Murder most foul
MICHAEL SCOTT considers a grisly new title that contains a blood-soaked collection of Roman murder tales
As Emma Southon points out, we all love a good murder story – and this book is full of poisonings, bludgeonings and beheadings from ancient Rome. Murder, as she says in her conclusion, allows us not only to see the “underbelly” of Rome, away from its shiny buildings, but also “how alike and unlike us” the Romans were.
The prologue sets out three deaths to frame the Roman story: the murder of Remus by Romulus, the suicide of Lucretia at the onset of the Republic, and the murder of Julius Caesar. The following chapters group types of murders together, so you can dip into the kind that takes your fancy: murder on the senate floor, in the family or in marriage, murders involving slavery, in the imperial house, or of an emperor. By far my favourite chapter was ‘Murder by Magic’, which, as you might guess, has a nice ‘whodunnit’ feel to it – often missing in the other chapters since the Romans were more upfront about the whole murder thing. On my wishlist would have been a chapter about murder in war (was there such a thing?) and one tackling gladiatorial combat head-on (since it feels strangely missing).
Southon brings some great and littleknown murder stories to light, revelling in the bizarre and the macabre. She also offers some good context for the more well-known episodes, for instance by putting Julius Caesar’s murder into the story of Republican killing, from that of politician Tiberius Gracchus in the second-century BC onwards.
A couple of points jar, however. Firstly, is this book about death (as the prologue list might indicate) or murder? While Southon points out the mutating definition of murder across modern communities, she chooses a catch-all definition “to include basically all killing”, which feels a bit fast and loose.
The second is the slippery use of phrases such as ‘us’, ‘the ‘western world’ and ‘western readers’ at points throughout the book. I think most people would push back against this as a helpful grouping, and, perhaps more worryingly, a grouping that Southon has in mind as her main audience. One hopes that she is aiming for a much wider and more varied readership than that – the material definitely deserves it.