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

by Emma Southon

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.

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. The fasces were carried by guards known as lictors who accompanied all Roman officials whenever they left their houses, so the message was never forgotten.1 Few other societies have revelled in and revered the deliberate and purposeful killing of men and women as much as the Romans. The Romans were, frankly, weird about it.

Homicide is the act of killing someone under any circumstances. Any time a human kills another person, that’s a homicide.

But 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.

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.

In American federal law, murder is ‘the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought’.

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. Homicide is clear cut, but murder is a label we apply to some forms of homicide, and that label changes over time and across space. What is clearly murder in one state is manslaughter in another; what is legal homicide to one person is obviously murder to another.

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.

There was a sense among Roman citizens, one which was almost certainly false, that enslaved foreigners would eventually outnumber Romans and were an existential threat to Roman supremacy.

Appian tells us that the rich were hugely upset that the land that they had worked very hard on, and dedicated many enslaved people to, was going to be stolen from them so they’d lose all their work. Also, some of them had bought that land fairly from neighbours after the neighbours stole it from the state and people of Rome, so they were definitely being treated unfairly.

A date was set for the Assembly to vote on the law and, as word spread, people began to flood into the city. The rich, suddenly concerned that they might lose, resorted to the Romans’ favourite insult: they accused Tiberius of wanting to be a king.

they fight and die to protect the luxury and wealth of others. They are called masters of the earth yet have not a single clod of earth that is their own.

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. The next day began badly with a series of omens. First, the sacred birds of Rome refused to eat their breakfast, which definitely signalled bad news. 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. Tiberius wasn’t listening. He kept going, only to have a tile thrown at him by a murder of crows fighting on a rooftop. It was all very ominous, but still Tiberius didn’t stop. After the previous day’s activities, voting had been moved to the Capitoline Hill where people might be expected to behave themselves a bit. It didn’t work. By the time Tiberius arrived, the tribes had devolved into two restless mobs, each furious that their vote had been erased the day before. When the other Tribunes tried to prevent the vote from going ahead yet again, a riot inevitably broke out. Th...

surprised that they didn’t take this opportunity to declare a national emergency and appoint a dictator, but suspects that they were so riled up, they completely forgot that appointing a dictator and legally suspending democracy was possible.

‘Let anyone who wants to save the country come with me!’ The senators roared and, as they were not allowed their swords in a Senate meeting, they tore their wooden benches apart and armed themselves with the planks of wood. Everything had gone awry. One senator ran to the Capitol to warn Tiberius that the Senate were armed and dangerous. People surrounded Tiberius to protect and remove him from the literal theatre of conflict as the mob of senators approached. It was not a long walk from the Temple of Fides to the top of the Capitoline and there weren’t many ways out. 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.

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.

Murder had been introduced as a solution to Roman political arguments and it could never be taken back.

He tried to undermine the controlling power of the rich and force some limited form of equality on them and they hated it. They hated it so much, they were willing to kill him.

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.

So Publius, in a fit of sacrilegious rage, launched the chickens into the sea, screaming, ‘If they won’t eat, let them drink,’ and stormed head-first into a catastrophic defeat, losing 93 of his 123 ships. When he eventually limped home, covered in shame, he was prosecuted for ‘activity hostile to the state’. Today’s lesson: don’t fuck with the sacred chickens.

It was impossible to hold elections without them turning into bloodbaths so no one was holding elections.

the mobs that Clodius inspired because the Roman sources are always keen to dehumanise these people, who were the urban middle and working classes.

Always remember that he took his troops across the Rubicon not to save Rome, but because he had refused to give up his job as governor of Gaul as it protected him from being prosecuted in Rome for crimes he had committed.

He was consul, dictator for life and censor of the Senate. He was called imperator and father of the country. He had golden statues built and placed among the statues of ancient kings and among the gods. He had altars and temples in his name. A college of priests was founded to dedicate their whole lives to looking after his temples and praying for him. When he revised the calendar, he changed the name of the fifth month to his own name. He had a golden throne that he could sit in whenever he liked. He was allowed to wear special knee-high red boots which were seen as the stereotypical clothing of the ancient kings and he was allowed to wear the big purple Triumphal robe all the time. He got special lictors and the right to ride his horse in places where horses weren’t allowed. Official prayers were given every year for his safety and wellbeing, and on and on and on. These things were all granted to him separately and over a long period, but by the time he died in 44 BCE, he had all of them and he was basically Louis the Sun King in all but name. He was so far above every other member of the aristocracy in every visible and invisible way that the optimates found it terrifying. He was ruining everything.

when an unaccountable autocrat becomes a permanent fixture, and the reality of living under an unaccountable autocrat sinks in, what you have is tyranny. Tyranny could be tolerated if it was disguised; Caesar kept making it obvious.

This is how much Romans hated kings – it was illegal to shout ‘king’ at people in the same way it’s illegal to do the Nazi salute in Germany.

If you’re bothered by something outside yourself, it’s not that thing which is bothering you but your reaction to it. So stop reacting to it . . . Take away your opinion and the complaint is taken away.20

Whatever happens to you was always going to happen to you; your existence and the things that happen to you are strands of fate woven together.21 Basically, Stoics hate the idea of feelings and trying to change things and they love only Reason. They’re dreadful. But they had a lot of capital-T

Bumping off dynastic threats is, frankly, practical policy for a monarch rather than strictly murder, but at this time in Roman history, they were still clinging a little desperately to the fiction that the Republic had been restored and that the emperor wasn’t a monarch.

Arguably, Locusta was as liable in the murders of all Nero’s enemies as Armalite are for all the deaths that have been caused by the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. She was less a serial killer than a weapon.

The poisoner of the people was a woman called Pontia, about whom we know very little except that she was the butt of many a scandalised poem in the high Empire. She appears first in Juvenal’s festival of misogyny, his sixth Satire, as an example of the very real and specific evils women could perpetrate. In Juvenal’s poem, Pontia is depicted as killing both of her sons by lacing their dinner with aconite and being utterly unrepentant about it. Juvenal’s Pontia laughs that had she had seven sons, she would have killed them all, leading Juvenal to compare her to Medea, who killed her children to spite her cheating husband in Greek myth and tragedy. Pontia appears again in several epigrams written by the absolute

All emperors killed people, all of them, but there were certain social and cultural criteria that separated the murderers from the statesmen; the bad boys from the grown-ups. We can call this section ‘So You Want to Be a Roman Tyrant?’ Please read carefully. To be a wicked, murderous tyrant it was first necessary for the emperor to make all their decisions about executions by themselves.

Bad emperors did what the hell they liked. Tiberius left Rome and moved to Capri and only answered letters from Sejanus because he couldn’t bear to be in the same city with other senators. Gaius and Commodus laughed in the faces of senators and openly told them that they could just kill them if they wanted to. Claudius and Nero insulted the Senate even further by taking the advice of Greek freedmen and women more seriously than legal scholars and may as well have spat in their eyes. This meant that senators and the Roman elite and experts didn’t feel they had any influence in a reign. The appearance of partnership wasn’t there. They felt vulnerable and afraid and exposed. And then, every so often, the emperor would kill one of them.

The seemingly random nature of these executions, which took place on the merest whim of the emperor, scared them. It rightly scared them because it restricted their freedom to do and say and write things without fear, but it also scared them because the emperors who did this kind of thing were implicitly – and sometimes pretty explicitly – interpreting themselves as the state of Rome itself, rather than a servant of the state. The legal justification

He was one of those men who didn’t distinguish between infamy and fame. Like Donald Trump running for election, Regulus didn’t care if people were saying good or bad things about him, as long as they were saying his name; whispering and pointing as he walked through the Forum, gossiping about him over dinner. It was all fame. Even better, Nero was thrilled. Nero saw Regulus as a heroic protector of his majesty and reputation and rewarded him with seven million sesterces and a priesthood.

In the eyes of a lot of the ‘bad’ emperors, of course, the Senate were a bunch of irritating upstarts with no formal power but a whole lot of ego who needed to be both pandered to and controlled while it was he, the emperor, who represented, possessed and embodied Roman power and prestige. It is this clash of ideologies and perspectives which quite often led to the other type of uniquely Roman imperial murder: murdering an emperor.