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.

Rome was built on the blood of Remus; the Republic was born from the death of Lucretia; the Empire grew from the assassination of Caesar. Rome was an unusually murder-y place. But for most of Roman history murder was not a crime. And for all of Roman history, killing in the gladiatorial arena was a literal sport. 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.

But then, we as a Western society are also weird about murder. We absolutely love it. We consume it with a passion. Right now, in the US and the UK, one in every three books purchased is a crime novel, which inevitably opens with a pretty woman found dead.

But, to us, the Romans look like the weird ones because they were fascinated by murder in a different way. We have our mountains of dead fictional girls. But they had mountains of dead real men.

The state has two broad functions here: it dispenses justice and punishes the wrongdoer, thus rebalancing the scales of justice, and it protects the people of the state by identifying a cause of harm and preventing it from causing further harm. In much the same way, the state is also now expected to make sure that rotten food isn’t sold in shops and substances judged to be dangerous, like heroin, aren’t freely available. We pay taxes so the state will keep us safe.

Tiberius was basically a wannabe Fox Mulder, wanting to investigate any weird thing that got put in front of him, and that included Silvanus’ incoherent story that his wife spontaneously launched herself out of a window while he was innocently sleeping.

These women are only visible to us because their male relatives had enough social status and money to cause an imperial level fuss. Had the social status of the men involved been even slightly lower, both of these women would have slipped into the swamp of sadness that is the majority of women’s history.

Cato the Elder allegedly once said about prosecution, laying out a pathway for all his spiritual descendants, ‘These are the offerings we should make to our parents – not lambs or kids, but the tears of their enemies and their condemnation [in court].’

In the modern West, only America has held on to the death penalty, and they have resisted pressure from the rest of the Western world to abolish it because they think, fundamentally, that some crimes are so bad that the perpetrators forfeit their right to life. Implicit in this, though, is the idea that everyone has a right to life. Romans, as a culture, would not agree with that notion.

Romans would also find quite weird the Western idea that, if one absolutely must murder a person for the good of the state, then it should be done quickly and cleanly. Why on earth, they might wonder, would you want death to be easy for the criminal? They caused suffering, so they should suffer. Romans wanted people to suffer a lot and suffer publicly. They wanted everyone – everyone – to know that the only rewards of crime were abject humiliation, excruciating pain and, eventually, death.