Was Teenage Roman Emperor Elagabalus A Trans Woman?

 

A museum is to relabel its display about a Roman emperor after concluding that he was in fact a trans woman.

North Hertfordshire Museum will now refer to emperor Elagabalus with the female pronouns of she and her. It comes after classical texts claim the emperor once said "call me not Lord, for I am a Lady". A museum spokesperson said it was "only polite and respectful to be sensitive to identifying pronouns for people in the past".

The museum has one coin of Elagabalus, which is often displayed amongst other LGBTQ+ items in its collection. It said it consulted LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall to ensure "displays, publicity and talks are as up-to-date and inclusive as possible".  Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, better known as Elagabalus, ruled the Roman empire for just four years from 218AD to his assassination, aged 18, in 222AD. He became an increasingly controversial figure over his short reign, developing a reputation for sexual promiscuity. Cassius Dio, a senator and contemporary of Elagabalus, writes in his historical chronicles that the emperor was married five times - four times to women, and once to Hiercoles, a former slave and chariot driver. In this final marriage, Dio writes that the emperor "was bestowed in marriage and was termed wife, mistress and queen".

The debate over Elagabalus's gender identity is long-standing and often splits academics. Dr Shushma Malik, a Cambridge university classics professor, told the BBC: "The historians we use to try and understand the life of Elagabalus are extremely hostile towards him, and therefore cannot be taken at face value. We don't have any direct evidence from Elagabalus himself of his own words. "There are many examples in Roman literature of times where effeminate language and words were used as a way of criticising or weakening a political figure. "References to Elagabalus wearing makeup, wigs and removing body hair may have been written in order to undermine the unpopular emperor." Dr Malik added that whilst Romans were aware of gender fluidity, and there are examples of pronouns being changed in literature, it "was usually used in reference to myth and religion, rather than to describe living people". However, councillor Keith Hoskins, executive member for Enterprise and Arts at North Herts Council, said texts such as Dio's provide evidence "that Elagabalus most definitely preferred the 'she' pronoun and as such this is something we reflect when discussing her in contemporary times, as we believe is standard practice elsewhere". "We know that Elagabalus identified as a woman and was explicit about which pronouns to use, which shows that pronouns are not a new thing," he added.

Museum reclassifies Roman emperor as trans woman. By Yasmin Rufo. BBC, November 21, 2023.

The North Hertfordshire Museum in the United Kingdom has reclassified a Roman emperor as a transgender woman and will refer to the ruler with she/her pronouns. The institution cited Ancient Roman writings claiming that Elagabalus, who held power between 218 and 222 CE before being assassinated at the age of 18, wore women’s clothing and preferred to be called “lady.”

 
While the official classification is new, scholars have long discussed Elagabalus’s sexual and gender identity, and the British Museum’s biography of the emperor states that she sought a gender-affirming surgery and frequently wore women’s garments. Depictions of the ruler in recent centuries have emphasized her feminine qualities, beauty, and opulence.

Elagabalus, who was born and lived in Syria before assuming the Roman throne at age 14, was also described as being sexually promiscuous. Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote that she had five wives, the last of whom was a man, and that she was “termed wife, mistress, and queen.” Some scholars have pointed out that Elagabalus’s contemporaries may have intentionally written discrediting text about the leader, who was ultimately overthrown and assassinated by high-ranking political leaders.

Zachary Herz, a Classics scholar and Elagabalus expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told Hyperallergic that he struggles with the concept of retrospectively assigning identity, adding that these texts were “almost certainly meant to discredit [Elagabalus]” and that the authors of these accounts were working for the statesman who overthrew Elagabalus in a coup. Although none of Elagabalus’s own writing survived, coins and portrait busts issued under the emperor’s reign are still around today. “The people making these coins and statues would have had a strong incentive to depict Elagabalus the way he wanted to be seen, so you can use these media to see what Elagabalus wanted to look like,” Herz said. “It happens that these coins and statues all depict Elagabalus as male, right down to the sad teenage-boy mustache.”

“On the other hand, if a trans person today reads about Elagabalus and feels less alone it’s hard to begrudge them that,” Herz continued. “My own personal take is that Elagabalus doesn’t show us ‘trans people in antiquity’ but does show us other ways of doing sex, gender, and sexuality.”

The North Herfordshire Museum owns one coin featuring Elagabalus’s face. A spokesperson for the institution told the BBC that it is “only polite and respectful to be sensitive to identifying pronouns for people in the past.”

UK Museum Reclassifies Roman Emperor as Trans Woman. By Elaine Velie. Hyperallergic, November 22, 2023. 

Elagabalus ruled as Roman emperor for just four years before being murdered in AD 222. He was still a teenager when he died. Despite his short reign, Elagabalus is counted among the most infamous of Roman emperors, often listed alongside Caligula and Nero.

His indiscretions, recorded by the Roman chroniclers, include: marrying a vestal virgin, the most chaste of Roman priestesses, twice; dressing up as a female prostitute and selling his body to other men; allowing himself to be penetrated (and by the bigger the penis the better); marrying a man, the charioteer Hierocles; and declaring himself not to be an emperor at all, but an empress: “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady”.

Based on this quote, North Hertfordshire Museum has reclassified Elagabalus as a transgender woman, and will now use the pronouns she/her. The museum has a single coin depicting Elagabalus, which is sometimes displayed along with other LGBTQ+ artefacts from their collection.

When writing about ancient subjects, from emperors to slaves, the first question historians have to ask is: how do we know what we do? Most of our written sources are fragmentary, incomplete and rarely contemporary, amounting to little more than gossip or hearsay at best, malign propaganda at worst. It’s rare that we have a figure’s own words to guide us.

Elagabalus is no exception. For Elagabalus, our principle source is the Roman historian Cassius Dio. A senator and politician before turning his hand to history, Dio was not only a contemporary of the emperor, but part of his regime.

However, Dio wrote his Roman history under the patronage of Elagabalus’ cousin, Severus Alexander. He took the throne following Elagabalus’s assassination. It was therefore in Dio’s interest to paint his patron’s predecessor in a bad light.

Sexual slurs and the Romans

Sexual slurs were always among the first insults thrown by Roman authors. Julius Caesar was accused of being penetrated by the Bithynian king so many times it earned him the nickname “the Queen of Bithynia”.

It was rumoured that both Mark Antony and Augustus had prostituted themselves for political gain earlier in their careers. And Nero was said to have worn the bridal veil to marry a man.

The Romans were no stranger to same-sex relationships, however. It would have been more unusual for a Roman emperor not to have slept with men. Roman sexual identities were complex constructs, revolving around notions such as status and power.

The gender of a person’s sexual partner did not come into it. Instead, sexual orientation was informed by sexual role: were they the dominant or passive partner?

To be the dominant partner, in business, politics and war as much as in the bedroom, was at the root of what made a Roman man a man. The Latin word we translate as “man”, vir, is the root of the modern word “virile”, and to the Romans there was nothing more manly than virility. To penetrate – whether men, women, or both – was seen as manly, and therefore as Roman.

 

Conversely, for a Roman man to be passive, to be penetrated, was seen as unmanly. The Romans thought such an act of penetration stripped a man of his virility, making him less than a man – akin to a woman or, even worse, a slave.

A man who enjoyed being penetrated was sometimes called a cinaedus, and in Latin literature cinaedi are often described as taking on the role of the woman in more than the bedroom, both dressing and acting effeminately. The implication is always that the way they dressed, acted and had sex was somehow subversive – distinctly un-Roman.

The word cinaedus appears in Latin literature almost exclusively as an insult — and it’s this literary role that is ascribed to Caesar, Mark Antony, Nero and Elagabalus. The power of the insult stems not from saying that these men had sex with men, but that they were penetrated by men.

It’s worth noting that these rules of Roman sexuality only applied to freeborn adult, male Roman citizens. They did not apply to women, slaves, freedmen, foreigners or even beardless youths. These people were all considered fair game to a virile Roman man, as uncomfortable a concept as that might be to us today.

Was Elagabalus transgender?

While the Romans clearly engaged in acts that we today consider gay or straight sex, they would not recognise the sexual orientations we associate with them. The ancient Romans did not share the same conceptions of sexuality that we do.

Many men’s sexual behaviour was what we would now term bisexual. Some lived in a manner we might describe as gender non-conforming. The concept of a person being transgender was not unknown. But an ancient Roman would not have self-identified as any of those things.

We cannot retroactively apply such modern, western identities to the inhabitants of the past and we must be careful not to misgender or misidentify them – especially if our only evidence for how they might have identified comes from hostile writers.

In attempting to fact check the sexual slurs and propaganda from the biographical facts, there is a danger that we lose sight of the fact that ancient Romans did recognise a huge variety of sexual orientations and gender identities – just as we do today. To attempt to crudely ascribe modern labels to ancient figures such as Elagabalus is not only to strip them of their agency, but also to oversimplify what is a wonderfully, fabulously broad and nuanced subject.

Museum classifies Roman emperor as trans – but modern labels oversimplify ancient gender identities. By Andrew Kenrick. The Conversation., November 28, 2023.

There are legendary dinner parties, and then there are the stories told about those thrown by the Roman emperor Elagabalus. The teenage ruler, who managed just four years as emperor before being assassinated at the age of 18 in AD222, would serve bizarre dishes like camels’ heels or flamingos’ brains to guests, stage themed nights when all the food was blue or green, or release lions or bears to roam among the diners.

On one famous occasion, according to a Roman historian, those present at a dinner were suffocated to death under an enormous quantity of rose petals; another saw guests seated on slowly deflating whoopee cushions – their first recorded use in western history.

 But did he really do all those things? Or perhaps we should be asking – did she? The obscure young emperor made headlines this week when it was reported that North Hertfordshire Museum in Hitchin has changed the pronouns it uses with reference to a coin of Elegabalus in its collection, and would now refer to the emperor as a trans woman using “she” and “her”.

It’s not such a stretch as it may sound. As well as throwing wild parties, Elagabalus was also said to have openly flouted contemporary gender roles. The emperor is said to have also dressed as a female sex worker, “married” a male slave and acted as his “wife”, asked to be referred to as “lady” rather than “lord” and even, according to one account, begged to have a surgical vagina made by a physician.

The stories led Keith Hoskins, executive member for arts at North Herts council, to say in a statement: “Elagabalus most definitely preferred the she pronoun, and as such this is something we reflect when discussing her in contemporary times … It is only polite and respectful.

“We know that Elagabalus identified as a woman and was explicit about which pronouns to use, which shows that pronouns are not a new thing.”

But do we know that? Thanks to a growing awareness of more complex ideas of gender in history, and a desire to reject historical prejudices, Elagabalus has been reclaimed in recent decades as a genderqueer icon.

However, many historians disagree that the evidence is as unambiguous as the museum says. Mary Beard, formerly professor of classics at Cambridge University, directed followers on X to her latest book, titled Emperor of Rome, which opens with a lengthy discussion of the “tall stories” told about Elagabalus.

The accounts of sexual unconventionality (and extravagant cruelty) largely originate with hostile historians who wanted to win the favour of Elegabalus’s successor, Severus Alexander, and so portrayed the emperor in the worst light possible, she says. “How seriously should we treat them? Not very is the usual answer,” Beard writes, calling the stories “untruths and flagrant exaggerations”.

The Romans may not have shared current understandings of trans identity, but several of the contested accounts about Elagabalus feel remarkably modern, points out Zachary Herz, assistant professor of classics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who has written about how we should approach the story of Elagabalus in the context of queer theory.

Asserting that Elagabalus requested female pronouns is an “astonishingly close translation” of a story written by the third-century historian Cassius Dio, says Herz. “Elagabalus is literally saying, ‘Don’t call me this word that ends in the masculine ending, call me this word that ends in the feminine.’ So it’s unbelievably close to correcting someone’s pronouns.”

The problem, as he sees it, is that “I just don’t think it really happened.” “The quote-unquote biographies” written under Elagabalus’s successor are “hit pieces”, he says. “I would be inclined to read [them] as basically fictional.”

 Martijn Icks, a lecturer in classics at the university of Amsterdam and author of a book about Elagabalus’s life and posthumous reputation, agrees that the stories about the emperor should be taken with “a large pinch of salt”. The same “effeminacy narrative” that has made Elagabalus a queer icon “was meant to character assassinate the Emperor, to show that he was completely unsuitable to occupy this position,” he says, adding that other so-called “bad emperors” including Nero and Caligula were described in very similar terms.

Racial prejudice also played a part, says Icks: before coming to Rome to rule it, Elagabalus was a priest in an obscure cult in Syria that venerated a black stone meteorite – a culture that would have been deeply strange to the Romans.

“And the stereotype that Romans had of Syrians … is that they were very effeminate and not real men like the Romans were.”

Some facts about Elagabalus’s biography can be asserted with confidence, says Herz, but in truth, comparatively few. And so while he says he considers it “perfectly justifiable” if his students use “they/them” to refer to the emperor (“if we don’t know a person’s gender, it’s a perfectly polite thing to use”), he believes “he” and “him” more accurately reflect the emperor’s own wishes.

“We don’t know what Elagabalus was like. We don’t know how Elagabalus saw himself. But we have portraits and coins that all look male, that portray him with male facial hair, male features and in garments that would have been understood as male within Elagabalus’s culture – including the coin that the museum has at the centre of its display.”

While “there is a long history of people who have been expected to be good at being a man or being a woman and have had a hard time with that”, says Herz, “I worry that when we tell our students they should care about Elagabalus because she’s trans or because they’re non-binary – because they fit a modern category that our students use for themselves – we’re depriving them of the richness of history.”

 

Was Roman emperor Elagabalus really trans – and does it really matter? By  Esther Addley.  The Guardian, November 24, 2023.

His reputation has suffered at the pens of historians for centuries – a suspected revisionist attempt to hide the fact that a powerful Roman Emperor was among the first persons in history to seek a sex reassignment surgery. Emperor Elagabalus (or Heliogabalus) came from a prominent Arab family in present-day Syria, where he served as head priest of the sun god Helios. He came to power at fourteen years old, and according to historical records, Elagabalus quickly developed a reputation for extreme eccentricity, decadence, zealotry, and sexual promiscuity. Those biases have persisted through history up until the present day.

An 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon, wrote that Elagabalus “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury.” Germany’s leading historian of Ancient Rome, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, said that “the name Elagabalus is branded in history above all others” because of his “unspeakably disgusting life.” An example of a modern historian’s assessment is Adrian Goldsworthy’s view that: “Elagabalus was not a tyrant, but […] incompetent, probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had.” Only archaeologist Warwick Ball describes Elagabalus as “innovative” and “a tragic enigma lost behind centuries of prejudice.”

When Elagabalus was alive, a Roman statesman who kept close tabs on the lives of his emperors. In his writings, Cassius Dio notably referred to Elagabalus by feminine pronouns and states that the emperor wanted to marry a former male slave and charioteer named Hierocles. Dio stated that Elagabalus delighted in being called Hierocles’s mistress, wife, and queen. Officially, Elagabalus was married five times (and twice to the same woman) all before he was 18, although there were rumours he also married a man named Zoticus, an athlete from Smyrna.

During his reign, women were first allowed into the senate, and his mother and grandmother both received senatorial titles. They’re found on many coins and inscriptions, a rare honor for Roman women. This establishment of a “women’s senate” would be considered by his contemporaries as one of the many examples of Elagabalus’s “moral corruption”.

According to Dio, the Emperor wore makeup and wigs and preferred to be addresses as “lady” instead of “lord”. It was also recorded that Elgabalus offered significant payments to any doctor who could give him the equivalent of a woman’s genitalia by means of a surgical incision. It is this detail that convinces some scholars to see Elagabalus as an early transgender figure.

In Ancient Rome, cross-dressing was practiced during Saturnalia, an ancient pagan festival, but was forbidden outside that rite, suggesting that by making such practices unacceptable outside that rite, gender identities had been firmly established. Romans also imposed it as a punishment, ordering deserters to wear female clothes for three days before execution.

Modern Historian Eric Varner notes, “Elagabalus is also alleged to have appeared as Venus and to have epilated his entire body. Recurrent charges of effeminacy were levelled against him, and a painted portrait was sent to the capital prior to the young emperor’s arrival in order to accustom the inhabitants of Rome to his exotic appearance”.

Further historical accounts claim that Elagabalus was an avid prankster. At banquets he would reportedly serve peas with gold, lentils with onyx, beans with amber, as well as sprinkling pearls in lieu of pepper, and at the end of the feast, he would bring out lions and leopards, panicking the invitees, who were unaware they were tamed. The origin of the whoopee cushion is said to be traced back to the Roman emperor, who regularly pulled the practical joke at his aristocratic dinner parties. Elagabalus was a teenager, after all.

His eccentricities (namely his relationship with Hierocles) lost Elagabalus his support from the soldiers of the Praetorian Guard. According to Augustan history, the hard-partying emperor lost the support of his courtiers too, who grew weary of his decadence, zealotry, and sexual promiscuity. Dio also claimed that Elagabalus prostituted himself in taverns and brothels. Allegedly, when finances of the Roman Empire were in dire straits, he proposed to prostitute himself for an insanely high price.

Eventually, Elagabalus’s grandmother, Julia Maesa, decided that he and his mother were to be replaced by her other grandson, a then fifteen-year-old Severus Alexander. Elagabalus and Alexander ruled together for about a year until Elagabalus realised the Praetorian Guard preferred his cousin over him. At this realization, Elagabalus supposedly organised several attempts to assassinate Alexander after the Senate refused to strip his cousin of his title. The Praetorians then mutinied and killed Elagabalus instead. After slaughtering his minions and tearing out their vital organs, they then fell upon Elagabalus as he hid cowering in a latrine. They dragged his body through the streets by a hook and attempted to stuff it into a sewer. When it proved too big, they threw him into the River Tiber.

 This was a teenage boy, struggling with hormones, discovering his sexuality, thrown into a lifestyle which offered him everything he wanted – complete power and wealth, with no hint of the consequences for acting upon his desires – and then given the ultimate punishment for taking it.

After Elagabalus’s assassination, his supporters (including Hierocles) were killed or deposed; his religious edicts were reversed; women were re-barred from attending Senate meetings and he was erased from the public record. In fact, one of his larger than life statues (portraying Elagabalus as Hercules) was re-carved with Alexander’s heteronormative face. This practice is commonly referred to as damnatio memoriae, and it’s reserved for those who were disgraced. It also might have scrubbed one of the first transgendered icons from the record.

Such a vast propaganda campaign was set up to besmirch Elagabalus following his death, that it’s hard to know what is and isn’t true about him. The only surviving evidence we have of his brief life was written by people with ample motivation to discredit and villify him. Was Elagabalus an awful emperor, or had Ancient Rome already become a vehemently transphobic and homophobic society? In his book, Transcending Gender: Assimilation, Identity, and Roman Imperial Portraits, Eric R. Varner says that it was directly after Elagabalus requested the sex reassignment surgery that he was deposed, implying that the assassination could have likely been one of the earliest recorded hate crimes in history, disguised as the coup of an incompetent emperor. Similarly condemned emperors like Domitian, Commodus were all criticised for receptive homosexual behavior, prostitution, feminine interest in exotic clothing, and excessive attention to hair care. It’s also just as likely however, that Elagabalus wasn’t trans, and that his enemies were exploiting roman ideas of gender to suggest that Elagabalus was so terrible at his job that he couldn’t possibly be of the male gender. For these reasons of historical uncertainty, we were unsure of the appropriate pronouns for this article.

Though the term transgender might be somewhat recent to the English language, transgendered people were present in society as early as Ancient Egypt, which had noted third gender categories. In the 3000 year-old Egyptian story, Tale of Two Brothers, Bata removes his penis and tells his wife “I am a woman just like you”; one modern scholar called him temporarily “transgendered”. Mut, Sekhmet and other goddesses are sometimes represented androgynously, with erect penises. Sumerian and Akkadian texts from 4500 years ago document transgender or transvestite priests known as gala and by other names, and in Ancient Rome too, there were galli priests who wore feminine clothes, referred to themselves as women, often castrated themselves, and have been seen as early transgender figures.

Elagabalus is ranked by history among the worst and most degenerate emperors – (or empresses) – but as Out History notes, “Her reported atrocities and crimes however almost entirely fall under the categories of upsetting the gender, cultural and religious norms of Roman society”. What good the teenage ruler did is no doubt buried in academic slander, but might it be time for Elagabalus’s story to be retold from a new perspective? It’s about time Hollywood made a new sword-and-sandals biopic. Someone get Ridley Scott on the phone.

History Conveniently Forgot to Tell us about the Transgender Roman Emperor.  By Mary Kay McBrayer.  Messy Nessy   ,July 26, 2021. 

For LGBTQIA+ history month, recent Ancient History graduate Ollie Burns explores the life of one individual who may confuse what we know about gender non-conformity in the ancient world.

*Although the histories written in antiquity refer to Elagabalus unanimously as ‘he/him’, examination of these sources suggest very strongly that the emperor did not identify as a male, and so for the purpose of this article I have used the pronouns ‘they/them’.

 Elagabalus is not an emperor whose name is particularly well-known outside of academic circles, yet their reign and life is one of the most fascinating cases from Rome’s Imperial period. Elagabalus was born Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus in 204 AD, most likely in the Roman province of Syria. Their father was an equestrian, who would later be admitted into the Roman Senate, and their mother, Julia Soaemias, was the cousin of Emperor Caracalla (r. 198 – 217). As part of the Syrian nobility, Elagabalus’ family held hereditary rights to the priesthood of the sun god Elagabal, whom Elagabalus served as high priest. This is where the name ‘Elagabalus’ derives. After the assassination of Caracalla in 217, the Praetorian Prefect Macrinus took imperial power, so as relatives of Caracalla, Elagabalus and their family were exiled. However Macrinus’ reign was highly unstable, and by 218 he had been executed. Consequently, Elgabalus was elevated to the Imperial throne at just 14 years old, and the Senate accepted that they be recognised as Caracalla’s son, boosting the legitimacy of their rule.

Elagabalus’ reign was short and controversial. They installed Elagabal as the new head of the Roman pantheon, displacing Jupiter. The idea of a foreign god being worshipped ahead of Jupiter was shocking to much of the Roman population. They took this even further when they ordered the removal of Rome’s most sacred relics (such as The Fire of Vesta) and had them placed at the Elagabalium, an enormous temple dedicated to Elagabal built on the Palatine Hill. This essentially made it impossible for Romans to worship any god without also honouring Elagabal. Further religious controversy was stirred up when Elagabalus married Aquilia Severa, a Vestal Virgin; Roman law very strictly stated that all Vestal’s had to remain chaste, and any found to have engaged in sexual intercourse were liable to be buried alive, so to many, this marriage was unacceptable. This brings us on to the subject of Elagabalus’ sexuality and gender identity.

Based on the sources we have, it is difficult to ascertain Elagabalus’ sexual orientation for certain; it is reported by Cassius Dio that Elagabalus married five times, and that they had numerous extra-marital sexual encounters with other women. The following is a passage from Book 80 of Dio’s Roman History:

‘’ He married many women, and had intercourse with even more without any legal sanction; yet it was not that he had any need of them himself, but simply that he wanted to imitate their actions when he should lie with his lovers and wanted to get accomplices in his wantonness by associating with them indiscriminately. He used his body both for doing and allowing many strange things, which no one could endure to tell or hear of; but his most conspicuous acts, which it would be impossible to conceal, were the following. He would go to the taverns by night, wearing a wig, and there ply the trade of a female huckster. He frequented the notorious brothels, drove out the prostitutes, and played the prostitute himself. Finally, he set aside a room in the palace and there committed his indecencies, always standing nude at the door of the room, as the harlots do, and shaking the curtain which hung from gold rings, while in a soft and melting voice he solicited the passers-by.”

This particular extract suggests that while Elagabalus married and indeed had sex with women, this was only so that they could learn how women acted, in order to replicate this with male partners, which would imply that they were homosexual. In terms of gender identity, Elagabalus’ habit of playing a female prostitute to solicit men shows a rejection of traditional Roman male identity, wherein men (especially those of rank) were seen as weak and effeminate if they allowed themselves to be penetrated by other men. Elagabalus was also known to have married a man, the charioteer and former slave Hierocles, and they loved being referred to as Hierocles’ wife or mistress. The emperor is also reported to have frequently worn wigs and makeup, preferred to be called ‘domina’ (lady) over ‘dominus’ (lord), and even offered vast sums of money to any physician who could give them a vagina. In one particular anecdote, Dio wrote that Elagabalus asked one of the Praetorian Prefects what the most painful method of removing their male genitals would be, and offered the man money to do it. It is because of reportings such as these that Elagabalus is believed by some modern historians to have been transgender, as it seems clear that they preferred being seen as a woman, and even sought to physically become one, however the extent to which Dio’s writings can be trusted is also a cause for debate. Dio wrote most of his Roman History after Elagabalus was already dead and disgraced, and it is common in Roman histories to see unpopular emperors slandered and have aspects of their reign negatively exaggerated to fit the current regime’s status quo. To that end, Elagabalus is referred to as ‘A tragic enigma lost behind centuries of prejudice’ by historian Warwick Ball.

Elagabalus’s religious policies and general eccentricities severely alienated the Praetorian Guard. Fearing a coup, Elagabalus’ grandmother arranged for her other grandson and Elagabalus’ cousin, Severus Alexander to take imperial power in 222. The Praetorian Guard murdered Elagabalus and their mother, decapitated their bodies, and threw them in the River Tiber. Elagabalus was just 18.

LGBTQIA+ History Month – Elagabalus, The Trans Emperor of Rome? – Ollie Burns. By Abigail Hudson. University of Birmingham blog, February 18, 2021.

This week’s entry: Elagabalus

What it’s about: Someone who’s been singled out as the most colorful and controversial of all of the Roman emperors, which is really saying something. Only 14 when he took the throne, Elagabalus was unprepared to rule, “probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had,” in the opinion of historian Adrian Goldsworthy. He seems to have spent most of his brief reign challenging Rome’s sexual mores, or as onetime member of Parliament Edward Gibbon put it, he “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury.”

Biggest controversy: Whatever Elagabalus’ failings as chief executive, it’s always the sex scandals that grab the headlines, even 1,800 years later. The historical record isn’t always clear, given a lot of the material here is salacious gossip. But it seems Elagabalus married and divorced five women in as many years. One of those, Annia Aurelia Faustina, was a descendent of the original Marcus Aurelius, and was conveniently single after Elagabalus had her husband executed. Another wife, Aquilia Severa, was a Vestal Virgin. Marrying someone who had taken a holy vow of chastity was a shocking breach of tradition, but Elagabalus claimed the union would produce “godlike children.” And those are just the women he married. Elagabalus also had a long-term relationship with his chariot driver, Hierocles, who Elagabalus called his husband, and at least one source has him marrying a male athlete named Aurelius Zoticus.

Elagabalus was also a prostitute, working in taverns, brothels, and even the palace. He bragged that he out-earned other prostitutes, and according to later Roman historian Cassius Dio, “he had numerous agents who sought out those who could best please him by their foulness.” In and out of the brothel, Elagabalus would “paint his eyes, depilate his body hair and wear wigs” to appear more feminine, and preferred to be called a lady and not a lord. Cassius Dio wrote that “Elagabalus delighted in being called Hierocles’ mistress, wife, and queen.” He also “offered vast sums to any physician who could provide him with a vagina,” which may have made Elagabalus the first person on record as seeking out gender-reassignment surgery.

(A note on pronouns: While it’s possible Elagabalus was a trans woman, we only have speculation based on centuries-old gossip to go on, so absent stronger evidence one way or the other, we’ll continue to use the emperor’s assigned-at-birth gender, as the Wikipedia article does.)

Strangest fact: His name wasn’t Elagabalus. Like the Pope, the emperor often assumed a new name upon taking the throne; Elagabalus’ was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus. His given name was likely Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus, although the historical record doesn’t seem sure. The name Elagabalus came from a Syrian sun god who was folded into the Roman pantheon. Our emperor was a priest of Elagabalus as a child, and as emperor replaced Jupiter with Elagabalus as the head of the pantheon of gods (to much consternation from the Roman faithful), and presided over religious ceremonies in his honor. Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus was only referred to as Elagabalus after his death, most likely to differentiate him from Caracalla, three emperors previous, who also went by those same four names.

Thing we were happiest to learn: Women’s rights took a small step forward under Elagabalus. Powerful women in Rome could usually only assert power indirectly, and Elagabalus was put in power through his grandmother’s influence. When Caracalla was assassinated, he was replaced by the head of the Praetorian Guard, Marcus Opellius Macrinus, but Caracallas’ aunt (and Elagabalus’ grandmother), Julia Maesa, convinced the army’s Third Legion to revolt and put her grandson on the throne at age 14. Once in power, Elagabalus gave senatorial titles to both his mother and grandmother (women had previously never been allowed in the Senate chamber), and both can be found on Roman coins, rare for women in any era of Rome.

Thing we were unhappiest to learn: Elagabalus’ reign didn’t last. After less than five scandalous years, Elagabalus had exhausted the patience of the real power behind the throne. The Praetorian Guard disapproved of his sexual antics, particularly his relationship with his chariot-driver husband Hierocles, while Maesa realized her grandson had no popular support and hung both him and her daughter out to dry.

Maesa pushed Elagabalus to appoint his cousin, Severus Alexander, as his heir and co-consul. Elagabalus quickly realized the Praetorians preferred Alexander, and after several failed assassination attempts, Elagabalus had to be content to strip his cousin of his titles and revoke his citizenship. The Praetorian Guard demanded to see the two cousins in their camp. When they, along with Elagabalus’ mother, appeared, the Praetorians cheered Alexander and ignored the emperor. Enraged, Elagabalus ordered the arrest and execution of the insubordinate soldiers. Instead, the guards killed him and his mother. We return to Cassius Dio: “[T]heir heads were cut off and their bodies, after being stripped naked, were first dragged all over the city, and then the mother’s body was cast aside somewhere or other, while his was thrown into the Tiber.” Hierocles and several of Elagabalus’ other associates were killed soon after.

 

Also noteworthy: Some more recent historians question the narrative of Elagabalus as an oversexed incompetent. After his death, Elagabalus suffered damnatio memoriae—his name was erased from public records, and statues of him were re-carved to resemble Severus Alexander. As a result, much of what was written about Elagabalus came from his enemies, and has therefore come under question. Martijn Icks’ 2008 book Images Of Elagabalus argues that it was Elagabalus upending the Roman religion, not his sexual exploits, that turned the Roman elites against him. Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado’s The Emperor Elagabalus: Fact Or Fiction? from the same year suggests he was merely a pawn in his grandmother’s power struggles, and the more salacious stories were part of a campaign of character assassination, which quickly followed his more literal assassination.

Further down the Wormhole: We mention Cassius Dio several times, because as historians go, he’s the closest thing we have to a primary source on Elagabalus. Cassius Dio was his contemporary, and while he wasn’t in Rome during much of the young emperor’s reign, he had easy access to eyewitness accounts. He also served as consul under Severus Alexander, so his accounts may contain a bit of bias, but in general, Dio is a terrific source, as his book Roman History spans nearly a thousand years, starting with the arrival of Aeneas in Italy. A hero of the Trojan War (second cousin to Hector and Paris) mentioned in The Iliad, Aeneas is a revered figure in both Greek and Roman mythology.

While Aeneas may have been an historical figure, most of the stories about him are mythological—Aphrodite and Apollo frequently intervene on his behalf, and Poseidon rescues him after an assault by Achilles. The Iliad’s main character, and the greatest of Greece’s warriors, Achilles also blurs myth and history, and as with Aeneas, myth wins out, as Achilles is most famous for his heel—his only vulnerable spot, after being dipped in the River Styx and granted magical invulnerability. The Iliad refers to Achilles as “the brightest star in the sky.” That star would be Sirius, visible from almost everywhere in the world, apart from the very northernmost latitudes. We’ll beat the summer heat by visiting the list of northernmost settlements next week.

This teenage Roman emperor may have been the earliest recorded trans woman. By Mike Vago. The A.V. Club, June 28, 2020. 

Elagabalus’ name is not quite as notorious as that of Nero and Caligula, or even Commodus, recently featured as the villain in Russell Crowe’s Gladiator. Like the three emperors mentioned above, Elagabalus has consistently been ranked among the worst and most depraved holders of the Imperial honor. Her reported atrocities and crimes however almost entirely fall under the categories of upsetting the gender, cultural and religious norms of Roman society. In this biography I will briefly narrate her life and evaluate what her contemporaries found so shocking about her. I will also show how examining her life and career can teach us much about the intersections of cultural conflict in ancient times and the lavish amount of attention transgender phenomenon have received since at least as long as history was recorded.

Name and Pronouns

First a note on name and pronouns: Historical sources uniformly refer to Elagabalus with male pronouns. The emperor is best known under this title (which is grammatically masculine) and she was assigned male at birth. I have decided to use female pronouns because, based on the evidence, this choice is just as valid as male pronouns. The three extant sources from antiquity, while they do contradict each other, still broadly concur that the sovereign did have very strong manifestations of cross-gender behavior. Telling aspects such as the story related by Dio Cassius that Elagabalus offered half the empire to the surgeon that would correct her genitalia seem to go far beyond merely scandalizing an effeminate monarch and more towards showing the desperation a transgender person might well feel in an age long before any methods were found to modify her body according to her desires.

Background

Elagabalus was born in the year 203 AD, and her brief reign occurred in the years 218-222 at the end of which she was killed. Well known through the ages, Elagabalus lived a very short but tumultuous life. Related to the family of Septimius Severus, Elagabalus was born into the highest level of privilege in Ancient Rome.

Elagabalus was inducted to the hereditary priesthood of the solar deity El Gabal, who was worshipped in her native city as the supreme deity. In a different approach to the Greeks and Romans who erected statues of their deities in their temples, El Gabal was worshiped in the form of a meteoric black stone. Elaborate ceremonies would mark this stone’s entry and brief residence in Rome.

Septimius Severus was a Roman general of North African origin who wrested the supreme power after the period of chaos that ensued from Commodus’ death (the son of one of the last of the “Five Good Emperors,” Marcus Aurelius). While Severus restored order to Rome, his stern and highly militaristic dictatorship undermined traditional Roman institutions (such as the Senate). Severus’ son, Caracalla was a ruthless tyrant, succeeding his father along with his brother Geta. The cleverly ruthless Caracalla killed the equally ruthless but clumsier Geta. Caracalla continued the militaristic dictatorship of Septimius Severus but was known for more erratic behavior. His most famous legal act was the widening of Roman citizenship to include virtually all free inhabitants of the Empire. This act helped further weaken the Roman tradition by weakening cultural and social distinctions. While this act seems appealing to modern sensibilities, it seems to have simply been a brazen ploy to increase tax revenues. Caracalla was killed by his soldiers in a plot, and the usurper Marcrinus (of commoner descent) took the throne for a brief period. The emergence of the military as the only legitimate source of power and the weakening of Roman tradition both became especially present in the Severan era and help us understand the context of Elagabalus’ brief reign.

Marcrinus’ welcome was quickly worn out when he attempted to reform the pay of the Roman legions to assist the solvency of the Empire. His attempted fiscal reforms angered the soldiers who, after overthrowing Caracalla, now missed that Emperor’s generous ways. The atmosphere all over Rome became very tense. Enter Julia Mamaea, the sister-in-law of Septimius Severus. She claimed that Elagabalus, the young child-priest, was the illegitimate son of Caracalla and this claim cemented that young person’s rise to the throne.

What makes Elagabalus rise to fame and power unusual was that the soldiers who had a chance to see her were entranced by her beauty as she danced ceremonies to El Gabal. All the ancient authors describe her sensuous robes that she wore while performing priestly duties. The fact that young boys could be sexually objectified and sexualized as much as women in the Classical world no doubt adds to Elagabalus’ ability to woo soldiers by dancing in luxurious robes and elaborate makeup rather than gain their respect with military feats in armor and sword.

Skilled generals and soldiers supported Elagabalus so Marcrinus’ forces were quickly defeated and the way was cleared for Elagabalus to reign.

Reign

The young Empress (for that is what she wanted to call herself) wasn’t used to the exercise of power. All the ancient sources agree that she made irresponsible appointments to the highest offices of government and religion. Herodian and the Historia Augusta salaciously assert that Elagabalus was in the habit of appointing ministers on account of the length of their penises.

The reign witnessed many actions that caused shock and offense to conservative Romans. Elagabalus married a vestal virgin, claiming, according to Herodian, that the priestly marriage would create divine children. Vestals’ chastity was very important to Roman religious practice and the punishment for violating chastity used to be execution by live burial. This marriage was thus an unprecedented violation akin to desecrating the Eucharist for observant Roman Catholics. Furthermore Elagabalus arranged a marriage between her deity El Gabal and Urania the goddess most worshiped in Carthage, which was the most ancient and hated enemy of Rome. In order to participate in her administration and gain Imperial favor, senators and other Roman dignitaries were forced to dress in un-Roman ways and to participate in elaborate sacrifices and other ceremonies.

The topic of Elagabalus’ genitalia comes up frequently. One way Greeks and Romans distinguished themselves from the near Eastern civilizations was that they did not practice and abhorred circumcision. The ancient sources claim that Elagabalus was circumcised as part of the requirements for the priestly profession and the later Historia Augusta even claims that her penis was infibulated (meaning that the head of the penis was divided in two.) Castration, according to Dio Cassius, was one of Elagabalus’ fondest desires, not out of religion but out of “effeminacy.” This last statement seems to very strongly indicate a condition that would today be called transsexualism.

The only symbols of Elagabalus reign that survive are precious metal coins and a very few examples of statuary. Many of the coins do indeed show the religious changes: displaying the meteoric stone of El Gabal and calling for that deity’s blessings. The statuary on the other hand shows a young man with hair cut in classic Roman style and thus seems designed to placate those of traditional feelings as it showed the young ruler as being similar in appearance to Caracalla and other Roman emperors. Some historians use this lack of archeological evidence to claim that Elagabalus cross gender behavior was greatly exaggerated or even simply made up to smear her. I think it is just as plausible that the fact that only gender normative visual records of Elagabalus survive shows that her sexual and gender variance was disapproved of and often hidden and can lead one to suppose that only images more respectable to Ancient Roman values were preserved, while evidence of cross gender behavior was effaced.

As Elagabalus’ standing decreased in the eyes of powerful Romans, she was forced to adopt her cousin Severus Alexander as a “son” and successor. Alexander was only four years younger! Meticulous care was taken to ensure that this boy was not corrupted by his eccentric cousin and was instead carefully reared according to the most conservative Greco-Roman values. Understanding quickly that Alexander was a threat, Elagabalus sought to remove him but the ploy failed and when coming to appear before the camp of the Praetorian guards, Elagabalus was murdered along with her mother. Their mutilated bodies were carried through the streets and then thrown into the Tiber as if to wash away the upset that came upon the Roman world.

Legacy

After Elagabalus’ reign, women were never allowed to enter the building where the Senate was convened. Her establishment of a “women’s senate” was considered one of the many examples of Elagabalus’ depravity. The fact that women like her grandmother, mother, and aunt wielded significant power and influence was also condemned by writers with deep patriarchal values. Care was taken to erase Elagabalus from the historical record like other Roman emperors that were considered tyrants in a process called damnatio memoriae. Elagabalus was used by subsequent historians, Roman and post-Roman, as an example of one of the worst rulers ever.

Transgender behavior existed in Rome before and after Elagabalus. Transgender practice was tolerated and even sometimes respected by the Roman populace when it was practiced by the male-born priestesses of Cybele, known as the Gallae. These women would celebrate a taurobolium which (originally meant to be the castration of a bull) was a castration ceremony where someone formally defined as male would lose their genitalia, bleed like in menstruation or childbirth, and then subsequently wear women’s clothing and go by female names. Like other cultural practices this was a highly ritualistic and mystical understanding of gender identity. Rome was a vast empire and culturally diverse empire and in some respects it can be said a marketplace of religions existed. A male-born person with strong cross gender identification could potentially seek out the local Gallae temple to Cybele and have herself castrated, both to please her goddess and also perhaps to fix a deep inadequate feeling toward her own anatomy.

 

The Gallae however, existed somewhat on the periphery of Roman society. While Roman polytheism greatly revered the Goddess Cybele as a very important goddess, her worship was not considered Roman and was not integrated with traditional Roman practice. For a brief span that didn’t exceed four years, however, a radical transgender and religious experiment was imposed on the Roman world by a passionate young person known as Elagabalus. It is a mistake to suppose that Elagabalus had goals akin to contemporary understandings of feminism and gender theory: Elagabalus was a product of her own time and place and the social structures in force at the time ensured her rise to power. Transgender people and phenomena have always existed but for once a person of strong gender variance caused a deep upset in an ancient culture.

 

Part of : Challenging Gender Boundaries: A Trans Biography Project by Students of Catherine Jacquet. A collection of biographies written by the students in Catherine Jacquet's Fall 2012 class at the University of Illinois, Chicago. The class was titled "Gender Non-Conformity in Historical Perspective."

A Brief Biography of Elagabalus: the transgender ruler of Rome. By Alexis Mijatovic.OutHistory, 2012. 

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.