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 […]