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

by Emma Southon

The sacred chickens were a Big Deal in Roman religious practice, a way of hearing the desires of the gods, and decisions were made based on when and how they ate. So Publius asked the chickens, ‘Should we go into this battle? Will we win?’ and waited for the chickens to eat their food in the correct way to give him the green light. Unfortunately for him, the chickens were on a boat and absolutely not in the mood. Or, the gods were sending a message. Either way, the chickens would not eat. No matter how much the consul wanted them to, or how badly he wanted to attack the waiting Carthaginian navy. So Publius, in a fit of sacrilegious rage, wanged the chickens into the sea, screaming, ‘If they won’t eat, let them drink,’ and stormed headfirst into a catastrophic defeat, losing 93 of his 123 ships.

By the 60s BCE, Roman government had effectively broken down. Pompey, Caesar and Crassus were coming up to full war, while every aspect of government was poisoned with bribery, violence and uncertainty. In the middle of this, Catiline was a low-level rapscallion who wanted to make a name for himself by somehow violently overthrowing the consulship and perpetrating a lot of murders in the name of the disenfranchised people of Rome. Unfortunately for him, Cicero was the consul and Cicero was no Mucius Scaevola. As soon as Cicero found out about Catiline’s conspiracy, he had Catiline executed without trial.

In December 62 BCE, the same year that they murdered Catiline, Clodius got hornily curious about the ladies-only religious ceremony for the Bona Dea festival. Bona Dea was a specifically Italian goddess whose festival was held at night, in secret, in the house of the Pontifex Maximus. His wife led the ceremony, accompanied by the Vestal Virgins. It was a big thing that men weren’t allowed to participate, so obviously Clodius wanted in. Being precisely thirty years old and an idiot, he thought he might look young and feminine enough to pass so he disguised himself as a woman – presumably by putting on women’s clothes and some make-up – and climbed in through the Pontifex Maximus’ window. The Pontifex Maximus at the time was Julius Caesar, so the house was pretty large and Clodius immediately got lost. According to Plutarch, he was found by a maid who instantly saw through his bad drag costume and started screaming. Despite his brilliant attempt to hide in a nearby room, he was found and prosecuted for sacrilege. In a move of extraordinary ballsiness, Clodius went full Shaggy in court and declared that it wasn’t him in Caesar’s house because he hadn’t even been in Rome that day. He claimed he’d been miles away. At which point Cicero stepped forward and testified that Clodius had definitely been in Rome because he’d been in Cicero’s house.

Clodius, who was technically called Publius Claudius Pulcher, then got himself adopted by a plebeian family in 59 BCE, meaning that he was no longer part of the patrician Claudian family, and changed his name to Clodius so he could run for election as Tribune of the Plebs.

As Tribune, Clodius proceeded to annoy the Senate, provide a perpetual corn dole to everyone in Rome, and, specifically to fuck with Cicero, he passed a law to prosecute consuls who had executed citizens without trial. And got Cicero exiled. Then burnt Cicero’s house down.

Titus Annius Milo got himself a gang of enslaved men and gladiators and, before long, political meetings became brawls. Every election was now a battleground. Rome was in chaos. For years. By 52 BCE, gang violence had become as normal a part of political life as bribery and prosecuting one another for gang violence. In Cassius Dio’s words, murder had become an everyday occurrence and by this he means open murders in the street. It was impossible to hold elections without them turning into bloodbaths so no one was holding elections.

Where Mark Antony chasing Clodius around the Forum with a sword, screaming bloody murder and forcing Clodius to lock himself inside a bookshop,

Clodius gave every citizen in Rome a universal basic meal plan, and for that reason they’d love him forever. So when he was murdered, it was a problem.

On 18 January 52 BCE, Clodius was travelling with his entourage of gladiators and enslaved men, thirty enslaved men with arms according to Asconius, when he met his arch-nemesis, Milo, at Bovillae. After Milo had leapt on the armed gang bandwagon so enthusiastically, he had emerged in the politics of the 50s BCE as a real problem for Clodius. The two of them spent years having gang fights over whether Cicero should be allowed to return to Rome and taking it in turns to unsuccessfully prosecute one another for said gang fights. Their relationship was one of vehement antipathy. So when Clodius and his entourage met Milo and his on the Appian Way that day in 52 bce, the violent clash was tediously inevitable. Except, this time, one of Milo’s gladiators went too far.

did not expect to be the ones injured in street brawls. So on this day, when one of Milo’s men drove a knife into Clodius’ back, it was a surprise to everyone. Reports differ on what precisely happened. Cicero, speaking in Milo’s defence at his trial, minimises the murder and makes the whole thing sound like Clodius selfishly threw himself on Milo’s slave’s dagger on purpose while Milo was looking in the opposite direction.

Mark Antony, according to Cicero, went around telling everyone that Cicero had asked Milo to kill Clodius, which is a version I like a lot.7 Cicero did occasionally write letters dated ‘x days from the battle of Bovillae’, which suggests that he held the date of Clodius’ death close to his heart.

Whatever the truth, Clodius ended up dead on the side of the Appian Way with a knife in his back and the people of Rome were appalled. This was a step too far. Clodius’ entourage carried his body to the Forum where they laid it on the rostra. He suddenly became a martyr for the Republic. He may have been an incestuous, sacrilegious, violent, horrible patrician co-opting the power of the plebeian Tribune, but he was their incestuous, sacrilegious, violent, horrible patrician co-opting their plebeian power and they were absolutely not OK with other senators killing him.

They built him a pyre of benches and wood ripped from the Senate House and then, at the appropriate hour, they burnt his body and the Senate House with it and held the funeral feast in the shadow of its flames. It had stood for five hundred years, built by the king Tullus Hostilius, and now, with the body of yet another murdered Tribune, it burnt. It took with it another slice of the Republic, and the Senate, in a panic, gave sole control of the Empire to Pompey.

He also, amusingly, didn’t even try to convince the court that Milo was innocent. He simply tried to argue that he shouldn’t be punished for murdering Clodius. His argument rested on three things: first, that it was self-defence; secondly, that the city was effectively at war so the laws shouldn’t really apply (the infamous line: silent enim leges inter arma); and thirdly, that Clodius was a villain and, had Milo deliberately murdered him (which he hadn’t), he would have been saving Rome from yet another populist leader of the plebs who threatened the stability of the Senate.

Milo was, accordingly, found guilty and banished from Rome. He went to live in Massilia, now Marseilles, which is not that bad a punishment for a murderer.

April 52 BCE. In the same year, Caesar began his war against Vercingetorix in Gaul. The year before, a Roman attempt to invade Parthia had ended in bloody disaster. Armies were marching across the Empire and the Triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus had collapsed when Crassus inconveniently died in Parthia. Without a third person to balance them, tension between Caesar and Pompey became unmanageable. Almost three years to the day after Clodius’ murder, on 10 January 49 BCE, Caesar crossed the Rubicon and marched his army on Rome.

He is a link between Tiberius Gracchus and Julius Caesar, populares who died violent, illegal deaths at the hands of the elite of the Empire to ‘save’ the Republic and to protect the interests of a tiny number of the richest men. His murder, like those of Tiberius Gracchus and Julius Caesar, caused such mourning that history was changed.

The traditional story of Romulus’ death was that he was suddenly assumed into heaven in a highly localised and very dense thundercloud while parading the troops outside the walls of Rome, to the surprise of everyone.

Romulus began acting as a tyrant towards the end of his reign, and that the cloud which surrounded him that day on the parade ground was not a divine thundercloud but a cloud of dust raised by senators falling on him with knives. The assumed-into-heaven story was far more popular – and obviously neither actually happened – but the survival of the tyranny version well into the Imperial period suggests that there was at least a strain of high Roman culture that wanted to lionise the killing of even the divine Romulus, son of Mars, in the name of Rome.

We have so much information about Julius Caesar, including his own writings about his activities as a general which – in an unbelievably annoying move – he wrote in the third person, that we almost can’t handle it.

any history of the late Republic or biography of Mark Antony or Caesar and look at how much of it relies almost entirely on Cicero’s words.

he never wrote about Caesar’s death. He wrote about before, and he wrote about what Mark Antony did after, but never about what happened on the Ides of March 44 BCE.

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 desc...

Apart from Nicolaus, every single one of these was born into a world in which emperors were the norm, where Julius Caesar was a literal god to whom they sacrificed little (and big) animals, who had priests and whose name – Caesar – had become a simple noun to denote imperial power and semi-divine authority. They existed in a world where killing a Caesar was a pretty big fucking deal, and a world that only ever killed emperors in order to replace them with other emperors. The notion of the Republic was an imaginary, near mythical one by the time Julius Caesar’s dynasty ended in 69 CE.

almost all the Greek-language sources (with the exception of Dio who likes to remind everyone that he was a Roman senator about once every three lines) refer to the Romans as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’.

Nicolaus had managed to build himself a distinguished career of being really close to people who pissed Augustus off. He was appointed as tutor to the children of Antony and Cleopatra, which was probably amazing until they fell out with Augustus. Somehow Nicolaus escaped that situation and he took up with Herod the Great, the king of Judea, aka that Herod from the Bible with the baby killing. The baby killing wasn’t a massive problem for Augustus but going to war with the king of Arabia without permission was, so Herod had to send Nicolaus off to Rome to try to beg Augustus for forgiveness.

This leads to some truly excellent lies and misrepresentations from Nicolaus, including calling Julius Caesar, one of the most successful, and most corrupt, politicians in Western history, ‘unskilled in political practices by reason of his foreign campaigns’, and ‘easily taken in’, which is laugh-out-loud hilarious.10

And in particular he made his soldiers feel special and loved and appreciated. Roman soldiers rarely felt these things; like the British army under Wellington, they were considered to be the scum of the earth to be whipped into shape and thrown into battle and then forgotten.

led his legions to a great many victories across Gaul11 and into Britain and then he didn’t forget them afterwards. His rise had been based on popularism and, like all populares before him, on proposals to redistribute land to Roman soldiers and the poor. As a general, he rewarded his soldiers richly, by letting them keep the stuff they nicked from the poor Gauls they massacred, and he promised them more and more glory and cash. He promised them that they’d be able to return to Rome with a heavy purse and the ability to boast that they fought with Caesar, and this really worked. To a frightening degree.

an extremely hard-working bureaucrat with an eye for detail and the ability to juggle a lot of projects at once, which is just as frightening as his military prowess because it meant ther...

For every person who adored him, there was another who despised him, who loathed his populism and his constant banging on about being descended from Venus. The optimates hated and feared his relentless desire for change and glory, and were terrified of his disregard for things like convention, propriety and the law. Because Caesar was astoundingly corrupt. He bribed his way into his first official job and didn’t stop from that point on. Always remember that he took his troops across the Rubicon not to save Rome, but because he had refused to give up his job as governor of Gaul as it protected him from being prosecuted in Rome for crimes he had committed.

When the Senate – correctly – said he was committing insubordination and treason, he invaded Rome and beat the shit out of Pompey for a few years. And that was pretty controversial, to put it mildly. Once he finished beating Pompey, he made himself dictator and started rejigging the entire system, beginning with how the Romans counted time, and allowing petrified minions to vote him more and more honours. The honours he was granted are staggering, quite apart from the dictator-for-life thing. Cassius Dio lists them all and as a list they’re pretty tedious, so here are the highlights. He was consul, dictator for life and censor of the Senate. He was called imperator and father of the country. He had golden statues built and placed among the statues of ancient kings and among the gods. He had altars and temples in his name. A college of priests was founded to dedicate their whole lives to looking after his temples and praying for him. When he revised the calendar, he changed the name of the fifth month to his own name. He had a golden throne that he could sit in whenever he liked. He was allowed to wear special knee-high red boots which were seen as the stereotypical clothing of the ancient kings and he was allowed to wear the big purple Triumphal robe all the time. He got special lictors and the right to ride his horse in places where horses weren’t allowed. Official prayers were given every year for his safety and wellbeing, and on and on and on.

The fear that the optimates felt watching Caesar being literally worshipped by the people and Senate of Rome, being given more and more honours and wielding his power with increasing confidence was compounded in 44 BCE by three incidents,

Caesar was a perpetual micromanager with an unending energy for dealing with shit.

The senators, meanwhile, had decided to take the opportunity of Caesar’s absence to go full sycophant and, for absolutely no reason other than trying to make Caesar like them, voted him a bunch of new and extraordinary honours. Deeply pleased with themselves, a group of senators wanted to break the news in person that he now had an even fancier chair or the right to kick people in the face or whatever, in the hope that he’d reward them. So they put on their best togas – all the sources emphasise that they dressed up for the occasion – and traipsed over to the building site to tell him. They found Caesar surrounded by enslaved attendants and clients and papers and approached with as much dignity as a bunch of absolute berks in wool blankets could muster. And Caesar ignored them. He was supposed to stand in the presence of senators in formal dress, but he didn’t even look up.

He humiliated the Senate. And they were not men who liked being humiliated. They were supposed to be the best men in the whole Empire. They were supposed to be treated with fawning respect by everyone, including each other. (I really recommend reading some of the surviving letters between Roman senators because they spend half of each letter talking about how brilliant the other guy is and it’s revolting.)

Dio is an unapologetic Caesar fan. He lays out his stall early in his account when he states that Cassius and Brutus destroyed the only stable government Rome had ever known and killed Caesar out of jealousy and stupidity. Even Dio struggles a bit with Caesar’s refusal to stand for senators; he is, after all, and he might have mentioned this once or twice, a Roman senator himself. So he states ‘some said that’ Caesar had been suffering from diarrhoea that day and had therefore been unable to stand and greet the senators lest he have an unfortunate accident. You really have to know that you have done something truly terrible when the best possible defence that your biggest fan can give you is that you might have shat yourself.

So Caesar’s outright win, his admirable forgiveness of those who had fought with Pompey, and the prospect of some peace and healing were certainly a relief to the Romans. But, Plutarch says, when an unaccountable autocrat becomes a permanent fixture, and the reality of living under an unaccountable autocrat sinks in, what you have is tyranny. Tyranny could be tolerated if it was disguised; Caesar kept making it obvious.

Appian, who had obviously thought long and hard about what the hell was going on in Rome. He struggled to work out why the Senate would voluntarily give Caesar so many honours and privileges and nice shoes and adore him and worship him and then get homicidally mad at him for using them.

Appian remained somewhat baffled: a dictator for life, he says, is exactly like a king. It’s just a substitute title.

The Senate built their whole identity on the fact that they had overthrown their kings and created the perfect Republic.

Marching off against Parthia was a good sign that a Roman general or emperor was getting too big for his boots, but this time a very specific anxiety arose. The Romans had a book of prophecies called the Sibylline Books which had been sold by a Greek female prophet to the last king of the Romans, Tarquinius Superbus. They were highly sacred and considered to be the true and very clear words of the gods.† They were kept in a vault beneath the great Temple of Jupiter, heavily guarded and consulted only at times of extreme distress. In 44 BCE, a rumour arose that the books contained a prophecy that the Parthians could only be defeated by a king of Rome and that Caesar was going to use this information – which no other Roman would be able to check – to get the Senate to grant him the title of king, possibly king of one of their provinces. This wouldn’t be the first time Caesar manipulated Roman religious beliefs for his own ends, and the rumour scared people.

The first incident occurred when a diadem was found on a statue of Caesar. A big golden statue of Caesar. A diadem is a traditional Roman crown – a wreath of laurel leaves and white ribbon. It was the ultimate signifier of kingship.

Statues were a public space in which the inhabitants of Rome could express their opinions about political figures.

One of the things raised by all the sources as prompting Brutus to join the conspiracy against Caesar was a series of insulting lines written on his statues suggesting that he was letting down his family name by allowing Caesar to rule. Statue graffiti was a way of learning public opinion about a person or issue. So, finding a diadem on Caesar’s most golden statue was a disturbing sign that certain people within Rome might actually want Caesar to be king.

it was illegal to shout ‘king’ at people in the same way it’s illegal to do the Nazi salute in Germany.

politicians were a bit like boy bands in the Roman world –

He claimed that they had fabricated the two incidents in order to frame him. He basically thought that they were complex false flag operations in which the Tribunes, his enemies, set up people to call him a king in order to make it look like he wanted to be a king. A weird and complicated thing, but not unthinkable for Roman senators.

Caesar shouting at Tribunes, however, looked bad. And then he really went too far. He stripped them of their Tribuneship and their powers and barred them from the Senate House. This was tyranny. This was Caesar showing off his power over the government of Rome and his disdain for the constitutional norms of the Senate. He could strip even the most sacred and powerful of the magistrates of their office and have them thrown out.

sitting incident was freaked out by this. Then came the famous Lupercalia incident. The one everyone vaguely knows about: when Mark Antony, Caesar’s best friend in all the world and partner in crime (literally), knelt in front of Caesar and offered him the crown.