also seem to use parricide to mean treason.

The main problem with patri/parricide is that the vast majority of Roman sources for what parricide was and what it meant come from the late Republic, that very narrow period of history when Romans were struggling a lot with their culture and politics and when all those people who had styled themselves as fathers of the country kept stabbing each other in the streets.

Problem number two is that just about every single written mention of parricide comes from rhetorical or hypothetical sources. Sources that only barely pretend to be describing any kind of reality.

Perhaps one of the most notorious things the Romans ever devised, it is technically known as the culleus or Poena Cullei, and is fairly regularly the subject of clickbait articles with titles like ‘This Roman Punishment Will Make You Sick!’

a person found guilty of parricide was beaten with ‘blood-coloured rods’ (presumably they painted them, I guess), then put into a sack. To the sack was also added a dog, a cockerel, a monkey and a snake. And then the sack was thrown into the sea.

There’s some question over whether the animals were ever actually used or whether the punishment in reality was just (‘just’) being sewn into a sack and drowned. Or if it even existed, which is really wishful thinking from old men who identify too hard with Cicero to be honest with you.

Also the Romans ritually crucified dogs every year so I put absolutely nothing past them.† They were horrid.

The point of the sack is outlined for us by Cicero in a defence speech. It was not for pure sadistic pleasure, but to prevent the profane and polluted body of the murderer from contaminating the earth, sky and water that it would otherwise touch.

Parricide didn’t just upset them, it offended them; it was almost a blasphemous act to kill one’s parents.

His name was Publicius Malleolus and the only thing we know about him is that he, with the help of some enslaved men, killed his mother. His crime appalled Rome to such an extent that they kept recording it over and over again, though naturally they are highly inconsistent.

the Romans didn’t like to talk too much about the specifics of people who killed their parents. It’s almost like it didn’t happen very often, or at least didn’t make too much of a splash when it did. One of the best-known cases of parricide is that of the Cloelius brothers who were tried for murdering their father in his bed. The method of the poor man’s murder isn’t noted but Valerius Maximus, who records the case in his delightful book of memorable words and deeds, states that there were gruesome wounds and a lot of blood, which suggests that it wasn’t a quiet pillow smothering.

Cloelius Senior’s body was found in the morning when someone opened the bedroom door to find a blood-soaked scene on one side of the room and the two brothers peacefully sleeping in beds on the other. Aside from the fascinating insight into sleeping arrangements in the Roman world, where two well-heeled adult men apparently shared a bedroom with their dad, the scene caused a bit of a scandal.

The judge decided to fully acquit the brothers on the basis that ‘it was not naturally possible’ for the men to have beaten their father to death and then gone to sleep afterwards. It appears not to have occurred to anyone that the only other possible interpretation of events was that two men had slept through someone entering the room, brutally attacking their dad mere feet away from them, beating him to death and then leaving again.

The most famous patricide who has come down to us, though, didn’t even kill anyone. He is a guy called Sextus Roscius, which sounds like a skin disease but was really his name. It was also his dad’s name, which is going to make this a little confusing so we’ll call him Roscius and his dad Sextus.

We know so much about Roscius and his dad because he hired Cicero to be his lawyer and Cicero was so characteristically pleased with his own speech that he polished it up and published it.

In his home town, Sextus had an ongoing neighbourly feud of unknown origin with a retired gladiator named Titus Roscius Capito and his pupil, Titus Roscius Magnus (I swear the Roman naming system was sent to test me).

Rome was still reeling from the war and Sulla’s behaviour after the war had sparked savage paranoia. He had enacted what are euphemistically called ‘proscriptions’: he published regularly updated lists of men who had pissed him off, confiscated all their property and then executed them.

The atmosphere in Rome was tense and difficult. Suspicion had been cast on everyone still standing after the war and so Sextus was in Rome making sure that everyone knew that he had been enthusiastically on Sulla’s side the whole time.

One might expect that Glaucia would go to Roscius and break the news of his father’s death immediately, but there one would be wrong. Glaucia, who turned out to be a pal of Titus Magnus’, went straight to Titus Capito, Sextus’ local enemy. Two things would stand out here to any budding Columbo, or even a half-awake beat cop: first, that Roscius was in Ameria, fifty-six miles away from Rome, when the murder occurred, and second, that Sextus’ enemies knew about the murder before anyone else.

A third piece of alleged evidence which really seems damning to the modern eye is that Glaucia had the still-bloody knife with him when he arrived in Ameria.

Immediately following his death, Sextus was posthumously and mysteriously added to the list of proscribed persons drawn up by Sulla. As a result, all of his properties were confiscated from his heirs and sold. They were purchased by one of Sulla’s own freedmen, Chrysogonus, who – as it happens – was also in charge of adding people to the proscriptions list, for the knockdown price of two thousand sesterces.

This all happened so quickly that, again according to Cicero, Titus Magnus turned up at Roscius’ house on the day of his father’s funeral and kicked him out without even the clothes on his back. In the space of a few days, Roscius went from being the son of the lord of the manor to being a nude, bereaved, homeless person.

My best guess here is that they thought that the accusation of patricide would be so utterly appalling and so defiling to everyone in the vicinity of it that Roscius would lose all his friends, that no advocate would agree to defend him and that he’d end up a country bumpkin in the big city, condemned on nothing but an accusation.

In this case, however, it backfired wildly because the Tituses hadn’t reckoned with Cicero, whose love of his own voice and people looking at him exponentially outweighed his feelings about everything else.7 Including parricide.

A fresh-faced provincial newbie senator with a big brain, a massive ego and an insatiable ambition. He had made a minor name for himself as an exceptional student of rhetoric, and he saw in Roscius a chance to punch Rome and its establishment hard in the face and make sure they all knew the name Marcus Tullius Cicero. And he succeeded.

For all his many, many personal faults, Cicero’s skill as a rhetorician is really something. Even reading the written version today, 2099 years from the day that little twenty-something Marcus delivered it, it is possible to feel the sting in his wicked barbs against his opponent and feel the reaction of the crowd as he drops bombshell after bombshell, battering his opponent’s arguments into a sad, corrupt pulp.

Cicero’s speech is, as I say, enormously long. Hours long. It tears the Tituses’ case to pieces, exposing their bizarre behaviour and the total lack of means, motive and opportunity presented by the prosecution. Cicero outlines his theory about the criminal conspiracy to steal Roscius’ house in a level of detail that deeply upsets the other side. But mostly he talks about how the charge of patricide is so horrific that it stains the accusers to have made a false accusation of such.

Cicero obviously won, and his name and career were made. And, for all the hints at unnamed people being thrown into sacks, and for all the opprobrium spilt upon it by late Republican rhetoricians, there are no more named patricides in Roman history.

Secondly, it tells us the reason we don’t see very many parricide cases in the courts: such issues were dealt with domestically. When a violation occurred within the family, even if, like parricide, it was technically a crime, it was usually dealt with by the family consilium.