A fatal thing happened on the way to the forum
My daughter gave me Emma Southon’s book “A fatal thing happened on the way to the forum” for Christmas. Apart from my longtime interest in history, there was a particular reason for this choice. Rebecca took five years of Latin in middle school and high school. She got a 5 on the Latin AP exam, which entitled her to college credit, although I’m not sure whether Colorado State awarded that credit on her transcript. Along the way, she learned 33 words for “kill” and supplied me a cheat sheet of these words along with the book. The lexicon turned out to be unnecessary, but it illustrates the scope of the task Southon undertook in writing this book.
Homicide, both intentional and inadvertent, was common in ancient Rome. Just how common is unclear, since many killings went undocumented. In ancient Rome, the idea of murder lacked the moral overlay that it has acquired today in most cultures. The most important lesson in the book is just how remote and foreign ancient Roman values and mores were from today’s, and how useless our perspectives on homicide and murder are in understanding how ancient Roman society worked and how its denizens thought about themselves and others. Insofar as there were any consequences at all, murder of the elite was punished because it was an affront to dignity and prestige:
“Life itself was not protected and no person had an individual right to life. What was protected by Roman elite cultural norms was dignitas, which is sort of the low-key, non-sacred form of imperial majesty. Dignitas . . . was earned through achievements in politics and war by men and was passed on via the family name to their sons and grandsons. It was an idealized face of elite masculinity . . . These external achievements made a man visible, important and worthy of life. They made killing them mean more than killing anyone else.” p. 237
If they didn’t possess prestige and dignity, the lives of murder victims mattered not at all. The lives of slaves, even freed slaves, meant nothing, other than their financial value to the owner. They were socially dead, so literal death was just a formality. In most cases, the lives of women and children meant nothing; they functioned solely as possessions of men.
The state had no interest in the lives of non-elite citizens. In modern America, the state investigates (or should) every homicide and prosecutes and punishes where guilty perpetrators are discovered. In ancient Rome, such matters were left to the families and relatives of the deceased. If they lacked the means to seek redress, nothing at all was done. If the matter was pursued, satisfaction was made by financial compensation.
In the case of elites, however, there was recourse to the courts:
“My absolute favourite court-based story from Rome is the story of Gaius Flavius Fimbria, whom Cicero called ‘a ferocious personality’ and a ‘lunatic.’ At the funeral of Gaius Marius . . . Fimbria stabbed the Pontifex Maximus, Quintus Mucius Scaevola. Scaevola was injured but not mortally. When Fimbria heard that he had failed to murder Scaevola . . . he lodged a charge against him instead. Baffled, a pal asked Fimbria what precisely he was prosecuting Scaevola for, as no one could work out what he was doing. Fimbria’s utterly wonderful response was that he was accusing him of ‘receiving [my] weapon into his body too gingerly.’ pp. 238-239
There were many types of murder and many classes of people who were murdered for many reasons. The chapters are organized by types of murder. Southon draws on a wealth of documentation (there are nine pages of end notes) to buttress her history, and is quick to acknowledge where sourcing is uncertain or dubious.
Not all of the book is funny. There are sections on the details of crucifixion and gladiator killings. Animals fared poorly, of course, but most humans at the time were held in no higher regard than animals and thus enjoyed no greater protection or consideration. Killing as entertainment is weird enough when it’s in the movies, but homicidal spectacle was a staple of Roman life. On the other hand, Southon’s account of the parking lot parties on the day Ted Bundy was electrocuted remind us that we haven’t progressed all that much.
Writing for a lay audience about ancient Rome, with its exotic and often redundant names, is challenging. Southon does a great job of enlivening what would otherwise be a soporific narrative by drawing on contemporary analogies to personalities and events to make them relatable to a 21st century western reader. She has an eye for good stories and a beguiling way of relating them (which seems odd, given the subject matter). Ultimately, this study of Roman murder shows us the lived experience of a blood-soaked Roman world underneath the marble columns, fancy mosaics, cool buildings, classic poetry and speeches, the barbarism that was integral to Roman “civilization.”
Man- I thought the gap between what I think and what some of my more conservative friends think was large. But it is apparently tiny compared to that between Roman ethics and even conservative thought in America. Whole different ballgame.
Thanks. Very interesting piece.
Several years ago, on a cruise very similar to the one I’m on now, I took to reading the trilogy by Robert Harris on the life & times of the Roman writer & politician Cicero. Just the thing for the likes of me on a cruise ship with a well stocked library.
Anyway, yes indeed, not too surprising perhaps in pre-Christian Rome, murder & assassination were rampant. There were no police as such, but gangs of bodyguards could be hired. Cicero was eventually assassinated in an act of revenge by one such.
One can see the origins of the modern mafia in all of this, perhaps.
I recommend the 3-volume series on the life of Cicero by Robert Harris (not Thomas Harris who wrote the Hannibal Lecter books) to get more insights on how it was in pre-Christian Rome. Murder and assassinations were rampant. Cicero himself was eventually assassinated for running afoul of an emperor.
@Fred,
Yes, Cicero featured prominently in this book.
in one of david graeber’s books (i forget just which one) he writes about something like dignitas. it appears to have been very common in early societies,
i am not so sure it has gone away. even in america you can get away with murder if you are rich enough. personally, i think i’d rather take my chances with that “law” than with organized police forces and “justice” systems. justice in america sometimes looks more like our version of the roman circus.
in any case, i think it would be a mistake to imagine we are either more “civilized” than others, or even understand our contemporaries as much as we think.
Some years ago I read a sci-fi novella on ‘first contact’ which postulated it happening on an earth still ruled by Rome. Like an Asimov story, the aliens were about to bestow their advanced tech on mankind (e.g. cancer cures & warp-drives) when they realized quite suddenly that humans still practiced slavery and decided to have nothing further to do with us. Imagine how they might react to our violent gun-toting tendencies.
@Fred,
H. sapiens is basically a species of overclocked apes. From time to time, we don the veneer of civilization, but nobody should be fooled. Not enough time has elapsed for our species to evolve into something different from the Roman Empire, the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The only meaningful difference today is thermonuclear warheads.
I have a friend, a recovering Texan. who reminds me that not so long ago slavery was still practiced. I tell him that putting a stop to was a really big deal.
@Fred,
Under Stalin, much of Moscow was built by slave labor.
I would not expect anything less from tyrants. Our Founders we’re not such.
Maybe dinosaurs persisted 100 times longer than we ever will because they were ‘unintelligent’?
The Ancient Greek record shows some similarities, some difference:
https://www.stoa.org/demos/article_homicide@page=all&greekEncoding=UnicodeC.html
The article examines legal and social attitudes toward murder, not toward human life. We don’t learn about “dignitas” or any equivalent idea among the Greeks.
FWIW, my kids both had 4 years of Latin in HS. Mrs Fred is something of a Latin fanatic, having done the same. My son had several years Latin prior in MS, got a dual-degree BA at a little Ivy & tested out of the language requirement. My brilliant daughter went to an engineering college with so such requirement, but got a HS graduation tribute from the Latin teacher both had shared that suggested she was among the finest pupils he had ever had. No AP Latin was offered because the syllabus was considered poor.
@Fred,
In our daughter’s case, this was about tracking. The kids in Latin were the high achievers. We were happy to see her in such company in a public school. In the event, she took two years of calculus, two years of biology and two years of chemistry as well.
Neither of us took Latin. As a one-time altar boy, my Latin responses were taped onto the steps that we knelt in front of, so I just had to mumble some facsimile of what was there. Then ring bells and hold the platter under the chins of people receiving communion.