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

by Emma Southon

five sources from the Imperial period: a fragment of a biography of Augustus by a Syrian philosopher, Nicolaus of Damascus, written between twenty and thirty years after the death of Caesar; a biography of Julius Caesar written by a member of the equestrian class called Suetonius from the emperor Hadrian’s household in around 100 CE, 150 years after the murder; another biography of Julius Caesar by the Greek philosopher and moralist Plutarch written at about the same time; a history of the civil wars of the late Republic by Appian, a historian from Alexandria in Egypt, from approximately 180 years after the events it described; and, finally, a history of Rome from the beginning by the Greek-speaking Roman senator Cassius Dio, written in around 230 CE, almost three centuries later.