Status Updates From A Fatal Thing Happened on t...

Just finished the first chapter, which ended on Julius Caesar’s murder. It was entertaining, a nice little overview of how his fellow senators viewed him and how they gave him to much power, to inevitably lead to need to kill him. Also completed chapter 2 which mostly focused on various laws that were placed and in use but didn’t necessarily cover murder specifically in how we view it today, more on property.

So far, interesting. Learned of the difference between homicide and murder (as well as its variants). Learned of two great (for the plebs or poor people) or not so great men that were politically involved and were murdered for trying to go against the rich (), Tiberius Gracchus and Publius Claudius Pulcher. Also learned the Ides of March was March 15.

Legit thought I wasn’t a history person, turns out I just need my historians to quote mean girls at me

My fave book quote is now “Don’t f*** with the sacred chickens”

so interesting, a refresher of my years of latin club shoutout

shoutout gladiator two reminding me i own this

To będzie 6 gwiazdek jak nic

"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."

All the Agatha Christie references are giving me a giggle

dnf-ing i can barely comprehend what i am hearing anymore

Murder on the senate floor

I didn’t think I would hear “Cataline was ballsy as fuck” in a history book but here we are.

Love the style of writing, very conversational and makes the unfamiliar material more easily digestible

“Massively lacking in charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent,…” 😭😭

“The speech begins with Cicero calling Vatinius unimportant and uninteresting and gets more brutal from there. It is almost ten thousand words of character assassination. It’s almost as bad as YA reviewers on GoodReads.” U go get ‘em Emma

"The reason the literary sources are so dehumanising is that they didn't perceive killing enslaved people to be particularly wrong. It was the purpose of killing which was wrong, not the death itself."

"It was...disruptive innovator Julius Caesar with his brilliant mind who found a way around this funeral situation and changed things forever. In 65 BCE, when JC was a low-key magistrate with a profile to match the amount of fucks he gave about tradition, but an unstoppable ambition, he held some gladiatorial games in the Forum Romanum in honour of his dad who had died two decades previously. It was genius."

"The existence of multiple overbearing women who kill their husbands for their sons in Roman literature did not mean that they did not exist, nor that they were the only husband-murderers who existed. It merely means that they were the only ones the Romans were afraid of."

"...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. In 451 BC, however, it was decided, for whatever reason, that this situation was not a sustainable or useful way forward for Rome. [...a] committee of ten men with consular imperium, put together ten tablets of laws and then bolted on another two tablets the following year."

"What I am getting at here is that murder is a constructed act. 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 across time and space."

One minute I’m reading about goofy Roman murder laws and the next a very sad history of infants in Ancient Rome

The Ides of March 😰

'you really have to know that you've done something truly terrible when the best possible defense that your biggest fan can give you is that you might have shat yourself'

im gonna cry why is the narrator so funny

An actually informative and funny read written by Philomena Cunk lite.

I do that that Southon is doing a phenomenal job emphasizing the barbarity of Romans. It's all fun and games to idolize The West until you realize that civility means nothing if you kill people mercilessly.

I am slowly becoming less impressed with the tone of this book.

rereading because i miss emma !!!!!!

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I can’t tell if I love or hate the casual tone here.

I will be done with this before I leave for south bend