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

by Emma Southon

That’s a pretty exhaustive list. 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.

For our purposes here, though, we’re going to pretend that parricide meant patricide, which meant killing one’s parents and, at a push, siblings and patrons, and we’re not going to look too hard at the laws. If we get started on it we’ll all be here for twenty thousand words of hand-wringing over what precisely a lot of Latin words mean, and honestly it’s both stressful and dull.

Each woman is unnamed because the Romans tried to avoid naming women if they could help it – one annoying walking-uterus is much the same as another to the Romans

His defence team insisted that M’Naughten had been incapable of understanding what he was doing as he literally thought that he was being stalked by Tories and was clearly insensible. And they won. He was bustled off to Bethlem Hospital (where he was described upon admission as ‘imagines the Tories are his enemies, shy and retiring in his manner’, which could describe so many of us)

Herodes Atticus was the kind of man who has been effectively eliminated in the modern West, except in England. He’s a figure like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg who can only exist in a society that has an ancient aristocracy, immense inequality and a belief that the rich are just somehow fundamentally better at things than the rest of us.

Romans adored their gladiators in the exact way we adore our reality TV stars and footballers: they simultaneously wanted to be them, fuck them and never let them marry their daughters.

The speech begins with Cicero calling Vatinius unimportant and uninteresting and gets more brutal from there. It is almost ten thousand words of character assassination. It’s almost as bad as YA reviewers on GoodReads.

Admittedly, if their consilium was anything like my WhatsApp groups, their friends will have vehemently declared that their enemies were the scum of the earth, offered to shank them themselves in outrage, and insisted that the emperor was a perfect paragon of goodness who deserved only joy, but possibly his friends were less furiously supportive than mine.

Sharp might not be being paid $80 million a year or have a theme park dedicated to him in China or the power to allegedly enforce a no-fly zone over his enormous house, but Sharp is still getting paid to play football in the Premier League and is undoubtedly being paid thousands of pounds a week for it, and he’s still in those FIFA computer games and has his name on a shirt that people bafflingly pay £50 for.

Marcus Aquilius Regulus was a real exemplar of how to make a tyrannical government work for you. For many, a despotic, capricious, semi-divine supreme leader with an ego like candy floss being washed by a racoon was a real obstacle to a happy life; but Regulus shows us that those people just weren’t sufficiently unscrupulous and devoid of conscience. Regulus knew how to see things from a different angle, how to turn a lemon into lemonade, make some money and also get revenge on everyone who ever annoyed him in the process. He was a real disruptor in the reign of two of the world’s most notoriously horrible emperors, and like all good disruptors, he was also a real prick.

Much like a Conservative politician will suggest the idea of national service in the UK every few years so that kids today can learn imaginary traditional British values like the stiff upper lip and enduring cold showers, Domitian thought that there was a need to return to imaginary traditional Roman values like stoicism, asceticism and extreme harshness.

It is punishment when a man nails another to a cross to suffer for days, but murder when a man tries to feed another to a lamprey. It is murder when a husband throws his wife from a window, but family business when a father strangles his daughter for having sex outside of marriage.