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

by Emma Southon

Husband and wife weren’t at the core of distinct little family units for the Romans; for them (and I’m mostly talking about upper-class families here) the oldest living man formed the core of a potentially vast familia. Marriage did not create families for Romans. It created alliances between two familiae, which remained separate.

English nicked the word family from familia so we tend to assume that familia describes a family when really it describes something closer to a tribe or a clan. The familia consists of one’s whole immediate and extended family, plus people who have been enslaved, plus formerly enslaved people who have been freed who now have a limited kind of freedom but are still around and share the family name forever, plus any random men who might have been adopted in and also all the dead relatives whose death masks are on the walls and who remain a vital, living part of a familia’s name and reputation forever. A familia is a big group of people, living and dead, linked together by biology, kinship, duty, obligation, affection and the law and has little in common with the mum, dad and 2.4 kids of the modern West.

Google supplicia canum if you absolutely must but do try not to think about the logistics too hard.

Search this later.

The justice system in Rome was one based purely on personal responsibility. The individual was responsible for identifying that a crime had taken place, identifying who had committed the crime, and finding a resolution.

First, the perpetrator had to be identified, then they had to admit that they did it, and then both parties had to agree on an appropriate level of compensation, which the perpetrator then had to actually pay.

Curse tablets are bits of lead on which ancient people wrote curses. They then rolled them up, nailed them shut and buried them at shrines in the hope that a generous god would smite the person who thieved their pot.

Tiberius didn’t believe him. We know this because he did something really unusual: he went to look at the crime scene. This is, I believe, the only time in recorded Roman history that an emperor decided to investigate a murder by examining the scene of the crime.

Their murder trials didn’t involve people looking at daggers or gloves or other bits of physical evidence. They just involved people reciting really good speeches at each other, each using the same rhetorical strategies, mostly about the character of the defendant and/or victim and their general demeanour in life rather than the actual events of the case in question, until the jury or judge picked whichever person they liked best.

Think about trying to bundle up a grown-ass woman, who is presumably not co-operating, and getting all her limbs out of a window without her holding onto the windowsill. Imagine the very physical, very determined fight you would have to have to do that. Even assuming that he had help, this was a hard way to kill someone. It’s a manner of murder that suggests both a lack of foreplanning and a serious dedication to killing the victim.

Suetonius says that lots of people believed that the emperor Gaius Caligula went mad because his final wife Caesonia had given him too many love potions.

In 160 CE, Regilla was murdered by her husband Herodes Atticus. You almost certainly know Herodes Atticus at least a little bit if you’ve ever been to Athens or seen photos of the very well-preserved, and still used, theatre built into the side of the Acropolis hill: that’s Herodes Atticus’ theatre. It’s enormous and it was built by a private citizen during the Roman era to honour the wife he killed: Regilla Atticus.

He walked free forever, and spent the next year grieving for Regilla so ostentatiously and ludicrously that it screams either guilty conscience or pure attention-seeking.

Another good story about Herodes which is utterly irrelevant but great is that he once met a man whom everyone called Hercules who was eight feet tall and had a monobrow and claimed to be immortal. Herodes was so impressed by Hercules that he invited him to tea, an invitation Hercules accepted on condition that no woman touch any of his food or drink. When he arrived, he took one look at the milk, declared that a woman’s filthy fanny hands had touched it and stormed out. Herodes went investigating and discovered that a woman had milked the cow. He marvelled. That’s the whole story. Its total pointlessness is part of its charm.

But while the slave states of Louisiana and Virginia lasted 150 years before abolition, the Roman Empire stood on the backs of unimaginable numbers of enslaved men, women and children for almost a thousand years. A thousand years is thirty-four generations of people enslaved to the Romans.

Elite free Romans made themselves exceptionally vulnerable to those they enslaved, who slept in their bedrooms, dressed them, washed them, fed them and literally carried them around. It would take just a couple of minutes to suffocate a rich wanker with their stupid toga if you were in charge of putting that toga on them, or you could whack them on the head with a particularly fancy vase, or push them into their ludicrously expensive ponds, but enslaved people almost never did these things because the punishments for enslaved-on-enslaver violence were, even for the Romans, extraordinarily horrible.

The consequence of a person being murdered by their own enslaved people was that every single enslaved person living under the same roof as the murderer would be executed. Every single man, woman and child who was legally the property of the deceased and part of the household would be taken outside of the Esquiline Gate and would die excruciatingly. Yes, I did say children too. Even the children.6 This punishment existed to make every single enslaved person constantly responsible for the wellbeing of their enslaver and for protecting their enslaver from all threats at all times.

By 61 CE, the law enacting this punishment had been in effect for fifty-one years, having been passed under Augustus’ rule in 10 CE (the Senatus Consultum Silanianum, which is super fun to say out loud) and renewed in 58 CE to include enslaved people who had been freed. Even people who technically had their freedom were never truly free.

It’s not until 319 CE in the reign of Constantine, who was quite possibly influenced by Christian thought on the matter, that the deliberate killing of an enslaved person by their enslaver became a crime. It did have to be deliberate, though.

He describes Pollio turning up in two chariots, with a horse and cart, a huge retinue of enslaved attendants and, for absolutely no reason, a yellow baboon. Just a pet baboon. From sub-Saharan Africa. Riding around Turkey in a chariot with this wanker.

in about 15 BCE, around the same time that Augustus and the Senate passed a law forbidding men from handing enslaved people over to be thrown to the beasts as part of public entertainments at random.

The Lex Petronia forced free people to bring a formal complaint against the enslaved person they wanted to hand over to get eaten by bears so that a magistrate could decide whether the enslaved person deserved the punishment.13

those who were prevented from having enslaved people mauled by lions were not prevented from using any other form of execution. They could still crucify enslaved people or beat them to death or starve them or stab them or drown them or throw them from a cliff or, indeed, as Pollio did, feed them to their privately owned beasts.

an execution could be bought pretty cheaply, just four sesterces per contractor, which included the cost of materials and disposal of the body.14 Of course, what this mostly tells us is that the flogging and execution of enslaved people was so common a thing that other people did it for a living, day in and day out, which is probably the best insight you’ll ever get into the mundane reality of a slave state like Rome and how little the lives of individuals meant to it.

Hadrian, almost 150 years later, and that also simply prevented free men from executing their enslaved people without oversight from a magistrate,

In the second century CE, a jurist named Marcian wrote that ‘whoever kills a man is punished without distinction as to the status of the man he killed’, which some have taken to mean that enslaved people counted as people where murder was concerned by then.15 Possibly it does, but we don’t see in the sources anyone suddenly being prosecuted for killing enslaved members of their household.

Constantine explicitly excluded the accidental killing of enslaved people during beatings or punishments. That’s fine, because the only real person hurt by that was the person who lost some valuable property. However, the enslaver is made guilty of murder if they deliberately kill an enslaved person in any of the following gruesome ways: with a club or stone, with any weapon, by hanging, by being thrown from a high place, with poison, with ‘the cutting of the sides with the claws of a wild beast’ (grimly specific even for a Roman), by burning, or by torturing a person to death, which Constantine, with the tone of someone really enjoying himself, describes as forcing ‘bodies and limbs weakening and flowing with dark blood, mingled with gore, to surrender their life in the midst of tortures’.