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

by Emma Southon

Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars tend to be seen as the Big Twelve. They are Julius Caesar (not an emperor), Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. We shall exclude JC to leave eleven emperors, of whom seven were murdered in different circumstances and three of the remaining four were haunted by rumours that they’d been done away with. A sixty-three percent murder rate is cause for concern, and leaves you wondering just what was so alluring about being emperor.

What followed the bloodshed was two days of negotiations between Claudius and the Praetorian Guard and the Senate about what would happen next. Rex fact: Herod Agrippa, the grandson of the king of Judea Herod the Great who murdered all the babies, was the primary go-between in the negotiations, convincing the Senate to back down and agree to Claudius’ rule.

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

The Roman world was a monarchy and history was being made in bedrooms. But you have to remember that we have the benefit of hindsight and for the significant proportion of Roman imperial history, they were pretending that they didn’t have a monarchy. They most highly praised those emperors who pretended the hardest and put on a really good performance of letting the Senate believe that they had any impact on anything, and they most highly condemned those emperors who couldn’t be bothered pretending and just acted like monarchs.

The next phases of imperial succession almost ended the fiction that the imperial seat could be inherited through the family line because the Senate and people and armies of Rome would respect a son – or nephew or grandson or uncle – because of their bloodline. Instead, it became more and more accepted that the Principate was primarily a military position, to be passed via adoption or execution to the next military dictator.

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

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. They were pretty clear that only people with fama and dignitas had a right to life, and that was only really to protect their prestige and dignity.

Infames were citizens who had done things that ‘mainstream’ Roman society considered to be so gross that they had surrendered their right to participation in the Roman state.

Infamia meant that a person was excluded from the legal system, unable to prosecute harms against them and unable even to make a legal will. If you were infames and someone tried to kill you, tough titties.

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. This was important because death wasn’t considered to be that much of a punishment in the Roman world view. Enslaved people and infames were already socially dead; literal death was a formality. The suffering was the important part.

Alexander the Great, in the 300s BCE, would sometimes go on a crucifixion spree when he was very cross indeed, such as when a city failed to surrender to him.

the use of nails would almost be a compliment. You’d have to really piss off the Romans to get a nail

Unlike most representations of Christ on the cross, the feet weren’t nailed crossed over at the front and through the ankle. That wouldn’t last. They were almost certainly positioned either side of the vertical beam and the nail would go through the calcaneum, which is the sticky-out heel bit of your foot.

As the jurist Quintilian says, people were crucified in the busiest places because the penalty was aimed not so much at the offender themselves but at setting an example for others.

JC was nothing if not an absolutely relentless innovator. He also had an awful lot of captured prisoners of war and enemy soldiers that he didn’t know what to do with. He appears to have resolved the dual problems of too many prisoners and the possibility of tedious executions by forcing the prisoners to re-enact battles in the arena for the entertainment of the crowd, thus forcing them all to kill one another. This is the kind of genius that gets a month named after them.

The most theatrical of all emperors, who really pioneered a new approach to judicial murder for fun, was Nero.

Every wife and mother in the Roman home tended the hearth and cared for the gods of the household, represented by small statues. The Vestals cared for the wellbeing of the state.

The gods the Vestals tended were those brought to Italy by Aeneas as he escaped the burning of Troy and the hearth they cared for protected Rome and its interests.

They were surrounded by state-sponsored death virtually every day, in a city, then an empire, built on slavery and suffering, but once the idea was raised of killing someone in a solemn, ritual setting, they were sick on their shoes. That was too damn far.

What the Roman state protected when it protected anything (which was rarely) was not its inhabitants, not the people who baked bread and soled shoes and wove cloaks and imported wine and called themselves Roman – rather it was itself and its own structures.

Homicide – the deliberate, wilful killing of another person – was embedded so deeply into Roman daily life that it is suffocating if you think about it too hard.

The Ciceros and Senecas and Plinys who are still hailed as brilliant men and models of wisdom (I’m looking at you, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers) were enslavers who, for all their moralising, sat in the front row at the games.