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

by Emma Southon

If you’ve read Ovid or Livy’s account of the death of Lucretia, for example, you’ll remember that when she calls a family meeting to tell them that the prince of Rome raped her and then kills herself, she invites a random family friend. That’s how they worked. The consilium would certainly include Mum and Dad, and dad’s parents and siblings; maternal in-laws might be there too. The purpose of the family council was for the family to look after the family, which primarily meant the family name.

Part of the role of the family council was to deal with this shit so that no one else found out about it, and part of the role was to deal with this shit because there was no other way to deal with it. To go to the courts required both financial resources and status. Without one or both of those things, there was nowhere else to go.

When it came to tales of parents murdering their kids in Rome, there were two types of stories: fathers who valiantly killed their children for the good of the state, and parents who horribly murdered their children so they could get laid.

If an aristocratic man’s children fucked up, they couldn’t be allowed to live and poison Rome; they had to go. The stories are all pretty similar and are told in that peculiarly Roman style which blends myth and history into something unique.

Titus and Tiberius conspired with some unnamed like-minded individuals to bring Tarquinius and his family back to Rome and place them back on the throne. They were, of course, immediately caught and brought before the new consul, their dad.

There, in front of the crowd and overseen by their father, lictors whipped them with sticks until they bled and then beheaded them. Throughout the whole ordeal, says Livy, the crowd watched Brutus, saw his fatherly anguish at his suffering sons and saw him enduring it for a higher purpose.

Titus Manlius Torquatus was consul in 340 BCE. He was already famous for an act of wild teenage delinquency that was inexplicably portrayed as a heroic act by the Romans. In his youth, his father Lucius Manlius thought that his son was thick and useless and so kept him working on their rural estates and away from politics.

someone prosecuted Manlius for keeping his son out of politics (and also for failing to give up his army command on time during a war, like those things are equal). When Torquatus heard that his father was being prosecuted for anything at all, he became furious and rushed to Rome. I like to imagine him grabbing a horse and riding through the night in a melodramatic fury, because he went not to the courts, but to the home of the prosecutor. In the middle of the night.

Torquatus enacted a full-on home invasion and terrorised a family until he got his way. This is probably why his father kept him away from Rome. Valerius Maximus tells this story as a wonderful, charming tale of extraordinary filial devotion.

There is, however, a murkier version of this story, which is the story of fathers who kill their sons for political crimes in family courts.

Spurius Cassius Vecellinus proposed the first agrarian law while consul in 486 BCE and, as soon as he was out of office, was taken home by his father, tried in a family court and killed in the home for treason.

The idea of a family court and the right to kill one’s adult children at home without any kind of checks and balances feels uncomfortable and open to abuse. Which is why these stories have lit up the imaginations of modern scholars.

The most famous and the oddest is the tale of Verginia, the young sexy daughter of Lucius Verginius, who attracted the unwanted attentions of Appius Claudius. Claudius tried to seduce the young girl, who was betrothed to another young man, several times and was knocked back every time. She just didn’t fancy him. But in the grand tradition of toxic men through the ages, Claudius was not willing to take no for an answer and he came up with a complex and insane plan to make Verginia his.

After much back and forth and the appearance of Lucius Verginius, Appius declared his verdict: the girl was a slave and would be sent to the house of his friend. Appalled and terrified, Verginius took drastic action: he grabbed his teenage daughter and plunged a knife into her heart. When questioned about what he had done, he said through his tears that he would rather lose his daughter to death than dishonour.

Pontius Aufidianus, an equestrian, came home one day to the news that his lovely daughter had been sleeping with her tutor, Fannius Saturninus. Oddly, the enslaved tutor’s name is recorded, but the daughter’s isn’t.

Enslaved men who slept with free women couldn’t be allowed to live and their punishment should be public. But what to do with the girl, who I’m going to guess was probably called either Pontia or Aufidiana or both. Her virginity was lost, her honour gone. She had brought shame on the family name. Aufidianus used his own hands to execute her and punish her for her crime of getting laid.

Publius’ sister Camilla had been engaged to one of the Curiatii (because Alba Longa and Rome were effectively the same city. It’s a long story.) and when she saw her future husband dead, she cried. She put her own feelings of loss and grief over the victory of her city and for that her brother calmly walked over and thrust his sword, still dripping in her fiancé’s blood, into her chest, shouting, ‘So perish every Roman woman who mourns a foe!’

This kind of story gives the very strong impression that the Roman father was constantly going around killing his children left, right and centre, telling his mates that they’d committed a crime and being carried through the Forum on their shoulders in celebration of his excellent parenting.

All these stories, which make murderous fathers into glorious heroes, able to put their country above their children, are legends. They all originate in the early or mid-Republic, those misty times many hundreds of years before any of our surviving sources were written. They all come from Livy, writing his glorious history to please Augustus, and Valerius Maximus, writing decontextualised anecdotes to please and guide Tiberius, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, also writing his history to please Augustus.

In the real world of actually raising snotty children with their bodily fluids and their learning to walk and say mater and pater for the first time and growing up and being your heart outside of your body, just running around all soft and unprotected, Roman fathers did not go around holding courts and stabbing their children in the heart for the good of the country.

In the real world, when parents really killed their children, they did so for selfish, stupid reasons and were treated as monsters.

There are a few examples of men murdering their children in historical rather than mythical circumstances and, pretty much without exception, Roman commentators got up in arms about the situation, as you’d expect.

One of the late Republic’s great villains was Catiline, who you’ll remember was judicially murdered by Cicero. Even before he conceived of a popular overthrow of the Senate, he was causing trouble. He was prosecuted, and acquitted, for fucking a Vestal Virgin, which was a very bad thing to do, for a start. And then he suffered an unfortunate series of events: his wife died, then his teenage son died, and then he married a beautiful but unpopular woman named Aurelia Orestilla.

Cicero also has a lot to say about another great villain of the late Republic, a man who stalked the small town of Larinum like Blanche Taylor Moore stalked Concord, North Carolina, bumping off person after person, pocketing their cash and getting away with it: Statius Albius Oppianicus.

Oppianicus appears to have been a quite spectacularly murderous individual and a real whizz with the poison jar.

In the process of that trial, Oppianicus was accused of murdering twelve other people, including two of his own children, one of whom was an infant, and an unborn foetus. His motive for poisoning his two sons, one after another in the space of a week, was that he wanted to marry Cluentius’ mother Sassia.

Just like Catiline, Oppianicus put his new love (and her fortune) over the lives of his children. One of his young sons was living with his mother Papia in Teanum, eighteen miles away, and only visited on public holidays (he was a bit of a deadbeat dad to this one), but Oppianicus wasn’t going to let that stop him. He asked Papia to let his son visit him and, as soon as the kid arrived, poisoned him.

Cicero also accused Oppianicus of poisoning Cluentius’ paternal aunt, Cluentia (of course), his own brother Gaius, Gaius’ pregnant wife and her unborn child, and his first mother-in-law, Dinea.

He found out that his brother-in-law (his first wife’s brother) had not died in the civil wars between Marius and Sulla as everyone had thought, but had, in fact, been taken into slavery. Oppianicus’ mother-in-law Dinea was overjoyed to hear her son was alive but Oppianicus was not. This interfered with his ability to inherit Dinea’s money. So he tracked down his poor brother-in-law, and killed him. And then poisoned Dinea.

when Sulla won the civil wars, Oppianicus armed a band of enslaved men, rode back into Larinum Wild West style, declared he was there on Sulla’s orders, and butchered the men who had originally run him out, including Sassia’s husband, leaving her open to his advances.

Seneca, for example, tells of a man named Tricho, an equestrian, who, in the reign of Augustus, beat his son to death. Whether the death was accidental from overzealous corporal punishment or a deliberate act of immense cruelty is unclear. Nor is the name or age of his son known. All we know is that Seneca remembered the case and that the son died a nasty death. Being flogged with rods was a punishment that was not supposed to be meted out to free citizens; only the enslaved were considered worthy of it, because it was horrendous.

It takes an awful lot of time and effort and, frankly, dedication to beat someone to death with a flexible rod. Like a really long time. Hundreds and hundreds of blows. To your own son. Which is probably why it upset the Roman people so much when they found out about it.

When Tricho next appeared in public, he was set upon by a group of furious men who stabbed him over and over with their sharp little styluses. Augustus had to send in armed men to fight off Tricho’s attackers and pull him out before he was himself killed by a thousand tiny stabs.

The only real exception to this, possibly, is when dads were killing tiny newborns. There is a very strong belief among lay people that the Romans, like all ancients, spent a lot of their time giving birth to babies and then immediately tossing them out of the window like rubbish.

The confusion here is one that academics have been battling for at least thirty years, which is the conflation of exposure and execution. It’s easy to do because we, as modern people with 2.4 children, see child abandonment occur only in times of desperation and we assume that babies being placed outdoors and rejected from their biological family means that they died. The truth is they mostly didn’t. A lot of babies were exposed in local places which were sort of designated baby-abandoning spots. If you had a kid and couldn’t look after it for whatever reason, such as you already had seven, then you could place it there and someone would probably pick it up.

In the ancient world, quite often, these babies were raised in slavery but there are lots and lots of cases where babies were picked up and raised, and sometimes made their way back to their bio-families, causing absolute havoc when it came to inheritance time.

What happened to Romulus and Remus is probably what happened to most exposed babies, without the gods and wolves. They were probably mostly picked up, and that’s what biological parents expected would happen when they wrapped a baby up and put it outdoors.

In 1912, the improbably named archaeologist Alfred Heneage Cocks excavated ninety-seven infant skeletons from graves around Yewden Villa, a Roman villa site in Hambleden, Buckinghamshire, which was inhabited from the first to fourth centuries CE. His team carefully packed each tiny skeleton into a cigarette box, popped them into storage and promptly forgot about them.

Modern archaeologists and demographers have estimated that around fifteen percent of pregnancies in the ancient world failed to reach full term and twenty to forty percent of infants died during their first year of life.21 A baby that died of SIDS or was stillborn looks exactly like a baby that was suffocated once it’s skeletonised; a skeleton baby does not equal a murdered baby.

Unfortunately, such inconclusive archaeology is our best evidence for infanticide because men didn’t write about it very much at all. Exposure comes up every so often, but the deliberate killing of a newborn very rarely does. The contexts in which it does appear, though, do tend to support the perspective that, in most circumstances, infanticide by the family was not considered to be a social or cultural problem that ever needed to be dealt with.

once you look past those flippant remarks, you find that actually there were plenty of people with disabilities living their lives in antiquity, so obviously ‘monstrous’ babies (with apologies for Seneca’s offensive language) weren’t routinely drowned or ‘extinguished’. Similarly, archaeology tells us that Romans did not routinely murder little baby girls because they ‘valued’ boys more.

There is no evidence at all, from anywhere in the Roman world, of sex selective infanticide.

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.

Sometimes, over the centuries, those courtyards and gardens became accidentally full of buried babies, not because of mass slaughter but because babies are fragile and centuries are long.

The intriguing gap is the lack of social response to infanticide. Even as the Empire progressed and the sanctity of the private family was gradually eroded away, to the point that emperors could stop you killing your own kids, there were never any baby-killing scandals or events; no great news stories or dramas that made the history books or even the letter collections of old men.

Women who kill their children are a completely different kettle of fish to men who kill their children. They are far less visible because of the lack of a heroic, mythical framework to hang stories on, and those we do see are often very weird.

Valerius wrote a strange miscellany of anecdotes called Memorable Words and Deeds and presented it to the emperor Tiberius. It’s sort of the Roman very-rich-and-educated-guy version of making a scrapbook for someone you love, but who you also think needs a good talking to. Valerius wrote nine books of memorable words and deeds split into chapters that each focus on a particular virtue, like anger, bravery, fidelity, fortitude and parental love, and which all teach a lesson that Valerius thought that Tiberius should learn.

At one stage, the prosecutor said that if Scaurus could produce just 120 people from the whole province that he hadn’t stolen from, he’d let Scaurus go. Scaurus was unable to do so, since he was an unrepentant crook, so it might seem to the reader that he would be found guilty. But only if that reader had not been paying attention to Valerius Maximus’ previous court reporting. Naturally, Scaurus was let off because his family was old and everyone mostly liked his dad.

Maybe imagine here the praetor, in front of the jury and the crowd of onlookers and the cuckolded husband and probably everyone’s dads too, demanding that Calidius answer what he was doing in someone else’s marital bedroom at night. What possible reason could he have for being there? A pause. An awkward cough. The shifty look of a man about to go as low as he could to save his own life. And when Calidius finally spoke he said, ‘I was there not for the woman’ (name not recorded). ‘I was there . . .’ A pause. ‘. . . because I wanted to bang the slave-boy.’