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

by Emma Southon

15 February, which culminated in the brilliant spectacle of all the most famous men in the city getting naked, slaughtering a sheep, oiling up all shiny, and then running through the city hitting women with bits of leather. For fertility, of course. People loved it. Everyone came out to watch and cheer and be hit by a nude senator for luck. A fantastic day out for all the family. And of course, Julius Caesar was there, sitting in his gold and ivory chair, raised above everyone else in the Forum where the run culminated, wearing his bright purple toga and his bright red boots. He sparkled above the crowd and glowed against the backdrop of senators in their ordinary white.

Nicolaus has another friend of Caesar’s called Licinius pull out the diadem (though he thinks a diadem and a laurel wreath are different things so maybe he’s not totally on the ball with Roman things). Caesar saw this and pushed a dude called Lepidus to intercept Licinius. So, a third guy, Longinus, grabbed the diadem from Licinius (I’m sorry, they all have virtually the same name) and placed it in Caesar’s lap. Caesar pushed it off, so Antony leapt up – nude and oiled – and put it on Caesar’s head. Caesar snatched it off in horror and lobbed it into the crowd.

it’s essentially Caesar fighting off all of his friends trying to put a crown on his head. On...

The crowd, in Nicolaus’ version, beg Caesar to take the crown. Thus, Nicolaus paints Caesar as an innocent in this, while virtually everyone Caesar knows and the Roman people...

None of the other four sources drag all these other men into it. They have the scene play out between Antony and Caesar alone. In all these, Antony completed his run through the city in the Forum and produced the diadem from somewhere on his nude body (probably best not to think about it). He then approached Caesar and placed it on his head. In Dio, the latest of our sources, Antony says, ‘Th...

impeccably. In Plutarch and Appian, who are the most hostile to Caesar, there is an extended back and forth between Antony and Caesar where Caesar waits to see how the crowd reacts to him wearing the diadem and then to him rejecting it. In Plutarch, the crowd is quiet when he receives the diadem and explodes with joy when he rejects it; this happens twice, just to be sure that the people definitely didn’t want a king. In Appian, the people boo when he receives the crown and clap when he rejects it. Twice. Their versions of the incident are that Caesar and Antony were testing the people of R...

He was a king in all but name and he had, for just a second or two, had the name. The optimates were desperate.

There were three leaders of the conspiracy: Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus and Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus, otherwise known as Brutus, Cassius and that other Brutus everyone forgets about. Cicero wrote a letter to his best friend Atticus (it’s cute that they all have best friends) on 8 June 45 BCE – ten months before the murder – from Marcus Brutus’ holiday home in Antium and already the beginnings of a plot are obvious. Brutus was already concerned that he was unsafe and Cassius felt the same.

discuss whether Brutus and Cassius should ever return to Rome. Cicero’s letter ends with him celebrating getting a five-year job but lamenting, ‘But why am I thinking about five years? If I am not much mistaken, the end is not far off.’

in constant danger because their careers now relied on Caesar’s mood and whims, rather than their own political actions. By the time of the Lupercalia incident in February, the mood was one of despair and recklessness. The conspirators needed to save their careers in the Republic and regain their liberty, and they were ready to do anything.

Roman aristocratic liberty was the freedom to fight among one another, according to the rules, to achieve political power. These were men who owned people as slaves – loads of people – legally kept women as minors and made legal distinction between the invented categories of patrician and plebeian. They did not want freedom; they wanted the right to become Caesar.

And so a plot was formed. There was never a meeting of all sixty (or eighty if you want to believe Nicolaus) conspirators. Instead, they were set up like true revolutionaries in little cells. Few people in any cell knew who was in the other cells, and they met in their houses, as normal meetings of friends, to discuss ways in which Caesar could be bumped off. They were also aware that time was tight – Caesar was leaving for Parthia on 20 March and then he’d be untouchable for a few years. They generally vetoed any plan that involved anyone tangling with Caesar’s bodyguard or where any person willing to defend Caesar might be available and armed. They were all pretty keen on surviving to live their lives and continue their careers as competitive senators after Caesar died. So, plots to push him off a bridge during a tribal vote, to ambush him on the Via Sacra in the Forum and to surprise him as he entered the theatre were all thrown out as too dangerous. Fortune intervened when Caesar himself called a meeting of the Senate for the afternoon of 15 March. The Senate House would be the perfect place: they could get close to Caesar without suspicion; no weapons were allowed inside so other senators wouldn’t be armed; and he would have no bodyguard.

that killing Caesar in the Senate House, which was a religious space, would make it clear that their actions were done on behalf of the state of Rome and not for personal revenge. It was this too which persuaded them not to kill Antony. They hoped the people would view the murder as the assassination of a tyrant and an attempt to restore the Republic, rather than an attempt to eradicate a rival political party. Cicero would later sigh heavily over this decision, writing that they acted with the bravery of men but the strategy of children.

The omens were as bad for Caesar as they had been for his predecessor, Tiberius Gracchus.

Suetonius includes a long one about a tomb being found in Capua which warned that the grave being moved would result in ‘a son of Troy slain by his kin and avenged at heavy cost to Italy’, which is a pretty suspiciously detailed prophecy. Caesar, of course, liked to tell everyone that he was descended from the goddess Venus, while the Romans believed themselves to be descended from Aeneas, who escaped the sack of Troy.

Plutarch has a good one about Caesar performing a sacrifice and opening up the beast to find that it had no heart. He clarifies that this isn’t normal, just in case his readers thought it might be. Suetonius also includes this one, but in his version Caesar snorts derisively and says that if he had wanted the beast to have a heart, it would have. Which is a pretty baller response to a nightmarish omen.

The traditional omen, however, is the fortune teller who warns Caesar to ‘beware the Ides of March’ in Shakespeare’s play. Shakespeare lifted this from Plutarch and it also appears in Appian, Suetonius and Dio. He is called Spurinna. In most, Caesar sees him again on the way to the Senate House and mocks him, saying that the Ides had ...

All the sources ramp up the narrative tension with Caesar being reluctant to attend the Senate that day. He was feeling sick, he’d had bad dreams, his wife Calpurnia had had bad dreams, there were all these omens and Calpurnia was nervous. Meanwhile the conspirators waited nervously at the Senate House. De...

leave. In Plutarch’s account, an enslaved man tried to warn Caesar before he left but got caught up in the press of people outside the house and was unable to re...

Before anything could happen, it was necessary for Caesar, as the person who had called the meeting, to sacrifice some animals to check that the gods wanted them to hold a Senate meeting at that time. This was traditional. But the sacrifice produced bad news: the gods wanted them to go home. So they killed another animal and looked at its guts. Same answer. Another one was brought out, smashed over the head and slaughtered. None were coming up with the right omens. In Appian’s account, Caesar was worried about pissing off the Senate and decided to ign...

Caesar entered the Senate House, while Decimus Brutus suddenly pulled Antony aside for a vital private chat. As Caesar walked up the steps, the usual press of people asking for favours approached him. One thrust some paper at him and begged him to r...

The Senate House was attached to the Theatre of Pompey and had in fact been built by Pompey while Caesar was away conquering Gaul. It was a magnificent place, a temple to Roman senatorial power, and at its centre was a statue of Pompey himself. There were a...

Caesar kept walking to his fancy chair, unaware that Antony had been detained outside and that the murder plot had already swung into precise action.

approached Caesar and fell to his knees to beg Caesar to bring his brother back from exile. Caesar dismissed him, but Cimber grabbed Caesar’s toga in desperation. While this was happening, the rest of the conspirators approached the chair. Cimber pulled Caesar’s toga and exposed his neck. This was the signal. In Suetonius’ version of the murder, Caesar was offended by Cimber’s tugging on him and shouted, ‘Why! This is violence!’ and in Appian’s, Cimber shouted, ‘What are you waiting for, friends?!’ but in all the others, the first stab came unannounced. The first man to stab Caesar was Casca. He came from behind and aimed for the neck. He missed and drove his dagger into Caesar’s shoulder. The murder had begun. Caesar’s response to the first stab varies across the sources. Nicolaus has him leap up silently, to be felled immediately with a sword to the side, driven into him by Casca’s brother. Suetonius’ Caesar grabs Casca’s arm, still holding the blade dripping with his own blood, and stabs Casca with his stylus before being cut down by another, anonymous blade. In Plutarch’s version, Caesar doesn’t just grab Casca, he grabs the blade of the dagger like an absolute hero and shouts, ‘Damn you, Casca,’ before being hit by Casca’s brother. Appian’s account portrays Caesar standing up, grabbing Casca and whirling around, flinging Casca across the room but exposing his side to another blade. Finally, Dio’s Caesar is the most pathetic and gentle. He is unable to react and is bes...

The aftermath of the murder was chaos; a brief forgiveness followed by rage followed by the arrival of Octavian to take vengeance on Cassius and Brutus. The Roman aristocracy were torn apart by their reactions to the murder. Cicero, for example, was vocally on the side of the killers.

Gaius Matius was of quite the opposite opinion. Matius believed that Caesar had been the Republic’s last hope, asking, ‘If a man of his genius could not succeed, what hope is there for anyone else?’

In the first days after the murder, it seemed that the murderers would get their wish: they were granted forgiveness by the Senate led by Antony. The homicide was briefly an assassination for possibly honourable purposes. The killers would be unpunished because they had not committed a punishable act. The peace didn’t last. Against the wishes of the murderers, and entirely undermining their aims and goals, the Senate granted Caesar a public funeral. Here, his friends built a wax mannequin of him, laid it on an ivory couch within a gold shrine draped in purple and dressed it in the clothes Caesar died in. His blood-soaked, filthy torn tunic hung in the centre of the glorious shrine. The message was unmistakable: our sacred and beloved Caesar was taken from us. Antony used his eulogy to recite the decree of the Senate in which they had voted Caesar his highest honours and the pledge the senators had made to protect Caesar. In that moment, the mood changed and Caesar’s death became, in the minds of the people of Rome, truly a murder. And they were enraged.

They thought that they could be classical heroes like the Brutus who overthrew the kings, forgetting that Brutus overthrew the kings with the help and consent of (almost) every single other senator, having made his case in public in the Forum. That Brutus had not made his plans in whispers in quiet rooms, in secret and fear with a tiny number of equally scared friends. Tiberius Gracchus had been beaten to death by the majority of the Senate working together, and his brother was forced to suicide by even more. Times had changed in the century since senators had been able to kill with their own hands and for it to seem honourable. Even Milo had had to answer to a trial for the pathetic murder of Clodius, and no one even liked Clodius. The Senate were no longer a cohesive whole, and the people were no longer completely downtrodden and disenfranchised. A new world had been ushered in by two centuries of murder and these murderers were the last to realise it.

Salona, the capital city of the Roman province of Dalmatia (now Croatia).

Their parents were just wealthy enough to raise a memorial to them and leave a little snapshot of them to history. And the snapshot they chose to immortalise in stone was the manner – and sometimes the perpetrator – of their death, which may seem, to us looking at them from here, a little bizarre. The only thing we know about Prima Florentina is that her husband murdered her. The only thing we know about Julia Restuta is that she died in a mugging that went horribly wrong. Their epitaphs seem to exist simply to draw attention to the terrible manner of their deaths and that is probably exactly their purpose.

The Roman world had no official police force to do investigations, and no CPS to prosecute a case. It had no long-term prisons and no state-sponsored public defender. All it had was a self-help system that forced the families of the victims to investigate, prosecute and – sometimes – punish crimes. These tragic murders highlight two significant legal issues in Rome that we need to take a quick look at. The first is that murder was not a crime in the Roman legal system for a surprising amount of its history.

The second issue is that the Romans never developed a concept of manslaughter or murder committed in the act of another crime. So, even if the men who killed Julia Restuta had been identified and captured, they probably wouldn’t have been prosecuted for murder anyway if they hadn’t actively meant to kill her.

for the first three hundred years of Rome’s existence, there was no written law. What was and wasn’t legal was up to the king, and then, when kings were booted to the kerb, to the priests.

Romans being Romans, a fundamentally pragmatic people, they decided to set up a committee to deal with the situation. This committee, of ten men with consular imperium, put together ten tablets of laws and then bolted on another two tablets the following year. These were known as the Twelve Tables and they were carved into either ivory or bronze and hung in the Forum Romanum so that every Roman citizen would know their rights and obligations.

primarily concerned with the administration of debts and courts.

‘When anyone summons another before the tribunal of a judge, the latter must, without hesitation, immediately appear.’

The Twelve Tables are now almost completely lost, existing in fragments scattered across about five hundred years’ worth of Latin literature.

what we actually have is numerous decontextualised snippets and allusions to the Twelve Tables, most of which are considerably more cryptic than is ideal. The fragments that survive are of a law code that avoided the abstract and the communal and focused almost entirely on relations and interactions between individuals, with a very strong focus on property rather than morality or ethics.

how debts have to be paid within thirty days, judges have to make decisions before the sun has set on the court, women mustn’t scratch at their faces during funerals, a tree is worth twenty-five asses† if it’s illegally cut down, and so on.

In the fragments of the tables that remain, the lawmakers instead appear to have been more interested in emphasising when homicide was lawful rather than delineating when it was unlawful.

if someone is caught while in the process of theft and killed, then that homicide is lawful. The Twelve Tables also emphasise that fathers have the power of life and death over their legitimate sons (more on this later) and have the right to kill any children born as ‘monsters’ (this too).

as representatives of the Roman city-state, were allowed to kill their citizens, including by throwing them off a big rock, scourging them, throwing them in the Tiber in a bag, something odd that no one understands involving a dish and a girdle that may or may not be a death penalty, being burnt to death, being sacrificed to Ceres, or being beaten to death with rods (that last one was the punishment for writing mean poems about other people). Giving false testimony was punished by being thrown off the Tarpeian Rock (the afor...

Murder is a moral outrage; intentional homicide is just a legal thing that happens. The death penalty is intentional homicide; it is not murder.

It reads: ‘Who deserves to be pardoned more than a man who has killed by accident . . . for there is a law in the Twelve Tables “if a weapon escapes from a hand . . .” ’.4 There it ends.

‘For to shoot an arrow is an act of intention; to hit a man whom you did not mean to hit is the result of fortune . . . if a weapon has flown from the man’s hand rather than been thrown by him.’5 From this, we can infer that the Twelve Tables said something along the lines of ‘it’s only murder if you mean it’,

This states that there was something to do with poisons in the eighth book of the Twelve Tables, which most people have taken to mean that poisoning people was illegal and probably, maybe, punishable by death.6

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.

Justinian was the Byzantine emperor from 527 to 565 CE and he is mostly remembered for building the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, being accused of being a literal demon by a contemporary historian and for the corpus of civil law that he put together.

thousand years’ worth of material and tidy it up a bit. The Digest is one of the products of that astonishingly successful project – the success of which really demonstrates the occasional efficiency benefits of a monomaniacal dictatorship – a collation of thousands of legal commentaries on the actual application of laws in the later Roman Empire.

Where anyone unlawfully kills a male or female slave belonging to another, or a quadruped included in the class of cattle, let him be required to pay a sum equal to the greatest value that the same was worth during the past year.7