Murder In Ancient Rome
Killing was a way of life for politicians and commoners alike, as we learn with historian Dr Emma Southon
The bloody truth of politics in the Roman Empire
hen Julius Caesar entered the Senate House on 15 March 44 BCE, he is said to have done so in good spirits. He had heard the prophecy of the threat against him, but surrounded and supported by his friends, he felt he had nothing to fear. As it happened, it was those same friends who would be the ones to murder him and end his ascent as ruler of Rome.
The story of the assassination of Caesar is probably the most famous example of murder in Ancient Rome, but it was far from the last. In fact, only a cursory glance at the reigns of the emperors who would follow him shows that the life expectancy of the ruler of Rome was often short – and not because of old age or illness. Going back even further into Rome’s history, it becomes clear that this was a world in which murder was a tool like any other in political life. It’s
this very history that Dr Emma Southon explores in her new book A Fatal Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.
“The first magistrate to be murdered by the Senate was Tiberius Gracchus,” Southon tells us. “He was beaten to death by a mob of furious senators while he was tribune of the plebs and trying to force through land reforms. He was retroactively declared an enemy of Rome and the Senate celebrated his death.
That happened in 133 BCE.” And this was just the beginning.
“Paramilitary gangs led by people such as Milo and Clodius
Pulcher roamed the streets and controlled elections by beating and killing people,” explains Southon.
“Cicero’s house was burnt down.
Mark Anthony once chased Clodius, who was tribune of the plebs, across the forum with a knife. Clodius was eventually murdered in a street brawl with Milo. For about two full generations of Roman politics, the landscape was incredibly violent. Murder was not so much legitimate as commonplace.”
Taking a step back from the political sphere, Roman society was steeped in violence in many quarters. The popularity of gladiatorial combat is as good an example of this as any other. But it begs the question: what was it about how the Romans viewed life and death that would make such actions seem acceptable?
“The main takeaway is that social death was culturally as important as physical death to the Romans,” Southon tells us. “People who had no fama or dignitas, like slaves, gladiators, actors or sex workers, were effectively already dead in Roman culture and, outside of their personal families and circles, made no ripples in the social fabric when they were killed. In modern homicide studies, these people are called the ‘less-dead’.” So, with the ‘lower classes’ seen as expendable, their death was business as usual. “From enslaved people being beaten to death, to revenge killings, to public executions in the arena, to crucifixions on the busiest highways, to gladiatorial games, to bandits who roamed the countryside, and then every person who died a natural death that was perceived to be witchcraft, homicide was a really regular part of life for a lot of Romans, which is really tough to get one’s head around,” says Southon. “So although they reacted with the expected grief and horror when someone they loved or someone famous died, they were exposed to the homicide of strangers on a regular basis and were, for the most part, not negatively moved by it.”
So, in this context was murder even something Romans cared about? Yes, but only if the victim was deemed worthy of that care. “A person in Roman culture was defined by their fama and their dignitas – their good name, reputation, prestige and honour. Someone with lots of dignitas and/or fama, like a magistrate or a member of an important family of the senatorial class, is therefore very literally more important than someone with neither. People designated infames – of bad repute – like actors, bar owners, people found guilty of certain crimes, enslaved people, were unmurderable in a certain sense. Their families might get upset but they had no real recourse. On the other hand when Apronia, daughter of the consul Lucius Apronius, whose father held the right to wear Triumphal Ornaments, was murdered, Emperor Tiberius held a personal investigation and oversaw the initiation of formal charges against her husband.”
With social standing being so important in whether someone’s killing would be punished, it should come as no surprise that the exact statutes on lawful and unlawful killings were also murky. “The laws concerning murder in Rome are complicated and evolved a lot over the centuries. The earliest law code, the Twelve Tables, are now very fragmentary but seem to have only considered accidental homicide (manslaughter) rather than murder,” says Southon.
“Judy E Gaughan argues that the earliest approximation to a law making murder illegal in Rome was Sulla’s Lex Cornelia Sullae de Sicariis et Veneficis, which made various specific forms of homicide illegal in the wake of the social wars and the civil wars between Sulla and Marius. Things like carrying a dagger with intent to kill and bribing judges to find defendants guilty in capital cases were explicitly outlawed for the first time in order to restore a semblance of order in the aftermath of
"Mark Anthony once chased Clodius, who was tribune of the plebs, across the forum with a knife"
a civil war. But it didn’t come close to making murder as a generic act of the deliberate killing of a person illegal.”
One of the things that’s notable about the Lex Cornelia Sullae de Sicariis et Veneficis is that while it does concern itself a little with killings and sacrifices, it was equally interested in the use of magic and seemed, in places, to care more about magical rites being used to influence others than about the death utilised in performing the rites. Indeed, magic was among the few methods of murder that seemed to universally concern Romans. “Poisonings and magical murders (which are intertwined in the Roman imagination into essentially the same thing) were treated as the most serious crimes, as messing with magic and poison was considered to be deeply unacceptable,” Southon explains to us. “Street stabbings, particularly by bandits and what are often described as ‘professional murderers’ were also taken very seriously.”
But even with all of those concerns, there was still a certain permissiveness around killings, not just around class, but also dependent upon motivation, particularly around the time of Sulla. “At that time in Roman history, there was no interest in the government in regulating who could and could not use deadly violence,” explains Southon. “Rome had a ‘self-help’ system of justice, which meant that it was up to the victim or the victim’s family to resolve injustices, and sometimes that involved revenge killings, which the Roman senate and magistrates were not going to start regulating. It wasn’t until the Roman government and the stability of the state came to rest on the power (and safety) of one man that, gradually, the right of the Roman people to kill
"Emperors who disrespected the Senate were always on a one-way trip to Stabsville"
other people, including enslaved people, was worn away through imperial decree. It’s not until the reign of Hadrian that a formal decree was made that outlawed killing and attempted killing of free men.”
Even so, these sometimes vague rules around murder meant that all sorts of strange rulings and conflicts emerged. Southon recalls one particularly interesting case involving Roman consul Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella and a woman accused of poisoning her husband and son. “She was brought before the governor of the province to be punished, but when she got there she defended herself by telling the governor that they had murdered her son from a previous marriage, and so she killed them in revenge,” says Southon. “This was a huge problem for the governor because killing a member of one’s family was a terrible moral outrage, which required punishment, but revenge killings were not only acceptable but very much central to Roman self-help justice. So Dolabella couldn’t acquit the woman, but also couldn’t condemn her because both actions would violate something central to Roman morality and justice. So he sent her to the ancient court of the Areopagus in Athens, who’d acquitted Orestes in Greek myth and tragedy, to make the decision. The Greek judges, unwilling to oppose their Roman overlords and make a decision that would be wrong either way, resolved the issue by postponing judgement for 100 years.”
As with this example, location could have as much of a bearing on the decision-making of courts as social standing and citizenship. Governors held most of the sway in Roman outposts, but back in Rome juries were needed to tackle crimes of respected citizens of the city. These juries were later replaced by appointees of the emperor once the imperial era was well established. And, of course, there was no police force to speak of to investigate crimes, with the military left to apprehend and hold suspects in the provinces and a special unit patrolling in Rome itself, run by the urban prefect.
All of this begins to paint a picture of a particularly conflicted and contradictory attitude towards life, death and justice, one that only gets more complicated when we begin to once again examine murder in the political field more closely. Unlike sex workers, slaves or gladiators,
senators and emperors couldn’t be argued to be lacking in fama or dignitas, and they were being cut down at incredibly rapid rates. Between 235 CE and 284 CE, for example, there were 21 emperors and only one of them can be said to have died from natural causes.
(Claudius Gothicus still only lasted two years as he died from plague while campaigning against the Goths.)
“In the 503 years of the imperial period (27 BCE – 476 CE), 49 per cent of emperors were murdered and another nine per cent died by suicide,” Southon says. “The longest dynasty was the first, which lasted 95 years and five emperors, of which two were murdered and one died by suicide. Being emperor was a dangerous job! It was hard to survive and balance the competing interests of the empire, the senate, the Praetorian Guard and the armies in the provinces.”
With life expectancy looking bleak, was there anything that you could do to improve your chances of surviving in the job? Southon explains some of the key factors that could lead to longevity as the head of Rome. “The emperors who survived to die a natural death in their beds, like Trajan, Hadrian, Vespasian and Diocletian, were largely army generals with the right combination of military success and interests, which kept the armies happy; an interest in bureaucracy which kept the empire running without
too many famines, money flowing to the Praetorian Guard, and a diplomatic approach to stroking the egos of the Senate. The Senate liked to believe, for a very, very long time, that they were the smartest guys around and that the job of an emperor was to take their advice and flatter them constantly and definitely not kill them! Emperors who disrespected the Senate, like Caligula, Nero, Commodus, Domitian, and Elagabalus, were always on a one-way trip to Stabsville because changing the emperor meant changing the whole flavour and colour of the government.”
And even when a good run of leaders could be put together, it would invariably fall apart. “The Nerva-antonine dynasty hit on the perfect formula for successful emperors: each successive emperor was adopted as an adult by his predecessor and was chosen for his proven abilities as a leader and a general,” says Southon. “Marcus Aurelius ruined the whole thing after the death of his adoptive brother and co-ruler Lucius Verus when he allowed his son Commodus to inherit the throne instead of granting it to a proven adult. Commodus turned out to be the spoiled, disrespectful weak leader all princes-turned-emperors were and ended his reign by being strangled by a gladiator in the bath.”
As much as an emperor might be a common target for assassination, Southon also highlights an example of an emperor trying their hand at being a detective after a woman named Apronia, as previously mentioned, was killed and her husband, Plautius Silvanus was the prime suspect. Given the importance of the family, Emperor Tiberius took a personal interest in the case.
“[Silvanus] threw her out of a window, which is strange in itself as a method of murder, and left her body to be found so he could claim she fell out while he was asleep,” reveals Southon. “Then the emperor Tiberius got personally involved and did a crime-scene investigation, an event so unique and unexpected that Silvanus hadn’t even bothered to tidy up after the fight that ended with his wife being defenestrated. Tiberius found ‘traces of resistance offered and force employed’ and so Silvanus was carted off to face a trial. Before that trial happened, however, he stabbed himself with a dagger his grandmother sent him.”
The question of motive in this remains a mystery, but there have been some suggestions. “All that is odd but there’s no reason given by Tacitus for the murder, and a theory was developed by an Italian researcher that a couple of years before the murder Silvanus had been found guilty of sexually assaulting his son and that this might have been related to the murder,” says Southon. “In addition, Silvanus’s sister Urgulanilla was, at the time of the murder, married to the emperor Claudius, but he dramatically divorced her shortly afterwards on the basis of ‘scandalous lewdness and murder’ according to Suetonius. All of which tangles together to create the strange and mysterious suggestion of a horrible, possibly incestuous, sex and murder ring at the highest level of Roman society in the reign of Tiberius!”
It’s fascinating to consider how differently the Romans thought about the legality and legitimacy of people killing one another and crime in general, as this example makes clear. For all of Rome’s lauded civility there remained a dark and barbaric heart that seemingly could not be quelled. The value of life was simply thought about very differently in this era than we would hope for today.
"Commodus ended his reign by being strangled in the bath by a gladiator"