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

by Emma Southon

By 510 BCE, Rome was a flourishing city under the king Tarquinius Superbus.

they took to the Forum and displayed her body as that of a murder victim. They demanded Tarquinius and his son be overthrown and exiled.

swiftly abolished the monarchy and established the Roman Republic.

glorious Republic of Rome lasted 450 years, and the moment of its demise was also marked by murder.

Ides of March 44 BCE

Theatre of Pompey and forty of his friends administered twenty-three stab wounds, leaving Julius Caesar, perpetual dictator of Rome and proto-emperor, bleeding to death on the floor of the entrance hall, and opening the path for his nineteen-year-old gre...

But for most of Roman history murder was not a crime.

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.

number two sport in Rome (number one: horse racing) and

The Roman state ran on the labour of enslaved men doing the administrative and physical labour necessary to run a huge empire and build fuck-off massive marble buildings covered in pretty paintings every four hundred yards.

Homicide is the act of killing someone under any circumstances. Any time a human kills another person, that’s a homicide.

But most forms of homicide are illegal,

The lowest forms are called involuntary manslaughter in English and US law, and culpable homicide in Scottish law,

perpetrator didn’t mean to kill that other person, but still someone died and it wa...

voluntary manslaughter. This is when you meant to hurt the victim but not to kill them.

Murder is defined in England and Wales as ‘where a person (1) of sound mind (2) unlawfully kills (3) any reasonable creature (4) in being (alive and breathing through its own lungs) (5) under the Queen’s Peace (6) with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm’. All six conditions have to be met in order for a homicide to be considered a murder in an English court.

first degree murder is intentional murder that has been premeditated or planned, while second degree murder is intentional but unplanned.

third degree murder, which covers all forms of manslaughter.

of New York, first degree murder only refers to the murder of police officers, multiple murders, murders involving torture or being a paid assassin

And they're charging Luigi Mangione with first degree murder though he doesn't meet any of New York's legislative requirements? They only care about murder when the victim is worth 50 million dollars. Deny, defend, depose.

I’d be liable for the death penalty in Pennsylvania, but not in New York because only capital (first degree) federal murders are death penalty murders in New York State.

The only black and white part of a murder is the bit where one person killed another, and that’s actually the homicide bit. Homicide is clear cut, but murder is a label we apply to some forms of homicide and that label changes over time and across space.

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.

Romans themselves wrote about it a lot, and left us pleasingly detailed descriptions of the Ides of March and its aftermath. The second is that, in hindsight, as Caesar died, he took the Republic with him,

The arrogant general, who has announced himself dictator for life, ignores the soothsayers and his wife’s dreams and weeping and walks to his own death; he dies on the Senate floor at the feet of a statue of his greatest rival; his final conscious realisation is the dawning horror and humiliation that his own closest friend has killed him and that no one will come to help; his final act is to cover himself, and his dignity, with his toga, always the showman to the last. All this means that Julius Caesar is more myth than man;

conducted by forty frightened dudes in ungainly dress who were so confused that they only got twenty-three stab wounds in (an almost fifty pe...

And his murder was not a standalone incident. It was one of a series of astonishing political murders in the late Roman Republic

His death marked the demise of the Roman Republic as much as Caesar’s, because it was his death which started almost a hundred years of open warfare in Rome.

It theoretically ended when Caesar fell, or perhaps when Octavian got the better of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium.

neighbours. Unfortunately for them, they had no power and the patricians just gave themselves all the land. Or, even more cruelly, pretended to set aside land for ‘public use’, and then rented it to themselves for ludicrously low rents, leaving the landless Romans still landless and adding to their ranks those poor Italians who had suddenly been conquered by these fighty bastards from Rome.

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.

The city was losing its ability to feed itself. So much of the land in and around Rome had become leisure land for aristocrats and pretty gardens and immense villas that Italy’s food production had dropped.

service in the army was technically supposed to be a privilege limited to property-owning Roman citizens and Rome was running out of disposable men who owned land.

first person to suggest land redistribution. The first had been the consul Spurius Cassius Vecellinus in 486 BCE – the people of Rome were delighted; the Senate, horrified.

Tiberius’ brother Gaius was an absolute riot, said to be the first person in Roman history to pull his cloak open and expose his shoulder while speaking, which is both pointless and a bit sexy. He also had a full-time personal musician who would follow him around and play music: calming when he was getting too angry and excitable if he was getting too sleepy.

Tribunes held enormous power in Rome; they were supposed to be the elected representatives of the non-patrician people of Rome

The commission would find and confiscate land which rich people were, technically, squatting on and redistribute it in parcels of five hundred iugera (about 350 acres) so that every (male) Roman citizen owned no less and, ideally, not much more than that five hundred iugera.

had built into his law a commission that would actively confiscate land, and a clause forbidding land from being resold. It could only be redistributed.

The wild beasts that dwell in Italy have their homes, with each having a lair and a hiding place, but the men who fight and die on behalf of Italy have a share of air and light – and nothing else. Without houses or homes they wander aimlessly with their children and wives, and their generals deceive them when they urge the soldiers on the battlefield to drive off the enemy to protect their tombs and temples; not one of these Romans has a family altar, not one an ancestral tomb; instead, they fight and die to protect the luxury and wealth of others. They are called masters of the earth yet have not a single clod of earth that is their own.

Attalus Philometor, the king of Pergamon, died and made the people of Rome his heirs. Pergamon was a very rich and large city in Turkey, where Roman rule was beginning to creep in violently. Attalus had watched the long horrific wars in Greece and Macedonia and had seen the Romans brutalise everyone in their path so he hoped to spare his city and his people. He knew that the Romans would come for Pergamon soon enough and, by surrendering rule of the city to the Romans in his will, he gave them control of Pergamon without any bloodshed.

The next day began badly with a series of omens. First, the sacred birds of Rome refused to eat their breakfast, which definitely signalled bad news. Then, when Tiberius was leaving the house, he badly stubbed his toe on the doorframe, breaking the nail and filling his sandal with blood. This might have been because people had kept him up all night with the shouting and lamenting, but doors and doorways had great symbolic significance for the Romans, and they saw this as the gods telling Tiberius to go back to bed. Tiberius wasn’t listening. He kept going, only to have a tile thrown at him by a murder of crows fighting on a rooftop. It was all very ominous, but still Tiberius didn’t stop.

many members of the Senate, the most grand and august body of Roman government, were trying to persuade the consul Publius Mucius Scaevola to use his imperium (supreme power) to kill Tiberius and officially execute him, without trial, for trying to take their stolen land.

As Nasica swung his chair leg into the heads of those trying to protect Tiberius, he shattered the façade of democracy and republicanism that allowed the people of Rome to believe they had a voice and power in their government.

He let it fall, but tripped. As he went down, someone took their chance. Plutarch says that it was Tiberius’ fellow Tribune, Publius Satyreius, who threw the first blow and Lucius Rufus threw the second. Appian says that Tiberius fell at the feet of the statues of kings; Valerius Maximus simply says that he got what he deserved. Wood came down on his head and Tiberius died. He, along with hundreds of others, was beaten to death by a mob of the richest men in the West. He hadn’t reached his thirtieth birthday. Murder had been introduced as a solution to Roman political arguments and it could never be taken back.

by being sewn into a sack with some angry snakes.

He tried to undermine the controlling power of the rich and force some limited form of equality on them and they hated it. They hated it so much, they were willing to kill him. They ripped apart the chairs they sat in and beat his head to a pulp to stop him and then they threw his body in the river.

It took a generation for murder to really take off as a strategic approach to political problems, but the elephant very firmly moved into the room as Tiberius’ blood splattered onto the statue of Romulus.

Gaius was as confrontational and disruptive as his brother was conciliatory and compromising. He immediately started throwing out policy proposals designed to upset all the wrong people. He wanted land redistribution back on the agenda. He wanted new rules about magistracies. He wanted the people of Italy, known as the Latins, to have Roman citizenship. He wanted more money for public works and poverty alleviation.

After his supporters stabbed a rude lictor to death with their pens (!) and Gaius’ main complaint was that it looked bad for him, it became clear that violence was now part of the Roman agenda. Gaius decided to lead an armed insurrection against the Senate, despite no longer being Tribune or having any justification for it, and tried to occupy the Aventine Hill. It went badly.

Gaius was forced to flee the city and got his enslaved attendant, Philoctetes, to stab him. When the Senate found Gaius’ body, they cut off his head and a man named Septimuleius (say that three times fast) impaled it on a spear and carried it back to Rome. He was rewarded with the head’s weight in gold.

First Punic War against Carthage in 249 BCE. As the head of the Romans’ fledgling navy, created specifically to fuck up the Carthaginians, our hero Publius was the handsome consul charged with winning the war.