Murder The Roman Way

 

Like all the best detective stories, the story opens with the body of a woman being found in Rome in the early hours of the morning, around A.D. 24. The sun was rising, the birds were singing, and a woman’s crumpled body was lying on the ground. The body was that of Apronia, the wife of the praetor Marcus Plautius Silvanus, and she had fallen, somehow, from a high bedroom window and not survived the fall. This was suspicious. Apronia was the daughter of Lucius Apronius, who was a very important man in Rome. He had enjoyed a very successful military career in Germany and Dalmatia, and had jointly put down a revolt in Illyricum. For this act, he had been granted the right to wear Triumphal Regalia, which was a really special outfit. Being the daughter of a man who was allowed to wear the special outfit was a bit like being the daughter of Brad Pitt; everyone wanted to marry Apronia so they could hang out with her dad. Her dad had chosen Silvanus, who was a man doing well for himself. He was a praetor, which is just below consul in terms of prestige, and the fact that he married the daughter of Apronius suggested that he was a man on the up.

 
Unfortunately for Silvanus, Apronia died painfully, hitting the Roman ground hard. Even more unfortunately for Silvanus, Apronius did not believe that his daughter, his good Roman daughter of excellent stock, had simply stumbled and fallen out of her bedroom window in the middle of the night by accident because that is a ludicrous thing to happen. Nor did Apronius, and please imagine here the most clichéd upstanding Roman man you can, a straight-backed, no-bullshit military man in his fine purple toga, think that his daughter had deliberately defenstrated herself, which was Silvanus’s version of events. He believed that Silvanus had pushed her. He believed this strongly enough that he wanted Silvanus prosecuted for it. And he wanted this taken all the way to the emperor—Tiberius.
 
Now, you’ll note that we have already diverged from what we may expect the narrative to be. In our murder mystery stories, the dead woman is found in the prologue and chapter one opens with the grizzled alcoholic detective examining the crime scene; but no police will appear to investigate Apronia’s suspicious death. There was no representative of the state of Rome who would get involved in this case until Apronius took it to the emperor because, as far as the Romans were concerned, the murder of wives, children, husbands, or really anyone at all was absolutely none of their business.
 
This is a useful demonstration of how fundamentally differently we view the role of the state to the Romans, and how we differentiate between public and private business. To most of us, it is obvious that the state has a responsibility to keep its people safe, and that it uses the apparatus of the police and the justice system to do this. When someone is murdered, the police investigate, the prosecution service prosecutes, and the prison service takes the murderer away and keeps them locked up until they are judged to be safe. The relatives of the victim aren’t expected to get involved because murder is a public business. The state has two broad functions here: It dispenses justice and punishes the wrongdoer, thus rebalancing the scales of justice, and it protects the people of the state by identifying a cause of harm and preventing it from causing further harm. In much the same way, the state is also now expected to make sure that rotten food isn’t sold in shops and substances judged to be dangerous, like heroin, aren’t freely available. We pay taxes so the state will keep us safe. On the other hand, we don’t expect the state to be getting all up in our bedrooms, legalizing who women can have sex with or rewarding women with public honors for having children. That’s private.
 
The Romans, however, saw things very differently. Rewarding women for babies was A-OK, making laws about how much jewelry a girl could wear was just sensible policy. But murder? That was family business. If a woman was murdered by her husband, it was her guardian’s job to work that out, find a prosecutor (or act as one), and take him to court if the family wanted to or arrange a fair compensation to be paid if not. There were no police to come and gather evidence or prisons to put dangerous people into, in the same way that there wasn’t a Food and Drug Administration or Food Standards Agency to make sure that tavernae weren’t poisoning people with old meat and that children couldn’t buy knives. That sort of thing was up to the gods and the individual.
 
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. Success, however, relied on three things. 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. None of these was particularly easy. And we regularly see in curse tablets what happened when these steps didn’t work out. 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. An awful lot of them were written by people who were super pissed off that someone stole their pig/gloves/favorite shoes and asked the gods to bring pain and death to that person. The personal responsibility system was a system with flaws. It also allowed some people to have more access to justice than others. Like Apronius.
 

Now, Apronius could have had a sit-down chat with Silvanus himself and worked out some compensation between them, but Apronius was, as previously mentioned, very important and he wanted more. He wanted public justice to be done and for everyone in Rome to know that Silvanus was a murderer and his daughter a victim. Luckily for him, he had the imperial access to make that happen. In addition, Silvanus was now acting very weirdly indeed. Apronius managed to have Silvanus pulled up in front of Tiberius for questioning very quickly, which would speak to his power and influence by itself. Emperors like Tiberius usually spent their time worrying about what entire provinces and colonized countries were doing, not what one idiot praetor did in his house. Most of the time, anyway.
 
Tiberius was a grumpy old man, pretty much from birth, but seemed to have absolutely loved a mystery. He was a budding Miss Marple of the Roman world and something about this case caught his attention and he got really invested in it. This might have been because Silvanus’s grandma was Tiberius’s mother’s best friend. Livia and Urgulania (Is this the worst name in history? Quite possibly yes.) were inseparable, and Livia was more than a little influential in her son’s early reign. Or it might have been that he just really liked Apronius. First, Tiberius questioned Silvanus about what had happened to poor Apronia and Tacitus (the historian who documented all this 80 years later) tells us that Silvanus gave an “incoherent” answer in which he claimed that he had been fast asleep the whole time but he assumed his wife had killed herself.
 
Unfortunately for us, it’s not recorded why he thought his wife might defenestrate herself while he was sleeping. Maybe his snoring was awful. 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. These things just didn’t happen in Rome because they didn’t have the same ideas about evidence and crimes that we have. 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 demeanor in life rather than the actual events of the case in question, until the jury or judge picked whichever person they liked best. Examining a crime scene wasn’t a particularly important part of that process. Tiberius going off to have a look at the window from which Apronia fell was therefore very surprising. So surprising, in fact, that Silvanus hadn’t even bothered trying to tidy up after the murder had been committed. The emperor was able to see immediately what Tacitus calls “traces of resistance offered and force employed.” Frustratingly, he does not elaborate on what these signs were. Maybe chairs had been flung across the room, or curtains had been torn down, or there was blood on the soft furnishings. This blows my mind a little bit. Silvanus was a rich man. He had a significant household of enslaved people. And yet he apparently didn’t even bother to ask them to tidy up a bit and make it look rather less like there’d been a fatal incident in the bedroom. No one took it upon themselves to have a wee whizz round with a mop while he was out with the emperor. Presumably, no one expected the august Tiberius to take time out of his busy day being in charge of all of Western Europe and North Africa to nip round for a look. No other emperor would have done this, even for their mum’s best friend’s grandson.
 
Tiberius just loved a mystery. There are lots of nice stories of Tiberius investigating things that interested him. He pops up in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (basically an encyclopedia of everything Pliny could think of) investigating some odd sea monsters who appeared due to an unusual low tide around modern Lyon (including sea-elephants and sea-rams, apparently), and in the wonderfully deranged Phlegon of Tralles’s collection of Greek and Roman marvels, making casts of some giant teeth and bones that had appeared in Turkey. The tooth was a foot long, says Phlegon, and Tiberius had a model of the full-sized giant measured from the tooth, making him, as Stanford historian of ancient science Adrienne Mayor points out, the world’s first paleontologist. (The tooth almost certainly belonged to a megalodon.) Tiberius was basically a wannabe Fox Mulder, wanting to investigate any weird thing that got put in front of him, and that included Silvanus’s incoherent story that his wife spontaneously launched herself out of a window while he was innocently sleeping.
 
One Italian historian has posited another reason why Tiberius might have found this a particularly interesting case, by suggesting that this Marcus Plautius Silvanus might also be the Servius Plautus recorded by St. Jerome in the fourth century as being guilty of sexually assaulting his own son in A.D. 24. If Servius Plautus and Plautius Silvanus are the same person, then he was one hell of a terrible person. He was a man who was caught somehow sexually assaulting his own son—Jerome offers only that he ”corrupted” his son so details are scarce—and then, while facing prosecution for this, killed his wife by hurling her out of a window. And let’s think about the logistics of that for a second. Stop right now and really think about this. Think about trying to bundle up a grown-ass woman, who is presumably not cooperating, 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. And if Servius and Silvanus were the same man, perhaps that gave Tiberius (and Apronius) an idea of why he might have murdered Apronia. It’s easy to imagine a wife who is deeply unhappy with her sexually abusive husband and the fight that might arise as a result. The surprising thing is that it would happen within such a “respectable” family home, where emotional control and maintaining face were important cultural behaviors.

 
But apparently it did happen, and Tiberius found the evidence and sent Silvanus to the Senate to be tried officially and sentenced. (He was maintaining a facade of pseudo-democracy at the time.) Silvanus was not destined to face a trial, though. His grandmother Urgulania intervened and politely sent him a dagger. This parcel was taken as a not-very-subtle hint from both his family and the emperor that Silvanus should save everyone some time and money and honorably punish himself with a quick dagger to the heart. Silvanus was not dedicated to the idea of killing himself, probably his most relatable opinion, and after failing to stab himself (again, relatable) he had an enslaved man cut his wrists for him. Whether justice was served is rather a matter of opinion. He lost his life, but there is certainly the feeling that by being allowed to die at home by his own hand and avoid the spectacle of a trial, he rather got away with it. It feels like history let him get away with it a bit, too.
 
This story is excerpted and adapted from the new book A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon.

Tiberius, Imperial Detective. By Emma Southon. Atlas Obscura, April 21, 2021.

Way back in the semi-mythical mists of Roman time, 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. In 451 BCE, however, it was decided, for whatever reason, that this situation was not a sustainable or useful way forward for Rome. 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. These were the Romans’ Ten Commandments, and they are primarily concerned with the administration of debts and courts. As far as anyone can tell, the first law the Romans wrote down, on tablet one of their epoch- and civilization-defining law code, the basis for Western law for millennia, was: ‘When anyone summons another before the tribunal of a judge, the latter must, without hesitation, immediately appear.’ As I say, they were a remarkably pragmatic people.
 
The Twelve Tables are now almost completely lost, existing in fragments scattered across about five hundred years’ worth of Latin literature. While the internet likes to suggest that you can read the Twelve Tables and offers a number of lovely extant-seeming translations, what we actually have is numerous decontextualized 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. They’re full of mundane things like 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. At a gut level, it seems that murder would count as an interaction between two individuals and would require legislation, but that is not the case. In the fragments of the tables that remain, the lawmakers instead appear to have been more interested in emphasizing when homicide was lawful rather than delineating when it was unlawful. For example, one of the clearest fragments states that if someone is caught while in the process of theft and killed, then that homicide is lawful.
The Twelve Tables also emphasize 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). We also see a number of ways in which the Roman court, 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 afore-mentioned big rock, which is the cliff of the Capitoline Hill). Punching a free man’s teeth out, however, just cost three hundred asses.
 
We have just two mentions of what we might now call murder in the Twelve Tables, but which actually refer to unintentional and intentional homicide. The difference between murder and intentional homicide is, of course, moral judgement. 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’s reasonably safe to say from the two extracts that we have that the Twelve Tables didn’t really contain a murder law. The first part of what it did have is extracted from two oblique references from Cicero, primarily a defense of a man called Tullius which manages to break off in the middle of the significant sentence. 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 ” ’. There it ends. This is the kind of inconvenient survival of source that I take as history trolling us. Thankfully, we also have a deeply tedious treatise called the Topica in which Cicero wangs on about Aristotle for ages and then suddenly says, ‘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.’ From this, we can infer that the Twelve Tables said something along the lines of ‘it’s only murder if you mean it’, which is very similar to our own differentiation between murder and manslaughter, but without the concept of manslaughter. This isn’t exactly clear, though, or indeed as clearly discussed or considered by later Roman authors as those laws about debt and hair rending.
 
The second mention comes from a fragment of a commentary on the Twelve Tables written in the second century CE—that’s a full six hundred years after they were written—by a borderline anonymous legal expert known only as Gaius. 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.
 
That was it for murder as far as the earliest Roman law code was concerned. The Ten Commandments are ten sentences long and even they’ve got more in them about murder.† 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.
 
That was the situation until sometime in the third century BCE, possibly around 286 BCE, when a Tribune named Aquilia got the Lex Aquilia passed via a plebiscite (basically a referendum). We know of this law because it survives in a text from late antiquity called Justinian’s Digest. 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. So a mixed legacy. Essentially, Justinian got fed up with a legal system based on a series of badly recorded, often contradictory and usually obscurely worded laws, judgements and imperial edicts dating back to the Twelve Tables, so he asked a set of legal experts to take a look at that one 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. From this, we have access to the application and perceived meaning of many laws which, themselves, have been lost. The Lex Aquilia is one of these and it dealt with property damage. It was concerned with the circumstances under which someone who damaged someone else’s property had to pay compensation, which seems unrelated to murder until you look at section one of the law, which goes like this:
 
“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.”
 
Do you see what’s happened here? The law deals with enslaved people, who the elite Roman lawmakers considered to be identical to four-legged animals that hang out in herds. The Lex Aquilia deals with sheep and cows and goats and enslaved people. To the modern reader, used to seeing every person as a person, therefore, it deals with murder because the commentaries that follow this section consist of over seven thousand (Latin) words of Roman legal scholars imagining hypothetical ways in which enslaved people and children could be killed and debating whether the person who killed them was liable to pay compensation to their owners. (There are also a couple of sentences on whether an elephant counts as cattle. Conclusion: no.) These hypotheticals go like this:
  
“A shoemaker, while teaching his trade to a boy who was freeborn and the son of a family, and who did not properly perform the task which he had given him, struck him on the neck with a last, and the boy’s eye was destroyed. Julianus says that, in this instance, an action for injury will not lie because he inflicted the blow, not for the purpose of causing him injury, but of warning and teaching him.”
 
What is happening here is that a kid is hit on the neck with a replica foot and his eye is destroyed. How did the eye get involved here? It is very disturbing but not, note, illegal under the Lex Aquilia.
 
The Lex Aquilia will apply where anyone who has been too heavily laden throws down his load and kills a slave; for it was in his power not to be overloaded in this manner.

 
I like this because it suggests that Roman lawmakers want everyone to be thinking all the time ‘if I fell on an enslaved person or cow while doing this, would it kill them?’, much like my personal favorite hypothetical:
 
“[I]f while several persons are playing ball, the ball having been struck too violently should fall upon the hand of a barber who is shaving a slave at the time, in such a way that the throat of the latter is cut by the razor; the party responsible for negligence is liable under the Lex Aquilia. Proculus thinks that the barber is to blame; and, indeed, if he had the habit of shaving persons in a place where it is customary to play ball, or where there was much travel, he is in a certain degree responsible; although it may not improperly be held that where anyone seats himself in a barber’s chair in a dangerous place, he has only himself to blame.”
 
What a wonderful imaginary series of events for multiple legal scholars to have worried about!
 
This is what the commentary on the Lex Aquilia is: a series of nasty and brutal ways in which men, women and children unlucky enough to be enslaved to the Romans could be maimed and killed, both accidentally and on purpose. In the Lex Aquilia enslaved people are beaten while ill, thrown from bridges, poisoned, stabbed, strangled, starved, trampled by mules, eaten by dogs and burnt. Reading it is like finding Patrick Bateman’s diaries: a sickening litany of violence committed casually, and this is why the Lex Aquilia has been seen as a murder law. It describes a lot of killings. It even usefully defines killing as something ‘done either with a sword, a club, or some other weapon, or with the hands if strangulation was used, or with a kick, or by striking him on the head, or in any other way whatsoever’.
 
To a Roman reader, though, reading the Lex Aquilia is akin to reading a list of ways in which tables might be damaged. Because this isn’t a murder law, it’s a property damage law. To the Romans, enslaved people weren’t people who can be murdered any more than cows and sheep were people. This law deals with intentional homicide because Rome survived on slave labour and enslaved people were everywhere, and sometimes people deliberately killed them for no good reason so it was necessary to ensure that their owners’ losses were repaired in these circumstances. This is intentional homicide, not murder. A person who kills an enslaved man, woman or child has to pay their owner their value. It is the owner who has been injured by their death and the owner whose loss must be made good. The life of the enslaved person is not the loss; their labour is.

 That’s it for homicide laws for another two hundred years, until the dictatorship of Sulla in 81 BCE changed the landscape of Rome forever. Sulla led a decade of civil war between him and Gaius Marius which he eventually won. His prize was that he got to be dictator, an emergency short-term position within the Roman constitution, basically a version of martial law, held absolute power for a year and was able to make all the laws he liked. His main aims as dictator were threefold: reduce democracy; centralize power on the Senate; and kill as many enemies as possible. And so he executed four hundred senators and sixteen hundred equestrians and simultaneously enacted the first true murder law, known as the Lex Cornelia de Sicariis et Veneficiis, which (very) roughly translates to the Cornelian Law on people who carry swords and also magicians. These two simultaneous acts introduced a radical new relationship between the state of Rome and the people: Sulla centralized power and this included the power to kill. For the first time, the Roman state decided that it could interfere in what had previously been private interactions between families. For the first time, the Romans legislated the lives and deaths of free citizens. Murder was invented.

 † An ass being a little stumpy bronze bar which rapidly stopped being worth anything when the Romans adopted proper coins. It was broadly (and reductively) equivalent to a penny.

 † For wider context, the Code of Hammurabi, which is the oldest law code in the world, doesn’t have a law on murder either and is remarkably focused on property, so the Romans weren’t totally unique on this.

 From : A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon.

 The Invention of Murder: How the Ancient Romans codified their Bizarre Views on Murder. By Emma Southon. Crimereads, March 10, 2021. 

In 176 BC a strange but revealing murder case came before the Roman praetor, M. Popillius Laenas. A woman, unnamed in the sources, was brought before the court on the charge of murdering her mother by bludgeoning her with a club. The woman happily confessed to the monstrous act of matricide. Her fate, then, seemed sealed when she entered Laenas’ court; but she introduced a defence that was as irrefutable as the wickedness of the killing of a parent. She claimed that the deed had been a crime of grief-fuelled vengeance resulting from the deaths of her own children. They, she said, had been deliberately poisoned by her mother simply to spite her and her own actions were therefore justified.
 
This defence caused the entire system to grind to a halt. The situation was an appalling paradox. In Roman culture, parricide was a crime that provoked a unique horror; there was nothing worse than murdering a parent. The typical punishment was a bizarre form of the death penalty, which involved the perpetrator being sewn into a sack with a monkey, a snake, a dog and a chicken and then thrown into the Tiber to drown. The purpose of the animals is unclear; the purpose of the sack was to deprive the murderer of the air and water, and prevent their bones from touching and defiling the earth. It was impossible to imagine a confessed parricide being left unpunished. Rome, however, had a predominantly self-help justice system, where private families and individuals investigated and punished slights against themselves. It was not the role of the state, particularly during the time of the Republic (510-27 BC), to interfere with such private matters as a vengeance killing within the family. The right independently to enact justice, especially when avenging the death of your own children, was central to the Roman conception of a just world. It was, therefore, equally impossible to imagine such a killing being punished.
 
For Laenas, the situation was a nightmare. For most of Republican history there was no formal law criminalising homicide: the Roman government was so deliberately decentralised that it did not see itself as a state which was harmed by private homicide. The murder of a private person did not affect the various magistrates’ power, and therefore the state need not interfere.
 
Therefore, if he punished a woman who had acted, in the depths of her grief for her children, to justly avenge their murder, then he would be passing judgment on all such killings and suggesting that vengeance killings were criminal. This could not be countenanced.
 
There was, however, one major exception to this rule: parricide. This was one of the few forms of homicide considered to be so despicable that a public trial would be held. Even hitting a parent was considered to be indefensible in any circumstances. For Laenas to allow a parricide to go unpunished would be to publicly suggest that there were times in which it was justifiable to murder one’s parents – and this, too, was untenable. Laenas was trapped in a paradox. In the words of Valerius Maximus, who recorded this case: ‘The first murder was judged to be deserving of vengeance, the second not deserving of acquittal.’
 
Western law allows for degrees of culpability. In a British court, for example, such a scenario would perhaps end in a manslaughter or lesser murder charge. Roman law, however, did not. There could be no shades of grey. In the end, Valerius claims that Laenus neither acquitted nor condemned the woman, but beyond that the verdict was not recorded and we will never know what happened to her.
 
This was not the only time that such a dilemma happened in the Republic.
 
Almost a century later, in the province of Asia, the proconsul Publius Dolabella was presented with a woman from Smyrna. She was brought before him in his role as a judge because she had killed both her husband and son with poison. As with the Roman matricide, she readily confessed her crime with little remorse. And, as with the Roman matricide, her victims had murdered her own child: her husband and son had killed her son from her previous marriage for reasons unrecorded. Dolabella was trapped, unable to acquit a woman who had clearly killed her own husband and child, but equally unable to condemn a woman who had been avenging the murder of her son. Incapable of coming to a conclusion by himself, Dolabella found an escape hatch which relieved him of the responsibility of either condemning a justified revenge killing or acquitting a child murderer: he bumped the decision to the ancient and venerable court of the Areopagus in Athens. The court sat on top of the Areopagus rock and had, in legend, exonerated Orestes for the murder of his mother to avenge his father. The judges, however, were unwilling to defy their Roman masters. After hearing the prosecution and the defence, they asked everyone to return to hear their judgment in 100 years’ time, neatly avoiding the need to ever make a decision.
 
These unusual cases highlight a great deal about death and justice in the Roman world and the limits the state placed on itself in the Republic. It is striking how all the sources that recount Dolabella’s dilemma acknowledge that revenge killings were not to be considered criminal acts and, therefore, how incapable the magistrates were of condemning a revenge killing. These cases, too, leave open the possibility that revenge killings were more common in everyday Roman life than is often imagined. As we see with the woman of Smyrna, private matters were occasionally made public when they were difficult. But it was not until the principate, when the stability and power of the Empire rested on the shoulders of a single man, that murder truly became a crime.
 
How To Get Away with Murder : Contradictions in Roman law left incurable headaches for its judges. By Emma Southon. History Today, September 9, 2020

 

There once was a wealthy Roman man named Vedius Pollio, infamous for maintaining a reservoir of man-eating eels, into which he would throw any slaves who displeased him, resulting in their gruesome deaths. When Emperor Augustus dined with him on one memorable occasion, a servant broke a crystal goblet, and an enraged Vedius ordered the servant thrown to the eels. Augustus was shocked and ordered all the crystal at the table to be broken. Vedius was forced to pardon the servant, since he could hardly punish him for breaking one goblet when Augustus had broken so many more.
 
That servant seems to have been spared, but many others had their "bowels torn asunder" by the eels. And that's just one of the many horrific ways the ancient Romans devised to kill those who displeased or offended them, from crucifixions and feeding people to wild beasts, to setting slaves on fire, and assassinating Julius Caesar on the Ides of March. Historian Emma Southon covers them all in her wittily irreverent new book, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, showing us how the people of ancient Rome viewed life, death, and what it means to be human.
 
Inspiration struck in April 2018, when the notorious Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, was arrested—a big day for true-crime aficionados like Southon. While chatting with a fellow true-crime buff and history teacher, Southon learned that her friend often used true crime as a teaching tool for specific cultural biases—for instance, using the example of Jeffrey Dahmer as a context for discussing homophobia in the 1990s. Intrigued, Southon searched for a true-crime book about killings in ancient Rome only to realize that nobody had written such a book. So she set out to rectify that grievous oversight, and the result is a delightful blend of true crime and ancient history.
 
Southon was struck by the elaborate nature of the public executions in particular. "Just having someone being eaten by a leopard wasn't fun enough [for the Romans]," she told Ars. "They had to find ways to build narrative tension: when is it going to happen? Where is the lion going to come from?" Crucifixions occurred in the most public spaces, and the Romans presumably were inured to the sight of rotting bodies falling apart on a cross as they went about their daily activities. "Just like true crime, it's the horror that makes it fascinating," Southon said. "You just want to poke at the dark soul behind it and see what makes that tick."
 
Ars sat down with Southon to learn more.

Ars Technica: You spend a lot of time at first talking about the definition of murder. How did you determine what constituted murder in ancient Rome for inclusion in your book?

 Emma Southon: Murder is very culturally specific. It's not that easily defined. Homicide is easily defined and has a clear definition: when one person kills another person. Murder is a word for something that is a crime, and that is different from homicide. English law is very specific. American law, because it's so many different states, it's wild. There's so many different ways in which murder is defined: you have first-degree murder and second-degree murder, and then manslaughter, and then first-degree manslaughter and second-degree manslaughter. It's so broad, and yet so specific at the same time, but if you move 10 miles in any direction, it's a completely different thing. So I could just say, "I'm just counting all homicide as coming under the umbrella of the book," even though the Romans would never consider any of this murder. It's an emotive topic, and law is often much more emotive than people think it is.

 Ars Technica: Did the Romans even have a legal concept of murder?

 Emma Southon: They did, but it was very specific about the methods used: poisoning, or carrying a knife. But if you threw somebody off a cliff, that doesn't fall under that law. Much later on you get things like Constantine's law, the first one that outlaws killing enslaved people. He lists, for about a page, all of the ways in which you're no longer allowed to deliberately kill an enslaved person. "Don't set them on fire. Don't throw them off of something. Don't hit them with a rock. “Why do you need to be this specific? It's because Roman laws are so often not aiming at generic things. They are responding to something specific. Especially when you get to the Imperial period, they are generally propagated in order to respond to a specific problem, rather than trying to make a law that is applicable to lots of things.

 But they're pretty clear it has to be intentional. Like, "You said I couldn't set him on fire, but you didn't say I couldn't strangle him." Or, "You didn't say I couldn't crucify him in my back garden," or, "You didn't say I couldn't feed him to a lamprey."

 Ars Technica: You have a PhD in ancient history, and you're a serious scholar, but one of the most delightful things about your book is how you imbue these tales with humor—a rare thing for history books.

 Emma Southon: I don't read that many popular history books, because I find them quite boring. I will usually skim them to see what the interesting bits are, rather than sit down and read them. I just write books that I want to read. I write what I would say to you if I were in the pub with you. If I were going to tell you the story of the lampreys, then that's pretty much how I would describe it. What I want is for people to pick up the book and keep reading it, and say, "Wow, the Romans are pretty interesting and there’s a lot more to them than just three emperors and some white togas."

 Ars Technica: They rarely teach you the good stuff in history classes.

 Emma Southon: It's true. Everything's hampered by curricula, is the problem. Curricula are never, like, "You know what you should do? You should show them a tintinnabulum [a decorative bell mounted on a pole] and then get people to talk about the tintinnabulum and about why somebody might put a penis-headed lion with a penis for a tail [on it]."

 This is why I ended up doing ancient history. I did modern history at school, until I was 16. It's all battles and treaties and Hitler, and then some more treaties and battles. It just was so tedious. Ancient history sounded more fun. I got a copy of Suetonius and read it and thought, "These guys are great." It's all just gossip and people having rude pictures and ghosts and omens. And then I read Aristophanes, a Greek comedy playwright; it's just dick jokes all the way down. I thought, "Clearly, this was where I was always meant to be."

 The history of ancient Rome is not this boring world of Cicero shouting or Julius Caesar marching around. It is this world where they would get really upset if they stubbed their toe while they were going to an important meeting, so they'd have to go home and end the whole day because that meant the gods didn't want them to do it. Or where they were nude all the time in the bars and had all seen each other's penises. They're such a weird and contradictory set of people. I love them more every year.

 Ars Technica: It's so difficult to tease out what really happened so long ago because of the scarcity of information, and the fact that the historical sources that have survived sometimes contradict one another. How do you approach this problem? 

 Emma Southon: The sources are always kind of dicey for the Romans. It's so rare that you get to know what actually happened, because if you've got two versions of a source, then you've got two different versions of a story, even if they're written by two people sitting next to one another. Romans didn't write history like we want to write history. They didn't write what really happened. They wrote history as literature, and what they were writing was closer to Robert Graves than it was to what we would consider to be academic history.

 Once you acknowledge that, then you can see what story they're trying to tell. What are they responding to? What's the context in which this was written? What are they trying to do? Who is their reader? Who is their audience?" That's how you have to approach a Roman source. If you've got some set of events that appear in each one, then you can be fairly sure that they're all working from the same song book, but they are all writing their own narrative about it. Acknowledge that, and you can let go of the idea of trying to find out what really happened, and you can also accept common myths as the stories that people wanted to tell about the Romans.

 People want Julius Caesar to be this great general who was an amazing person. They want that version of Julius Caesar because it tells the story of Romans who are the foundation of "the West," which American civilization and British civilization have built themselves to emulate. Caesar had an oratorial ability and a charm about him. He could show up and people would swoon, and people chased him down the street because they loved him so much. But he was also a deranged, corrupt, upstart who didn't care about anyone or anything except himself, who committed genocide in Gaul, killed a million people in the cruelest of circumstances and then boasted about it, and who then came back, didn't give up his position and instead marched on Rome. He just kept granting himself honors. Nobody could reason with him or talk to him.

 Ars Technica: We like to say history repeats itself.

 Emma Southon: History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

 Ars Technica: That’s a good way to put it. What can we learn from Roman murder that is applicable to us today?

 Emma Southon:

If you're on Twitter, you get people coming at you all the time with Cicero in their bio who want to tell you about Western civilization and how great it was. They love the version of Rome that we are so often shown in popular media and that is embedded so strongly even in our architecture. Looking at the world through Roman murder, and how they treated people they thought were important or not important, you see that this is either what [the Cicero fans on Twitter] want, or they don't realize what they are advocating for: a world entirely propped up by slavery, in which it is very explicit that some people count and some people don't count. The thing that makes you count is your family background and your wealth, and that's about it.

 You either have to expose this stuff and force people who say they want [this type of] western civilization and be explicit about it, or you have to make them confront that, and hopefully they'll back down. One of the things I wanted to do is to show that it was pretty grim, guys. It makes you feel a bit better about now. We've never had anybody, to my knowledge, raped to death by a bull [or a giraffe, in the legend of Locusta] in public for fun.

 Ars Technica: You include an epigram right at the beginning of the book about how right and wrong are geometrical. What about that resonates with you?

 Emma Southon: That is from Donald Black's Pure Sociology and it really stuck with me. There's another book that I was reading, called Is Killing Wrong? which is a very fun book to read in public. It outlines the thing that the Romans made reality, that in the modern world is less explicit: the notion that rightness and wrongness have levels. If all you had left were our laws, you would be able to write, as a historian 2,000 years from now, "Murder was illegal, and anyone who committed murder against anyone was arrested, and these were the penalties that were handed out for them," because most of them are pretty clear.

 You would think that that was presumably universal, but when you look at the reality of the situation, you'll find that if a black man kills a white woman, that's more wrong than if a white man kills a black man, because the black man will likely get a death sentence and the white man won't. A homeless person killing a CEO is going to get a much harsher penalty than a CEO killing a homeless person. There are levels to what our system actually considers to be right and wrong. I found that really useful as a lens as I was combing through [archives], looking for all the [Roman] murders I could find. That's the geometric nature of the way that we see right and wrong in terms of murder.

 Stabbing, crucifixion, eaten by eels: Learn all about murder the Roman way. By Jennifer Ouellette. Ars Technica, March 21, 2021. 

Crucifixion, drowned in a sack and being eaten by flesh-eating fish... the VERY gory ways people were murdered in Ancient Rome are revealed in a new book. By Stephanie Linning. Daily Mail, March 26, 2021.