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

by Emma Southon

Rome was coming to rely more and more heavily on imports, which is a bad plan.

That would have been a better plan, but then hindsight is always 20/20.

At first, no one really believed that this was as important a moment as it turned out to be. In the moment, no one ever realises that they’re living through historical turning points.

Imagine if your least favourite world leader just refused to stop being in charge when their term ended because they just didn’t want to and that they also had an enormous personal army.

murder was not a crime in the Roman legal system for a surprising amount of its history.

one of the clearest fragments states that if someone is caught while in the process of theft and killed, then that homicide is lawful.

The Ten Commandments have somewhat misled modern readers into thinking that written law has always been interested in moral issues like murder and adultery, when really only religious law is interested in those things.

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. The person with a knife in their chest suffers violence, but the state suffers a challenge to its power to control the behaviour of its citizens and therefore it is the state that brings criminal cases.

Nero fiddling while Rome burnt (acceptable only because it spawned a cracking joke in the late 1990s when a German company called Nero made CD burning software and called it Nero Burning Rom, which made me chuckle every time I made a mix CD as a teenager).

Marriage did not create families for Romans. It created alliances between two familiae, which remained separate.

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.

In the modern world, according to the UN, for every six women murdered by a partner, one man is murdered by his.

Male victims of domestic violence are all but invisible in our data-saturated online world,

The Roman Empire is considered to be one of the genuine slave states in human history, in that, like the antebellum Southern states of America, it could not exist without slavery.

These little moments of uncontrolled rage reveal the prejudice that lies underneath their more careful persona.

the Romans didn’t send rookies in with reigning champions unless the rookie had some kind of spark about him; they hated the idea of an unfair fight. It just isn’t fun or sporting or particularly interesting to watch the New England Patriots play the 2017 Cleveland Browns,

The system is, of course, set up to morally and practically absolve everyone from the responsibility of murder. The gladiator is a weapon; the crowd is a conduit; the editor is merely a cog in the wheel of the divine plan of the gods.

So that’s obviously a lie and we know nothing about her. Not that this stops it from being on Wikipedia.

The histories and biographies of Roman emperors are bursting at the seams with grotesque tortures, impulsive executions and random punishments, but whether the acts are defined as terrible murders or perfectly reasonable capital punishment depends essentially on

‘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].’

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;

What conspiracy theories tell us is what people think is ‘really’ happening in their world, how their world ‘really’ functions.

Killing criminals and offenders is way easier and more cost-effective than imprisoning or rehabilitating them, so most human cultures have had capital punishment.

the threat of death is usually seen, at a kind of common-sense level, as being an effective deterrent to crime. It’s not, but it feels like it should be.

Implicit in this, though, is the idea that everyone has a right to life. Romans, as a culture, would not agree with that notion.

There’s quite a lot of argument over whether nails were commonly used in Roman crucifixion or only on special occasions. You know, when you really want a crucifixion to hurt. Like when you’re executing Jesus.