Homicide–the deliberate, willful killing of another person–was embedded…deeply into Roman daily life.
Emma Southon’s A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a fascinating, witty, detailed book about murder in Ancient Rome. Southon makes a distinction between homicide–the killing of someone under any circumstances–and the variable ways society defines murder. In the case of Rome, only a select few deaths were considered murder, where all others–of the enslaved, of criminals, of prisoners of war–were of little note, the Romans considering such people non-entities.
Although I use the word “delightful” in the title of this review–and the book is in many ways–Southon does not sugar-coat the kinds of spectacle deaths and suffering the Roman Empire enacted particularly on the nameless and doomed. She makes very clear that the Romans only considered prestige and dignity the province of the upper class. As for slaves and other infames, they were killed publicly all the time and considered hardly worth ancient Roman historians telling their stories.
Southon goes through the many types of murder, from murder in the Senate, murder in the family, murder in marriage, murder in the slave state, murder in the imperial house, and judicial murder. For part of its history, over 50% of ancient Roman emperors were murdered. The killing of everyday citizens for the viewing pleasure of other everyday citizens and the elite was a common occurrence. Southon goes into graphic detail about such atrocities, so content warning for sensitive readers.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out how funny Southon is and how accessible her writing. She is a consummate storyteller and manages to make ancient history come alive, even if it’s in the name of death. From one-offs like “don’t fuck with the sacred chickens” to “you really have to know that you have done something truly terrible when the best possible defence that your biggest fan can give you is that you might have shat yourself” to “Tiberius’ biography recounts him putting people to death for asking what books he was reading, refusing to shag him, changing clothes near a statue of Augustus, carrying a ring with his face on it into the toilet and being mean about the Greek mythical king Agamemnon in a play,” Southon is compulsively readable and witty.
From what I understand, Southon’s written other history books. I’m definitely going to pick some more up.