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

by Emma Southon

Whenever there was a transformative moment in Roman history, there was a murder. A person died, usually bloodily, and, in the space where they once lived, something entirely new emerged.

Interesting to read this as the backdrop for crucifixion

No other society has built media empires on such mountains of dead and mutilated women.

No inhabitant of Rome went without contact with enslaved persons and no one ever questioned it. No Roman ever looked at their slaves and at their freed slaves (who remained part of their household) and thought, ‘Hang on a minute. These are people!’ Instead, they treated these men, women and children with whom they shared their houses as though they were chairs. Things that could be abused and kicked and disposed of without, for the most part, any consequence.

What I’m getting at here is that murder is a constructed act.

Murder is the interpretation of an event, interpreted by individual people, which makes murder an emotive label, no matter how much legalese it is couched in.

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.

basically, tension over this land ownership issue seethed constantly in Republican Rome and there was a very real split between the power held by the people of Rome in their tribes which they exercised through voting, and the power held by the Senate of Rome which was exercised through senatorial decrees.

by 133 BCE, the land ownership thing was causing not just tension but very real, pragmatic problems for the growing Roman Empire and the city of Rome. The city was losing its ability to feed itself.

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.

For all the weaselly attempts by later Roman historians to make Tiberius into some kind of deranged traitor to the Republic, it’s pretty clear that what they mean is class traitor.

From this point on, violence was always a possibility in Roman politics.

Tyranny could be tolerated if it was disguised; Caesar kept making it obvious.

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. Roman law had no particular interest in legislating morality at the beginning.

These two simultaneous acts introduced a radical new relationship between the state of Rome and the people: Sulla centralised power and this included the power to kill. For the first time, the Roman state decided that it could interfere in what had previously been private interactions between families.

The Lex Cornelia paints a picture of a scared and vengeful segment of society who had spent ten years killing one another on battlefields and absolutely were not over those wartime resentments.

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.

And it was the personal business of the victim’s family to sort out the harm done and make things right either by having a chat with the perpetrator or by employing an advocate and taking the perpetrator to court.

Parricides were to the Romans what Adam Lanza is to us.5 According to Cicero, they violated the rules of human life for the Romans at a deep, fundamental cultural, personal and religious level.

been spilled over the former because they are wild. They are stories, told as parables of idealised behaviour, of a heroic, stoic, patriotic father exercising his ius vitae necisque, his power of life and death over every member of the family, by killing his off-spring. They show his responsibility to uphold the sanctity of the city of Rome over the love he felt for his children.

They were all written at the very start of imperial, monarchical rule to please and delight monarchs who based their power on the notion that they were the father of the country (the pater patriae) who loved and ruled their Empire as benevolent citizens, not kings.

an alternative argument for the fact that we see these women, and only these women, killing men is that it is only these women who fit into a familiar Roman narrative and so only these women were recorded. In the same way that men who are beaten by their wives in the modern world and women who kill their husbands out of jealousy, rage, mental illness or a desire for control are all but invisible in the modern world because they do not fit our familiar narrative of domestic violence, while frightened beaten women who stab their violent husbands are a trope of popular soap operas. The appearance of the latter in multiple mainstream tales does not preclude either from existing in real life. The existence of multiple over-bearing women who kill their husbands for their sons in Roman literature does not mean that they did not exist, nor that they were the only husband-murderers who existed. It merely means that they were the only ones the Romans were afraid of.

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.

there were between 4.8 and 8.4 million enslaved people in the Roman Empire at any time, with the city of Rome’s population including anywhere from ten to twenty-five percent enslaved people.

Interestingly, he held onto life for long enough to see his attackers rounded up and executed for his murder and then died. I can only imagine that it would be both immensely satisfying and immensely surreal to be alive and with it enough to watch someone punished for murdering me. It would certainly erode my trust in the treatment I was receiving from my doctors.

We only really hear about people killing enslaved people when the laws were changed to reflect shifts in attitude towards the killing of those whom the Romans didn’t think were human.

He was hated because he was considered to be unnecessarily cruel in how he ruled his household. He was a tyrant, unable to control his baser urges, acting in anger, while good men executed their enslaved people rationally and calmly.

Gladiatorial fighting and killing and dying was not a perversion, no matter how hard Christians and Stoics wanted to see it as such, but spoke to something fundamental in the Roman value system. It spoke to their love of fighting and competition, to their worship of the military and their valorisation of single combat in particular.

Canidia’s magic represents the total absence of civilised control and moral goodness, the opposite of the natural, scientific medicine of Pliny and Cato. This was ‘Eastern’ savagery.

Pontianus was initially delighted that his mate was now his stepfather, which is a challenge for those of us who grew up on American Pie to wrap our brains around but the past is a foreign country.

In Roman literature the writers are only interested in those who were doing the sacrificing of these little boys, and to be honest they were not too bothered with the fact that a child had died. The problem with this behaviour for them was less the murdering and more the fact that an illicit sacrifice had taken place outside the boundaries of proper religion. A religious action was being done for irreligious, selfish purposes and that was much worse than killing a kid.

Cicero always gave 110 percent, so he wrote and delivered an entire speech ripping Vatinius to shreds as a person in order to destroy his credibility as a witness. 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.

The reason that the literary sources are so dehumanising is that they didn’t perceive killing enslaved people to be particularly wrong. It was the purpose of the killing which was wrong, not the death itself.

If the Republic itself died with Julius Caesar, the myth of the restored Republic died with Marcellus as it became very, very clear that Rome had a royal family.

Tacitus is a really fun source for the women of the Julio-Claudian period of Roman history because he hated women like most people hate wasps.

What matters is that the population of the Empire apparently believed that the imperial family was perpetually plotting to secretly murder one another. Surreptitious murder had very quickly come to be seen as a strategy for members of the imperial family to gain and maintain power and everyone thought that was pretty fun gossip.

The Imperial era began when dinner-party gossip became historical fact, and when every death in the family became a murder.

All emperors killed people, all of them, but there were certain social and cultural criteria that separated the murderers from the statesmen;

This meant that senators and the Roman elite and experts didn’t feel they had any influence in a reign.

Sounds so similar to Trump. Not qualitatively different from larger GOP but he won't pretend to care

The problem with all of these executions is that they appear to be capricious, egotistical, somewhat random and therefore unjust. We’re talking here about the executions of prominent members of the Roman community

There was a linguistic shift which led to gods who had never been mortal being called deus (or dea) while deified mortals were called divus. Divus Julius Caesar, but Deus Jupiter. The distinction was slight but precise.

Your classic Imperial era informer is, of course, Judas Iscariot.

Marcus Aquilius Regulus was a real exemplar of how to make a tyrannical government work for you.

The power of the emperors rested entirely in pretending that they had no actual power at all and that they weren’t tyrannical military-backed dictators.

Part of the whole theatrical charade of the imperial system for a long time was that people who wanted to please the emperor would bring a formal accusation against a person they knew the emperor hated.

Regulus didn’t care. 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.

Domitian’s reign, like Nero’s, was apparently a real boom time for people with no scruples.

The interesting thing about all this is that no ancient or modern writers seem to see this behaviour as murder.

The Romans hadn’t built any permanent theatres yet, so they had to construct a temporary wooden theatre to hold thousands of spectators for each set of games. It’s amazing what a culture can achieve with slavery.

Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, they believed, not from some farcical bloody murder. Strange men in corridors distributing stab wounds was no basis for a system of government.

Just 24.6 percent of all the Roman emperors managed to die in their beds.