2022/143: A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome — Emma South

2022/143: A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome — Emma Southon

No other society has built media empires on such mountains of dead and mutilated women. But, to us, the Romans look like the weird ones because they were fascinated by murder in a different way. We have our mountains of dead fictional girls. But they had mountains of dead real men. [loc. 85]

Murder in Ancient Rome came in many forms, and Southon explores them all: the 'social death' of enslaved persons, which meant that their actual deaths were trivial; the infamous murders of assorted emperors (I did not know that Claudius was the only Emperor to have been poisoned); death as spectacle in the arena; ritual murder and sacrifice; the high rate of infant mortality, and whether all those dead babies were killed deliberately or not.

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