A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum Quotes

“Rome was built on the blood of Remus; the Republic was born from the death of Lucretia; the Empire grew from the assassination of Caesar.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“As had happened with Julius Caesar, it turned out that the people of Rome were actually quite keen on Gaius and were not fans of presumptuous senators and magistrates making unilateral decisions about the nature of Roman government with swords. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, they believed, not from some farcical bloody murder. Strange men in corridors distributing stab wounds was no basis for a system of government.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“As wood shattered bones and blood began to flow, the Republic was being inexorably mutilated along with the faces of a lot of Roman people.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“While the wound was not fatal, Victorian medicine unfortunately was.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Tiberius's brother, Gaius, was an absolute riot. Said to be the first person in Roman history to pull his cloak open and expose his shoulder while speaking, which is both pointless, and a bit sexy.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“In among all these little stories are two extraordinary tales of women who were neither acquitted nor convicted in their trials. Each woman is unnamed because the Romans try to avoid naming women if they can help it. One annoying walking uterus is much the same as another to the Romans.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“As the excellent Gretchen Weiners once said, ‘Brutus is just as cute as Caesar, right? Brutus is just as smart as Caesar, people totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar, and when did it become OK for one person to be the boss of everybody because that’s not what Rome is about!”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“the emperors who did this kind of thing were implicitly – and sometimes pretty explicitly – interpreting themselves as the state of Rome itself, rather than a servant of the state.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Enslaved people were, obviously, always infames. They were basically dead anyway.1 The concept of infamia is fascinating to modern readers of Rome because the idea of telling a person to their face in a court of law that they literally don’t matter as far as the state is concerned seems utterly wild. Infamia meant that a person was excluded from the legal system, unable to prosecute harms against them and unable even to make a legal will. If you were infames and someone tried to kill you, tough titties. The law won’t help you.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“In the eyes of a lot of the ‘bad’ emperors, of course, the Senate were a bunch of irritating upstarts with no formal power but a whole lot of ego who needed to be both pandered to and controlled while it was he, the emperor, who represented, possessed and embodied Roman power and prestige. It is this clash of ideologies and perspectives which quite often led to the other type of uniquely Roman imperial murder: murdering an emperor.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“He was one of those men who didn’t distinguish between infamy and fame. Like Donald Trump running for election, Regulus didn’t care if people were saying good or bad things about him, as long as they were saying his name; whispering and pointing as he walked through the Forum, gossiping about him over dinner. It was all fame. Even better, Nero was thrilled. Nero saw Regulus as a heroic protector of his majesty and reputation and rewarded him with seven million sesterces and a priesthood.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“The seemingly random nature of these executions, which took place on the merest whim of the emperor, scared them. It rightly scared them because it restricted their freedom to do and say and write things without fear, but it also scared them because the emperors who did this kind of thing were implicitly – and sometimes pretty explicitly – interpreting themselves as the state of Rome itself, rather than a servant of the state. The legal justification”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Bad emperors did what the hell they liked. Tiberius left Rome and moved to Capri and only answered letters from Sejanus because he couldn’t bear to be in the same city with other senators. Gaius and Commodus laughed in the faces of senators and openly told them that they could just kill them if they wanted to. Claudius and Nero insulted the Senate even further by taking the advice of Greek freedmen and women more seriously than legal scholars and may as well have spat in their eyes. This meant that senators and the Roman elite and experts didn’t feel they had any influence in a reign. The appearance of partnership wasn’t there. They felt vulnerable and afraid and exposed. And then, every so often, the emperor would kill one of them.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“All emperors killed people, all of them, but there were certain social and cultural criteria that separated the murderers from the statesmen; the bad boys from the grown-ups. We can call this section ‘So You Want to Be a Roman Tyrant?’ Please read carefully. To be a wicked, murderous tyrant it was first necessary for the emperor to make all their decisions about executions by themselves.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“The poisoner of the people was a woman called Pontia, about whom we know very little except that she was the butt of many a scandalised poem in the high Empire. She appears first in Juvenal’s festival of misogyny, his sixth Satire, as an example of the very real and specific evils women could perpetrate. In Juvenal’s poem, Pontia is depicted as killing both of her sons by lacing their dinner with aconite and being utterly unrepentant about it. Juvenal’s Pontia laughs that had she had seven sons, she would have killed them all, leading Juvenal to compare her to Medea, who killed her children to spite her cheating husband in Greek myth and tragedy. Pontia appears again in several epigrams written by the absolute”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Arguably, Locusta was as liable in the murders of all Nero’s enemies as Armalite are for all the deaths that have been caused by the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. She was less a serial killer than a weapon.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Bumping off dynastic threats is, frankly, practical policy for a monarch rather than strictly murder, but at this time in Roman history, they were still clinging a little desperately to the fiction that the Republic had been restored and that the emperor wasn’t a monarch.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Whatever happens to you was always going to happen to you; your existence and the things that happen to you are strands of fate woven together.21 Basically, Stoics hate the idea of feelings and trying to change things and they love only Reason. They’re dreadful. But they had a lot of capital-T”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“If you’re bothered by something outside yourself, it’s not that thing which is bothering you but your reaction to it. So stop reacting to it . . . Take away your opinion and the complaint is taken away.20”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Stoics hate reality; it’s too messy and emotional.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“But gladiatorial fights remained absolutely connected to funerals for about two hundred years from their first introduction, so a member of the family had to die before anyone could put a good games night on. It was, of course,”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“As the Roman Empire grew and newly enslaved people were flooding into the city of Rome along with the necessary wealth that allowed those at the top to enslave hundreds or thousands of them, Roman enslavers suddenly became very afraid that they were outnumbered. This became an especial fear as mass slave-owning became a marker of wealth and privilege and conspicuous consumption. Romans took to owning people like modern-day social media influencers have taken to owning Hermès Birkin bags. But unlike a handbag, enslaved people could be dangerous: the more enslaved people one purchased, the more sad and pissed-off people were literally in your house to hate you. Seneca, that old Stoic, wrote about this a few times. He famously said that a (rich, slave-owning) man had as many enemies as he had slaves. He also recorded an interesting senatorial debate about whether enslaved people in Rome should be forced to wear some kind of special clothing to make their status visible and unambiguous. The proposal was voted down because the enslavers feared that if the people they enslaved could see how many of them there were in the city, they’d feel the strength of their numbers and possibly act on it. Such a reasoning is probably nonsense, not least because in a household of four hundred enslaved people everyone definitely knew that they outnumbered their one enslaver, but it’s interesting that the rich experienced some anxiety about their actions. But, being Romans and being hugely wealthy men, and being very, very dedicated to the institution of slavery, the best solution the Senate could come up with was to terrorise those they enslaved into being too afraid to act against those who enslaved them.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“being beaten to death with rods (that last one was the punishment for writing mean poems about other people).”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“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.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Our liberty is freedom for all from oppressive restrictions on our lives and behaviours. Roman aristocratic liberty was the freedom to fight among one another, according to the rules, to achieve political power.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“This is how much Romans hated kings – it was illegal to shout ‘king’ at people in the same way it’s illegal to do the Nazi salute in Germany.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“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. These things were all granted to him separately and over a long period, but by the time he died in 44 BCE, he had all of them and he was basically Louis the Sun King in all but name. He was so far above every other member of the aristocracy in every visible and invisible way that the optimates found it terrifying. He was ruining everything.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“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.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“the mobs that Clodius inspired because the Roman sources are always keen to dehumanise these people, who were the urban middle and working classes.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“It was impossible to hold elections without them turning into bloodbaths so no one was holding elections.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome