Irving Finkel, Curator of the British Museum, Discovers What May Be the World’s Earliest Depiction of a Ghost

 










At the back​ of the British Museum is a cavernous room lined with hundreds of cased wooden drawers supported by a central architrave. Each drawer contains tens of glass-topped boxes of various sizes with neat, typewritten labels. The boxes contain clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, around 130,000 of them, inscribed in cuneiform, many broken and eroded. An agricultural boom at the end of the fourth millennium bce led the Sumerians to create the first written records, in order to help them keep track of various commodities. These early signs, traced in wet clay with the sharpened end of a reed stylus, looked a lot like the things they represented: a bowl for food or rations, a jug for beer and so on. Over time, the scribes realised that it was quicker to impress than to incise signs into clay, and the resulting script, cuneiform, gets its English name from the characteristic wedges (cuneus in Latin).
 
The earliest written recipes, laundry receipts, peace treaties, poetry, representations of pi and lullabies are inscribed in cuneiform. Six thousand years ago, people living in present-day Iraq washed their clothes and did maths and shared songs and baked bread. They also saw ghosts. In his new book, The First Ghosts, Irving Finkel, the curator in charge of the BM’s clay tablets (and the reason I dropped law to study cuneiform), discusses what these and other artefacts excavated from Mesopotamia tell us about supernatural apparitions and the ways they populated everyday life. The clay tablets, he writes, preserve ‘abundant and surprising details’ in the form of omens, spells, myths, royal propaganda and letters, ‘almost as if they anticipated our interest’.
 
Burial sites from across the ancient world attest to what Finkel describes as ‘the deep-seated conception that some part of a person does not vanish for ever’. The first recorded use of a word to describe a spirit that is separate from, and survives, the human body is a tablet dated to the early third millennium bce, which is inscribed with the cuneiform character for the Sumerian word for ‘ghost’, gidim (although it originated as the script for Sumerian, cuneiform was adapted for a number of other ancient languages, including Akkadian and Hittite). Inhabitants of Mesopotamia were usually interred after death. The Royal Cemetery at Ur, uncovered during excavations in the 1920s, housed sixteen royal tombs that date from roughly the same period as the gidim tablet. The aristocracy of Ur entered the afterlife with crowns, chariots, helmets, harps and daggers. Some of them left this world with an entourage: archaeologists discovered what they described as a ‘great death pit’ adjacent to one tomb, containing the remains of 74 people, including adolescents. One skull from the pit that underwent a CT scan was identified as that of a woman in her late teens or early twenties: the last thing she felt would have been the blunt force of something like a battle-axe.
 
Not every Mesopotamian was buried in such style. Graves have also been discovered beneath and within the walls of family homes, allowing the deceased to be fed and watered by their surviving relatives (ideally by the eldest son), who were also required to recite their names regularly. Sometimes people buried their relatives in coffins shaped like bronze bathtubs, or in large jars. Others wrapped the corpse in reed matting or covered it with broken pieces of pottery before burying it in a pit. Even unborn babies, some barely beyond twenty weeks of gestation, were given a final resting place. Finkel cites a Sumerian poem about Gilgamesh: ‘Did you see my little stillborn children who never knew existence?’ Gilgamesh asks the ghost of his companion, Enkidu. ‘I saw them,’ Enkidu replies. ‘They play at a table of gold and silver, laden with honey and ghee.’
 
Those who went unhappily to their graves or who remained unburied, as well as those whose tombs were untended (or insufficiently tended), became restless ghosts. The spirits that rose from the dead were as varied as their living counterparts: there were ghosts of the very young, of women who died in childbirth and those who died as virgins, of wet nurses, soldiers, slaves. Sometimes they were described according to the way they met their end – by drowning in a river, burning to death, falling off a roof or being slain in war. They retained the characters of the people they had once been, from mild-mannered to malicious. Like more recent depictions of ghosts, the Mesopotamian accounts make clear just how unpleasant these spirits could be. A 99-line spell, which belongs to a much larger work on expelling demons, describes ‘exactly what it was like to be visited by an unknown, unidentified ghost of the roaming, malicious hooligan type’. These ghosts ‘flicker like flame’ and ‘flash like lightning’, they cross the thresholds of houses and descend over the rooftops. They frighten, snarl at and otherwise torment the ‘sick person’. They hide in a house’s holes and crevices, they slither, they stalk people, they roam the streets and steppe.
 
The spirits of the restless dead also caused medical havoc. They formed part of a complex explanatory system for illness, which included deities, demons and even witchcraft alongside causes we would still recognise – a snake bite or the sun’s heat. Some ghosts entered the body through the ear. The word for ‘ghost’ could be written in several ways that exploited the many meanings layered onto each cuneiform sign. As Finkel writes, one sign combined the signs for ‘open’ and ‘ear’, giving a literal reading of ‘ear-opener’. Ghosts, therefore, could cause roaring or ringing ears as well as all manner of medical misery, from madness and headaches to flatulence, fever, chills and depression. Some cuneiform texts that describe ghost-induced illness detail the way the now ghost died, and sometimes the manner of death corresponds to the symptoms the ghost causes: the ghost of a person who drowned, for example, caused shortness of breath in the haunted person, ‘like one who has just come up from the water’.
 
A rich tradition of ghostbusting emerged in response to the many troubles caused by ghosts in ancient Mesopotamia. Those who could afford it turned to scholars known as the ashipu, whose accepted English translation of ‘exorcist’ doesn’t quite capture their professional domain. Usually men (though there are sporadic references to women exorcists, for instance in the Maqlû series of incantations against witchcraft), these scholars spent years mastering medical knowledge and treatment, including what we might call ‘magical’ remedies. Medicine in Ancient Assur by the Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll follows the career of one such exorcist, Kisir-Ashur.* By piecing together more than seventy texts found in a private library in the city of Ashur, Arbøll has mapped out Kisir-Ashur’s training, which included anatomy, diagnostics, paediatrics, veterinary medicine and magic. As a trainee, with the help of his father, he learned practical skills that ranged from the use of bandages and emetics to spells and rituals. In one instruction manual, written in the summer of 658 bce, Kisir-Ashur describes how to treat a patient suffering from ghost-induced confusion. After sweeping the ground and sprinkling it with purified water, setting up an incense burner and pouring a libation of beer, the exorcist must make a figurine of the confusion-causing ghost from clay, tallow and wax, which the patient then holds up to the sun god while reciting a long incantation.
 
The medical and magical instruments at the exorcists’ disposal were as varied as their patients’ ailments. Someone troubled by visions of dead people might be told to wear a leather pouch filled with various plants and a soiled rag, or other noxious substances such as sulphur or fish oil (these were also useful in repelling unwanted living visitors). Another ritual calls for three libations of donkey urine; Finkel explains that ‘the thirsty ghost – for ghosts were always thirsty – might take it for a refreshing beer and receive a punitive shock.’ Spells exploit connections not immediately obvious to a modern reader: some of them have abracadabra-like strings of words and syllables whose original meaning might well have been forgotten but whose magical applications remained powerful. Some of these spells involve necromancy, to which Finkel devotes a chapter.
 
Some ghosts formed an intense connection with their victims, requiring the exorcist to create a substitute companion. Around ten lines of cuneiform survive on one side of a broken clay tablet from the fourth century bce. They were written by a Babylonian scribe called Marduk-apla-iddin as part of a manual describing how to get rid of a ghost so persistent it resisted other methods of exorcism. The reverse of the tablet appears to be blank, but under the right light the outlines of two figures appear. It is incredibly rare to find drawings on tablets from ancient Mesopotamia: only a handful have been discovered so far. In this image, a man with a long beard holds his shackled hands in front of him, attached to a rope. On the right, a woman in a smock holds the other end of the rope. The instructions tell us that she has been created as a companion to entice the obstinate ghost into the underworld. Finkel reckons that the figure on the left is ‘the oldest drawing of a ghost in the history of the world’.
 
Students of Akkadian today often read a Babylonian narrative about the journey of Ishtar, goddess of love and war, through seven gates into the ‘Land-of-No-Return’. Ishtar’s descent into that ‘gloomy house’, whose inhabitants live in darkness, eat dust and clay, and wear feathers for clothes, gives us a glimpse of the horrors imagined by Mesopotamians for the afterlife. Another underworld account comes from a nightmare reported by an Assyrian prince called Kummaya, and relates how he was held captive in the ‘House of Death’, which was populated with ‘top-rank underworld gods and demons’. Here he met seventeen embodiments of evil in the form of hybrid demons and ghosts, and a personification of Death with the head of a dragon. It’s not surprising that the bearded Babylonian ghost didn’t want to make the one-way journey through the seven gates.
 
Conceptions of the afterlife were not uniformly bleak. Ancient Mesopotamians were buried with bowls, saucers, bottles, bracelets, beads and even toys. Wherever they were going, the dead, it seemed, could still eat and drink and dress and play. But many of them hung around the living. I imagine ghosts in much the same way the Mesopotamians did. They should look and act like the people they once were, but they represent something beyond the restlessness of the dead, giving shape to what is lost, difficult or unresolved.
 
Review : The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies by Irving Finkel.
Hodder, 344 pp., £25, November 2021, 978 1 5293 0326 1
 
Roaming, Malicious, Hooligan Ghosts. By Moudhy Al-Rashid. London Review of Books, January 2022,

Irving Finkel speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about his new book, which transports us to ancient Mesopotamia to uncover the earliest written evidence of a belief in ghosts.
 
Ellie Cawthorne: You argue that “most, possibly even all, human beings everywhere truly believe in ghosts”. Why do you think humans are inclined to believe that the dead might return to exist among us?
 
Irving Finkel: In the modern world, ghosts have a funny status. Most people don’t wear their ghosts on their sleeves, because there’s a good chance they’d be branded idiots for believing in such things. But when you look into the matter historically, we have plenty of testimonies concerning ghosts, coming from all over the world and covering a huge span of time. They date right back to the very first written material that we have – cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, developed before 3000 BC. And this earliest written evidence is what I focus on in my book.
 
Arguably, you can trace this ghost business back even farther than the beginning of writing. I would posit that the concept of something hanging around after death goes back to the very dawn of mankind. Take as an example a Neanderthal burial in which the body is laid out in a prepared grave, in a particular position, alongside special bits and pieces. The point here is this: if you bury somebody in the ground to get rid of them because they’re smelly and dangerous, that’s one thing. But burying them in a special way with goods implies that your expectation is that, once the horrible bodily chemicals have disappeared, something – most likely the essence of the person – comes out of the body and goes on to some kind of afterlife. And my idea is this: if you’re willing to accept that someone’s spirit can disappear over there, it’s a short step to believing that it can come back again.
 
I think we’re hardwired to believe in ghosts. The most austere, clever scientist in two white coats might look at you as if you’re crazy – but if you make them jump, they will shiver just like everybody else. It’s beneath the skin.
 
AC : Your book focuses on the very first writings on ghosts, on ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets. Why are they so illuminating to study?
 
IF : One of the reasons I wrote this book is that there is a general feeling that ghosts were invented in the 19th century, or perhaps in the Middle Ages. Not many writers even talk about the marvellous stuff on ghosts from Greece and Rome, let alone Mesopotamia [which included Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian cultures]. So I thought that I would put the Mesopotamians back on the ghost map to show that these beliefs are truly old and unchanging.
 
If you learn to read Babylonian – it’ll only take you 20 years – and you translate these messages written on cuneiform tablets, you’ll find it extraordinary just how familiar the world of ghosts that emerges from them is. The underlying story is still fairly recognisable to us today: if a ghost is unhappy in the underworld – perhaps if they had a miserable death, or didn’t get the offerings they were due – they could come back. And they could make living people jump or pull their hair, follow them around or make them ill – all kinds of things.
 
AC : You state that ghosts were “not symbols or metaphors, but literal realities” in Mesopotamia. How so?
 
IF :
From the king on the throne to the beggar in the street, the whole population didn’t just believe in ghosts – they took them for granted as a fact of life. Ghosts were just part of the everyday scenario, alongside all the other things you had to worry about, like children, housing, warfare and disease.
 
And since ghosts were an everyday reality, they also called for the undertaking of everyday chores. A household’s oldest son was responsible for making offerings of food and drink to his dead family, who were often buried under the courtyard of the family home. They needed water and food because there was an understanding that the underworld wasn’t very hospitable. Arriving there was a bit like arriving at an Airbnb with no towels or electricity. People had a responsibility to look after the ghosts of their relatives in the sense of reciting prayers in their honour, remembering them, talking about them.
 
The explanations provided for ghosts returning were not metaphorical but literal – there’s a big difference. The Mesopotamians didn’t speak about them in elusive poetics but as something grounded in reality. In many parts of the world, this attitude survives unchanged. In villages in India, you can ask people about local ghosts and they’ll have 100 stories to share immediately.

 
AC : How did belief in ghosts connect to the wider religious system in ancient Mesopotamia?
 
IF : When we talk about deities in the ancient world, “religion” isn’t necessarily the best word for the system. The Mesopotamians didn’t have a word for “religion”, because their system of gods and goddesses was more than that – it was all-pervading. They had a huge pantheon of deities, and in some ways interactions with ghosts did trade on this system. If someone returned from the dead, a priest or exorcist would be recruited to drive the ghost back. These priests would call on the power of the gods, invoking names such as Ishtar the Goddess of Love to help them to deal with ghosts. On the whole, though, dealing with the dead was slightly unrelated to the prevailing main religion. It wasn’t centrally what we would call a religious matter but more of a traditional matter.
 
AC : Were ghosts always figures to be frightened of?
 
IF : Another jolly good question, because in the later tradition we think of ghosts mainly as clanking ghouls in hotel rooms, bearing frightening messages. In Mesopotamia, people could be startled and sometimes made unhappy by ghosts; if you saw a ghost, on the whole it wasn’t good news – it generally meant that there was a danger that you needed to do something about.
 
However, because people tended to live in extended families, with their relatives and ancestors buried directly under the family home, so quite often you were dealing with a familial ghost. And I feel that the basic position towards a ghost from your own stock was a kind of sympathy. Of course, if that sympathy didn’t work, you could always pay an exorcist to get rid of them with more heavy-duty tools.
 
In addition, there were also lots of unknown ghosts floating about who were nothing to do with your family, and who might be very dangerous indeed. They could go into your ear, torment you and make you very ill. Imagine that after a battle, for example, there’d be thousands of dead soldiers who hadn’t been buried properly, floating about. And the first thing they might do is head to Babylon and make life hell for anybody still living there.
 
AC : Can you give some examples of the types of ghost spells found on cuneiform tablets?
 
IF : Babylonian scribes described a whole slew of simple spells and complicated rituals to get rid of ghosts. Some of these rely on lists of all of the different kinds of ghosts – a ghost who died in a fire, say, or a ghost who was run over by a chariot or drowned in a well or died in childbirth. Part of the spell to get rid of them would involve reading out this list, essentially saying: “Whether you are this type of ghost, or that type of ghost, we know who you are. Go back where you belong!” Identification of a troublesome ghost was a means of gaining power over it.
 
Another tablet contains a list detailing what it meant if you saw a ghost. For example, if you saw a ghost in the bedroom, it could mean that your uncle was going to die, or you were about to lose all your money. Those are grim portents, but there were specialists who could use concomitant forms of magic to dispel the threat. And an omen wasn’t a fixed fate but more like something in the air.
 
One of my favourite spells is designed to help someone who keeps seeing a ghost. They have to recite a spell that essentially says: “You, who keep persecuting me, leave me alone – I’m not going to Kutha.” That was a city in Babylonia, the location of the entrance to the underworld. It had a big temple through which gods and ghosts came up. You can imagine ghosts beckoning with a bony finger, saying to a living person: “Come with us.” The person who has been seeing a ghost then calls on all these goddesses to back them up. It’s fantastic, because it demonstrates that, though the gods are very busy, they will come over and thwack a ghost if needed. It’s basically a way of telling the ghost: “Piss off back to your underworld gloom!”
 
AC : What can you tell us about the underworld?
 
IF : One of the main sources of information on this is a marvellous series of literary texts describing the descent of the beautiful goddess Inanna into the underworld. On a quest to rescue her lover, who is imprisoned there, she passes through seven gates, each manned by ferocious gatekeepers. Inanna journeys all the way down to the underworld, where her sister is queen, in order to sort out this problem. When she gets there, it’s very gloomy indeed – there’s no real light. All of the ghosts are lurking, their numbers increasing every minute as more people die. We’re told in the Akkadian Gilgamesh Epic that “dust is their sustenance, clay their food. They see no light, dwelling in darkness. They are clad like birds, with wings as garments.” One gets the impression of them all swaying with their shoulders together like dusty penguins. The lack of food and drink explains the evolution of a ritual of pouring out drinks and offering food for the dead – it theoretically went down to sustain them in the underworld.
 
This wasn’t hell in the sense of a burning pit with pitchforks and laughing devils pulling your nose. It was more a kind of interregnum – a kind of dreadful waiting place in which nobody’s quite certain what they’re waiting for. Understanding this adds a whole different dimension to the idea that ghosts want to return. If you were trapped down there, wouldn’t you want to go back to the sunny world of ancient Iraq?
 
Another crucial point to understand is that the Mesopotamian afterlife didn’t have a moral dimension: there was no concept that bad behaviour in this life meant a terrible time to come in the next. In my opinion, that connection was a disastrous invention because it dislocated responsibility – everybody spent the whole of their lives fretting about the consequences of their actions after death. The Mesopotamians didn’t have that trouble.
 
AC : You’ve found spells for necromancy. How – and why – would anyone bring people back from the dead?
 
IF : Necromancy wasn’t about bringing people permanently back to life so much as summoning them temporarily to get some answers.
 
The Mesopotamians believed, as many people do today, that ghosts were in possession of a knowledge of the future. It was understood that if a ghost appeared and didn’t say anything, they wanted to communicate something. So there were spells to try to encourage a ghost to answer questions. Sometimes this would require a full-blown ritual in which you procured the skull of the person you wanted to interrogate – who might well be a family member, retrieved from under the floor. The skull was plonked on the table and covered in oil, while the exorcist burnt incense and called upon the Sun God to bring the person back up from the underworld. They would then enter the skull, and you could ask it questions. This ritual was probably terribly frightening, so I don’t think you would do it in a flippant way. However cool and callous a person you might be, I think that staring at a skull until it began to speak would make you pretty jumpy.
 
After the ritual was over, and you’d hopefully got the answers you were after, you’d want to send the ghost back to the underworld jolly quickly. A safety clause was built in to the necromancy manual to help with this: underneath the spell to bring back a ghost, the scribe provided a whole load of spells to then get rid of them as soon as possible. The last thing you would want would be to bring up a ghost for a chat and then let them go off round the world causing mischief.
 
 
AC : In the book you discuss how disrespecting the dead could be a political device. Can you give us an example of that?
 
IF : It’s very interesting to see what you might call political ghost-work at play. Take, for example, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, one of the great rulers of antiquity. He had ongoing military trouble with the Elamites, in what is now Iran. In a particularly regrettable state of military fury, his troops ravaged the tombs of the old Elamite kings and scattered their bones, thereby condemning the dead rulers of Ashurbanipal’s hated enemy to a state of eternal unrest. That intention – to impose eternal unrest on the Elamites – is expressly stated in the official Assyrian annals. This was not a metaphor or a clever use of language – it was jolly well what happened.
 
 
AC : As well as ghosts, the Mesopotamians also believed in demons. What can you tell us about them?
 
IF : The big difference between a demon and a ghost was that, whereas a ghost was a dead human being, a demon had an alien component. Demons were immortal: you could not kill one. If you were lucky, a ghost was not generally malevolent and wicked, more likely just miserable. I don’t think you’d find a miserable demon. Demons had no heart – they were horribly evil.
 
Most demons were either a bit dragony or anthropomorphic – basically like human beings with other nasty characteristics thrown in. One of the worst of all was the demoness Lamashtu, the “baby snatcher”, who liked consuming newborns. At first sight she looked like a woman, but get closer and she had wings, talons and reptilian feet – a very frightening mixture.
 
 
AC : What can looking at these ancient Mesopotamian beliefs tell us about humanity’s relationship with the idea of death more generally?
 
IF : Ghosts are a persistent reality in human thinking, and it’s always interesting to try to uncover when such long-running ideas started. I would argue that ghost beliefs are very difficult to expunge from our mindset because they’ve been there since the beginning, built into the human psyche. The idea of not being able to rest in peace if your life is lacking in resolution, or you met an unhappy or awkward end, is to be found absolutely all over the world.
 
One of the most exciting things about working on these texts was the empathy I felt with the Mesopotamians, for whom ghosts were a problem. I thought that the only way to write about this was with empathy – in other words, there was no point debating whether or not ghosts really existed, because for the Mesopotamians that was not a question worth asking. Instead I focused on looking at what Mesopotamians did because ghosts existed. That doesn’t mean to say that I believe in ghosts personally; it’s more of a way of finding a voice that you can recognise in these texts. And the voice that is distilled from these sources is still, I think, very vibrant.
 
Irving Finkel is curator of ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures at the British Museum. His research specialities include the study of cuneiform script and the history of board games, and among his previous books is The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014)
 
“Ghosts were taken for granted as part of everyday Mesopotamian life”: Irving Finkel on ancient Mesopotamia and ghosts. By Ellie Cawthorne.  Hstory Extra, October 29, 2021

A 3,500-year-old Babylonian tablet that had been kept in the vaults of London’s British Museum since the 19th-century appears to include the earliest depiction of a ghost, according to a forthcoming book.
 
The discovery is featured in The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies, authored by Irving Finkel, a curator of the British Museum’s Middle Eastern department. According to Finkel, the long-overlooked clay tablet features an obscured drawing that can only be seen from above, under bright light.
 
“You’d probably never give it a second thought because the area where the drawings are looks like it’s got no writing,” he told the Guardian in an interview. “But when you examine it and hold it under a lamp, those figures leap out at you across time in the most startling way.”
 
The drawing on the tablet depicts a bearded male ghost being led to the underworld by a younger woman, possibly a lover. It belongs to a cuneiform guide to exorcising, which has never been publicly displayed, and half of which is missing.
 
“It’s obviously a male ghost and he’s miserable,” Finkel said. “You can imagine a tall, thin, bearded ghost hanging about the house did get on people’s nerves. The final analysis was that what this ghost needed was a lover.”
 
“You can’t help but imagine what happened before. ‘Oh God, Uncle Henry’s back.’ Maybe Uncle Henry’s lost three wives,” Fickel quipped. “Something that everybody knew was that the way to get rid of the old bugger was to marry him off. It’s not fanciful to read this into it. It’s a kind of explicit message. There’s very high-quality writing there and immaculate draughtsmanship.”
 
The back of the hand-size tablet features a text with instructions for handling a ghost that “seizes hold of a person and pursues him and cannot be loosed.”
 
The exorcism ritual begins with making figurines of a man and a woman, with specific instructions in the text: “You dress the man in an everyday shift and equip him with travel provisions. You wrap the woman in four red garments and clothe her in a purple cloth. You give her a golden brooch. You equip her fully with bed, chair, mat and towel; you give her a comb and a flask.”
 
Next, the ritual involves vessels of beer and evoking Shamash, the Mesopotamian god of the sun and the judge of the underworld.
 
“At sunrise towards the sun you make the ritual arrangements and set up two carnelian vessels of beer,” the cuneiform reads. “You set in place a special vessel and set up a juniper censer with juniper. You draw the curtain like that of the diviner. You [put] the figurines together with their equipment and place them in position… and say as follows, Shamash [god of the sun and judge of the underworld by night].”
 
The text ends with the ominous warning: “Do not look behind you!”
 
According to Finkel, the purpose of the ritual was to transfer the ghost into one of the figurines. He believes the tablet belonged to a library of magic in the house of an exorcist or in a temple.
 
In a 2018 video by the British Museum, the scholar explained that Mesopotamian burial rituals made sure that the dead are “jolly well locked in and wouldn’t come back and cause trouble.”
 
“Everybody in Mesopotamia, as far as I understand it, believed in ghosts,” he added, explaining that people of the period felt sympathy towards wandering spirits that weren’t able to find rest.
 
When asked if he would like to attend a séance himself, Finkel concurred without hesitation, saying: “I would like to see a ghost. I’ve never seen one. It’s very annoying to me.”
 
Curator Discovers What May Be the World’s Earliest Depiction of a Ghost. By Hakim Bishara. Hyperallergic, October 25, 2021.

The First Ghost Stories | Dr. Irving Finkel - Live Events.

 

Learn how the near-universal belief in ghosts goes back to the beginning of time.  Discover how the oldest known writing, in cuneiform script on tablets of clay, gives us a full picture of the ancient Mesopotamian ghost experience: who might be expected to be a ghost,  how to keep the dead happy in the netherworld, how to banish annoying ghosts that keep appearing and how to summon the dead to come back and disclose the future.

 

Archaeology Now November 6, 2020. 

In the late evening, after the last members of the public have been ushered out of the building and the outer gates have been bolted shut, a swift and palpable change comes over the British Museum.

 The museum is the most popular tourist attraction in Britain, ahead of Tate Modern and the National Gallery: more than 6.2m people visited in 2019, over 17,000 every day. Without these visitors, the relentless thrum of activity beneath the glass-and-steel lattice roof of the Great Court fades to a whisper. A thick silence fills the cavernous galleries that surround it, each one loaded with artefacts that encompass the arc of human history.

 By the time the night shift begins, most of the lights in the museum have been extinguished. The security staff, who patrol the length and breadth of the 14-acre complex until early morning, carry out many of their duties by torchlight. Scouring the premises for anomalies – water leaks, the smell of gas, an employee trapped in a remote corridor – they cast their beams into dark corners, the shadows melting back to reveal a war-like Roman bust or an Aztec mask with shining eyes and teeth. They may even confront a real human being, like the body of an Ancient Egyptian, 5,500 years dead, huddled inside a reconstruction of his sandy grave.

 Even without visitors, the museum is never completely silent. The main building, which dates back to the 1820s and has been expanded and reconfigured ever since, is alive with creaks, as old buildings are prone to be. The air-conditioning hums. Doors clank. Sudden breezes whistle around corners and up lift shafts. As security guards move through the 94 rooms open to the public, along the rabbit warren of back-of-house offices and passageways, and into the rambling network of storage facilities below ground, they are privy to the building’s most intimate sounds: scrapes and groans, drowned out during opening hours, can grow disconcertingly loud at night.

 The guards are accustomed to such disturbances. But every so often a patrol encounters a noise, a flash of movement, or simply a sudden lurch in the pit of the stomach, that stops even hardened veterans in their tracks.
 
Sometimes it’s the doors. To complete a full circuit of the museum more than 3,000 doors need to be opened and closed. Some of these, particularly ones that seal off the major galleries, are cumbersome to shut. But when bolted, they won’t open again without a tussle. Except when they do. Take the Sutton Hoo gallery, which houses treasures from an Anglo-Saxon ship, among them a ferocious-looking helmet believed to have been worn by Raedwald, king of the East Angles, in the seventh century. On one occasion a guard bolted the double doors and moved on to the next room, only to be informed by a CCTV operator that the doors stood wide open again. Video footage of the gallery showed them moving spontaneously.
 
Sometimes it’s a sudden drop in temperature, like the unnerving patches of cold air that linger next to the winged, human-headed bull of Nimrud at the entrance to the Assyrian galleries. Sometimes it’s the sound of footsteps, or music, or crying, where no obvious source can be found.
 
And sometimes it might be the objects themselves. One night a security guard was passing through the African galleries in the basement and paused for a moment before the figure of a two-headed dog. The guard believed that this 19th-century wooden Congolese fetish, bristling with rough iron nails, possessed some mysterious power. On this particular night he felt an irresistible compulsion to point his finger at it. As he did so, the fire alarms in the gallery went off. A few days later the guard returned to the gallery with his brother, who also pointed at the two-headed dog. Again the alarms sounded.
 
These stories were all told, directly or indirectly, to Noah Angell, an American artist and storyteller who has been researching hauntings at the British Museum since 2016. There are many other tales too – of spectral figures cropping up in visitors’ photographs, of a séance held by departmental staff in a haunted brick store.
 
Angell first learned of the stories in a London pub. He was at birthday drinks for a friend who had once worked at the museum, when her former colleagues started trading eerie anecdotes from their old workplace. Angell, a 39-year-old from North Carolina, often makes use of folklore and oral history in his writing and artistic projects. He sensed an opportunity to get under the skin of one of Britain’s grandest institutions. “I thought that there would be a half dozen or so stories which everyone knows, and they circulate around the museum, and little variations and mutations are created,” he told me. He assumed that documenting them would be straightforward. Four years on the tales are still pouring in: more than 50 visitors and staff have spoken to him so far, and there’s no sign of the supply running dry.
 
These days Angell gives unofficial walking tours of the museum, spending two hours retelling the stories in their exact locations (the coronavirus outbreak has put a stop to these for the moment). Compactly built, with dark-brown hair, a high forehead and the stubbly remnants of a once-mighty beard, Angell steers clear of the arch theatrics of a typical ghost-tour host. He begins by warning that any­one who mocks the museum’s spirits risks getting hurt. On the first stop, in the Clocks and Watches gallery, he recounts how a Dutch couple took a photograph of the mechanical galleon, a model ship of gilded copper and iron from 16th-century Germany, only to find, reflected in the glass case, the apparition of a female dwarf with missing clumps of hair smiling back at them. A woman on the information desk who dealt with the couple’s bewildered query ended up directing them to the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain. She noted that the ghost was dressed in 16th-century costume.
 
Angell is alert to how British Museum staff experience the building differently according to their place in the hierarchy. He notes that it’s often the lower-level workers, not curators or senior management, who have stories. (A former museum worker himself, Angell says that one of his goals for the project is to give a voice to gallery attendants, cleaners and other overlooked staff, who have built up intimate knowledge of the collection through years of observation and proximity.)
 
It was the orbs that drew in the overnight security team. Around 3am an alarm went off in a disabled toilet and a pair of guards rushed over to check what was going on. Nothing seemed amiss until a guard received a call from a CCTV operator, who said that large balls of white light were hovering above a staircase in the Great Court and chasing each other through the air. “We can’t see anything,” the security guard responded. “They’re all around you,” the CCTV operator replied.
 
The appearance of the orbs coincided with an exhibition called “Germany: Memories of a Nation”, which ran from October 2014 to January 2015. The guard who stood among the balls of light wondered if they might be connected to one of the exhibits: a white, wrought-iron gate from the concentration camp at Buchenwald that bore the motto “Jedem das Seine” (“To each what he deserves”). “You get objects that hold energy,” the guard explained. “Nothing [else] in that exhibition was anything that will have caused something like that...I’m really not surprised if someone attached to that object was to come with it. You couldn’t blame them, to be quite honest. I’m happy to have them here.” The orbs appeared at the same time each night until the exhibition ended. “When Germany went,” the security guard said, “they went.”
 
Angell says many museum staff share this attitude. “Most of the people that I’ve gathered these stories from...don’t self-identify as believing in ghosts,” he tells me. “For the most part, these visitor-services and security people are working-class blokes and they don’t make a fuss unless something really serious is going on...But what they all seem to agree on, as the sort of folk belief of the museum worker, is that objects hold energy. This is a formulation that everyone is comfortable with.”
 
Angell, who is planning to publish a book on the subject, is not immediately forthcoming about what he believes himself. On the tour he lets his audience make up their own minds. “This project is agnostic,” he tells me at one point, adding mischievously: “I may not be agnostic, but that’s neither here nor there.”
 
As we talk it becomes clearer that he is open to supernatural explanations and considers himself to be, as he puts it, “somewhat psychic”. He’s happy to let a few provocative ideas slip out in conversation. One of these puts a distinctive spin on the debate around restitution, which has been growing in volume in recent years.
 
In 2017 France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, declared the return of African heritage to Africa a “top priority” (though by the end of 2019 only one object had been returned). A report published the following year, commissioned by him, recommended that all objects obtained during the colonial era be restored to their country of origin unless there was proof they had been acquired legitimately. Stéphane Martin, president of the Musée de Quai Branly, an anthropological museum in Paris, decried the report in an interview with Le Monde as an act of “self-flagellation”. But the French inquiry stirred the waters. The British Museum has since received multiple requests, from Ethiopia, Nigeria and Chile among others, to hand back disputed items.
 
The question of restitution is as old as conquest and plunder. According to Pliny the Elder, the Roman emperor Augustus was embarrassed enough to return pieces of looted art to Greece. Discussion has intensified in recent years as the West has been forced to confront the legacy of colonialism. Many former colonies have asserted their claim to treasures, and indigenous communities have amplified their demands through social media. Nigeria is planning a new museum to house the Benin bronzes, the largest number of which are held at the British Museum.
 
Some institutions in Britain have returned objects. The Manchester Museum said last year it would send back 43 items to four of Australia’s First Nations. The British Museum, by contrast, has avoided making any commitments. It loans items around the world, but the museum cites a variety of reasons – including government legislation blocking the removal of objects – for keeping its collection intact.
 
Over the course of his research, Angell has arrived at a strikingly different perspective on restitution. “In the conventional discourse around repatriation,” he says, “contested objects are like pawns. They may be fantastic and big and old, but essentially they are being employed as a symbolic wedge, which two countries with grievances against each other can use to get what they want.” The testimonies he has been gathering amount to an argument that the pawns may have their own agency. As Angell puts it: “These stories seem to suggest that the objects themselves are restless.”
 
The British Museum has about 8m items in its collection, and new acquisitions are being made all the time. The artefacts include sacred objects from all over the world – tomb guardians, reliquaries, statues of deities and demons – and more than 6,000 human remains. By rights the British Museum ought to be one of the most haunted institutions on the planet.

 
Irving Finkel, a curator in the museum’s Middle East department, reckons it is a fruitful place to look for ghosts “for lots of reasons”. Finkel is interested in magic and demonology: with his long, white beard and circular glasses, he’s the epitome of a scholar who spends his time deciphering cuneiform inscriptions in Sumerian and Babylonian. His views on the supernatural are more surprising. Throughout history, he says, many cultures have considered ghosts a fact of life. He argues that the belief in some form of spiritual lingering after death is deep-seated in the human psyche. Our current relative scepticism – only about half of the British population professes to believe in ghosts – is “an anomaly”, he says.
 
To his great annoyance, Finkel has never actually seen a ghost himself. He puts that down to a lack of sensitivity on his part. But he reckons the museum offers plenty of opportunities. “One, there are lots of dead bodies here,” he says. “Then there’s lots of curators who’ve spent their entire lives here and some of them died on the premises.”
 
The British Museum, which opened its doors on Great Russell Street in 1759, has been accumulating voraciously from the beginning. The original collection was bequeathed by Hans Sloane, an Ulsterman whose lucrative career as a physician and income from his wife’s slave plantations in Jamaica allowed him to amass some 71,000 items – manuscripts, medals, preserved animals, shells – through a vast network of contacts across the British Empire. After he died in 1753, Sloane’s vision for a free public museum dedicated to the ideal of universal knowledge began to take shape.
 
It was not an entirely new concept. The museum is a legacy of the ancient world, though the Musæum at Alexandria, home of the famous library, brought together great scholars rather than artefacts. During the Renaissance, collectors assembled Wunderkammern, cabinets of curiosities. But Sloane, according to his biographer James Delbourgo, was “original in calling for a universal museum in both senses: a gathering of all the things of the world open to all the citizens of the world.” His project was driven by the Enlightenment compulsion to classify the world by pinning it down, bagging it and putting it behind glass.
 
By the turn of the 19th century antiquities were flooding into the museum from overseas at an extraordinary rate. Few people seemed to mind or notice the oddity of calling a museum “British” when it contained objects that were anything but. By 1801, when the British army seized the Rosetta Stone from the French in Egypt, Lord Elgin had already begun stripping marble statues and panels from the Parthenon. Much of the current debate around restitution has its roots in that period. European powers roamed the globe, divided it between them and sent the treasures home. Not everything was acquired illegally. Some items were bought, exchanged or received as gifts – though there’s a question as to how freely a gift is given, if it’s handed over to a man at the head of a platoon of bayonets.
 
Many museums in the West argue that communities sometimes don’t want artefacts back because they lack the resources to care for them. As borders have shifted and kingdoms been succeeded by modern states, it’s not always clear to whom, exactly, a centuries-old item should be returned. Better to keep the objects where they are, goes the argument: accessible to visitors, and preserved for future generations to study and admire. Publicly, the British Museum has barely reckoned with its colonial past. When Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian author, resigned from the museum’s board of trustees in July 2019, she expressed disappointment at its inaction on restitution, as well as its association with BP. The British Museum, which discourages employees from commenting on the subject, has a standard response to enquiries about restitution: “The integrity of the collection should be maintained.” (Hartwig Fischer, the British Museum’s director, declined to comment for this article.) Yet it’s not clear exactly what kind of integrity an assemblage of items so broad and diffuse really has.
 
When confronted with the plethora of ghost stories from the museum, an obvious interpretation is that they are manifestations of disquiet about the institution’s heritage. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, an American scholar who writes about the supernatural in the arts, reckons that hauntings are often observed when official narratives repress “an untold story that calls into question the veracity of the authorised version of events”. Yet Angell hasn’t noticed any guilt or anger among the employees he’s interviewed: most of them seem comfortable with the objects under their watch. He’s heard a few stories that deal directly with illicitly acquired objects, such as the caryatid in Room 19 that Lord Elgin tore from the Parthenon (according to legend, the graceful marble statue could be heard weeping inside her crate as she was shipped to England). But these tales came to Angell from outside the institution.
 
Ghost stories at the British Museum are nothing new. In the 1910s and 1920s the Egyptian department received stacks of letters calling for the return of artefacts that were believed to be cursed, according to Roger Luckhurst, a professor of literature at Birkbeck College in London, who has written a book on Western culture’s dark fascination with mummies.
 
Certain members of the museum hierarchy are conscious of heightened friction around particular items. When I asked Jim Peters, a collections manager in the Britain, Europe and Prehistory department, what he makes of Angell’s idea about restless objects, he tiptoed around the question. “I would agree with him to a certain extent,” he said. “It’s very important the pieces are here. But having said that, there are pieces that I think are out of sync being here.” He went on: “There are certain objects that, if they were in the correct context, would still have a purpose.” These, he says, declining to give specific examples, “are the restless objects”.
 
Personally, I found the idea difficult to get my head around. How could inanimate lumps of wood, rock or metal open doors or set off alarms? Surely this was just a case of humans imbuing them with powers in the absence of obvious explanations of the phenomena. But when I put Angell’s theory to Fiona Candlin, a colleague of Luckhurst’s at Birkbeck, she seemed more amenable. Candlin, a professor of museology, had shadowed overnight security staff earlier in her career. She heard them bid “goodnight” to dead bodies on display and picked up a couple of ghost stories along the way.
 
Before that, Candlin had spent time in the British Museum investigating why many people feel compelled to touch objects in galleries, especially when expressly forbidden from doing so. Some people feel an item to understand how it’s made, but for others, the instinct is more primal. “They had a sense that if they touched it, it gave them a conduit to the past and put them in actual connection with people who had lived,” she said: “So this block had been carried by an Egyptian slave, and if you touched it, it was like touching him.”
 
Many of us share a similar attachment to our own most emotionally valuable possessions, says Candlin. Your grandfather’s glasses are not just lens and frame, “they are like a bit of your granddad, and you can’t bloody throw them away, because it would be like throwing away a bit of your granddad.” Candlin reckons that many visitors to the British Museum believe that particular objects have inherent power. Gallery staff told her that they’d often see devotees attempting to commune with four black stone statues of Sekhmet, a mighty lion-headed goddess known as “she who mauls”, which dominate a corner of the Egyptian sculpture gallery. Candlin also heard about Christian visitors holding up wooden crosses or glass vials next to the relics of saints in order to channel their energies. “That’s a really clear situation where someone thinks that the object does have power and that power can be conveyed,” Candlin says.
 
Lissant Bolton, keeper of the Africa, Oceania and the Americas department at the British Museum, tells me of visitors who treat objects in the collection “as living identities”. Some regard them as ancestors. One potent example looms over the entrance to the Living and Dying gallery, directly behind the Great Court. Hoa Hakananai’a is a four-tonne statue of a human figure hewn from brownish lava rock, with deep-set eyes, pursed lips and a gentle pot belly. The Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of Easter Island – whose governor visited the British Museum in 2018 to campaign for the figure’s return – consider it to be an actual living entity. “This is no rock,” the president of the Rapa Nui Council of Elders said last year. “It embodies the spirit of an ancestor, almost like a grandfather. This is what we want returned to our island – not just a statue.”
 
The restitution of the dead is particularly sensitive. Many religions and cultures have a tradition of burying human remains, so it can be offensive to find bodies ending up in a museum instead. Several people told Angell during interviews that they felt uneasy about the presence of dead bodies in the building. Phil Heary, who worked at the museum for 29 years, recalled unsettling experiences in a long row of rooms where 19 mummies from Ancient Egypt are on display. On one occasion, alone in the galleries amid the wizened faces and desiccated corpses, he felt the temperature plummet for no apparent reason. “It was like walking into a freezer,” said Heary, a burly north Londoner who now works in a supermarket bakery not far from the museum. “My stomach turned over. The feel of the gallery was – you wanted to get out. It was scary…I’m a great believer that, wherever you’re buried, you should stay there. A lot of the mummies there should be back in their graves.”
 
Emily Taylor, who worked as an assistant in the Egypt department for ten years until 2015 and regularly handled human remains, takes a different view. She got used to the leathery skin and still-intact hair of millennia-old corpses, as well as the sweetish smell of decay that was released when showcases were opened after long periods. “When we worked on exhibitions, the mummies would be referred to by name,” Taylor tells me. “In Ancient Egyptian culture, that’s part of their death rite: they wanted people to be spoken about – that’s how you kept them alive. Even though this person is not in their proper resting place, they are being kept alive by being written about, being spoken about, by being shown in the museum.”
 
As I’ve wandered through the museum’s galleries over the past year, I’ve often thought about the power of these artefacts. If the objects are in some sense alive, or if ghostly entities accompanied them to their current resting place in central London, are they furious about being amid the bright spotlights and thronging crowds? Or are they glad to be the centre of attention – enlivened, even, by the public’s gaze? One day, weeks before the outbreak of coronavirus, when visitors still brushed past each other with scant regard for social distancing and pressed their faces against the glass to get a look at the mummies, I attempted to tap in to the energies of the collection.
 
In the Enlightenment gallery, the grandest in the museum, I stared for a long time at John Dee’s black obsidian mirror, which the Elizabethan polymath reportedly used to commune with angels. I climbed up and down the North and East Stairs, which are said to be haunted by shadows and disembodied voices. I even toured the museum with a medium called Patsy Sorenti, whom Angell had invited along. She said she picked up several presences around the building, including the sound of ghostly feet running across the Sutton Hoo gallery.
 
Despite all this, I witnessed no supernatural activity myself. The sceptical part of me, which I hoped would be cracked open by some paranormal epiphany, remained stubbornly intact. But, over months pondering Angell’s ghost stories and haunting the galleries myself, I experienced a gradual shift in my understanding of what a museum is. “All museums are strange places,” Candlin told me. “You put loads of things together that otherwise wouldn’t exist together and that have been utterly disassociated from where they come from – it’s quite a strange thing to do. Not all cultures do that, but we’ve got used to walking around spaces looking at objects that have been removed from use and meaning.”
 
At the British Museum you can bridge chasms of space and time simply by walking from one room to the next. You breeze past objects that speak of lives lived and loved; religion, dominion and death jostle with one another for space. Whatever you think about the possibility of ghostly activity, that is inherently uncanny. Nowhere else are so many objects which were once dear to their creators and owners so profoundly, almost comically, out of place.
 
On my last visit, after spending a morning watching couples take selfies next to the mummies, I began to imagine how the British Museum might appear to the objects themselves. In the Great Court, I considered two giant quartzite heads of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, over 3,000 years old. Then I turned around to see what they were looking at with such infinite composure: a display of popular-history books and mini umbrellas for sale outside the museum gift shop.

 In the Assyrian gallery, I marvelled at the stone reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II, king of Assyria from 883BC to 859BC. His “standard inscription”, which he had carved across each wall panel in his palace, makes Shelley’s Ozymandias seem self-effacing. He refers to himself as “the king who acts with the support of the great gods, and whose hand has conquered all lands, who has subjugated all the mountains and received their tribute, taking hostages and establishing his power over all countries.” Today, his inscription hangs in a poky room more than 2,300 miles away from where it was carved in stone. But at least the Assyrian king’s 2,900-year-old declaration still receives widespread attention. The overwhelming majority of the museum’s collection – around 99% of it, though much of this comprises stones, flints and other fragments – lies in storage, hidden from the curiosity, admiration or perplexity of the general public.

 Angell would love to take a closer look, but securing access is tricky (he’s working on it). For now, millions of objects remain in the dark, save for an occasional glance from a departmental assistant or the nightly ministrations of security guards, who switch the lights on for a brief moment to make sure nothing is out of place, before closing the door and continuing their rounds. “Down there”, says Angell, “things just stew in their own juices, indefinitely, for ever.”
 
 
Are ghosts haunting the British Museum? By Killian Fox. The Economist,  April 28, 2020.

 

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.