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One of the big debates in history is the extent to which people in the past were more or less like us, and to what extent they were a totally alien history. Rome has an outsized influence on contemporary Western culture and government. And to the extent that Anglo-American culture is absolutely obsessed with murder (the 11:00 news, true crime podcasts, murder thriller bestsellers, prime-time police procedurals...), we're a lot like the Romans in their obsession with death. But the details are almost entirely different.
The big one is that the Romans didn't really have a crime of murder, at least not in the way that we have it. Murder is a crime both against the dead person and their loved ones, but also against the State. Romans would see that as deeply weird. Murder was a private business. Instead, what they had was an absolute shit-ton of homicide.
After all, Rome was an empire built on slavery and war, where something like 50% of emperors were assassinated or couped (and another 10% committed suicide in the face of immediately fatal circumstances). Republican politics from Sulla to Julius Caesar was a process of armed gangs being used to settle issues. So there were a bunch of high profile public murders which shaped the destiny of empire, and then the ordinary day to day practice of gladiatorial games interspersed with public executions against people the state deemed enemies.
But someone close to you got murdered, the options were very different. Most killings were a matter for the familia, the large lineage/patronage networks that control Rome. If it was interfamilia, say a husband murdering a wife, the matter of justice would be up to the patriarch to decide. Murder between familias was a matter of lawsuits (and the Romans loved lawsuits), or good old fashioned feuds.
Southon skips through different types of murders, including those by and against slaves, by magic and poison, and by imperial informers. She has a refreshingly open attitude towards the classics, noting that our surviving sources were written by incredibly wealthy men postulating an official attitude of stoicism totally at odds with how they, and most ordinary Romans lived. In short, Cicero may have written a lot, but even if he's at the high end of reliable for Romans, it'd still be like taking Alan Dershowitz at face value for 21st century American culture. The flip side of this openness is very colloquial writing style. I'm not a person who says that the classics must be staid and inaccessible, but this book is written like an extended social media post. Tweet 1/2754, and so on. The style is engaging in the moment, but I think it'll age like milk. In a hot car. In Arizona.
But hey, given the state of the classics, I can't say doing it the old way was working. I think I'd rather read this than The Inheritance of Rome. And Southon is up front about her assumptions and inferences from the surprisingly spotty record.
The big one is that the Romans didn't really have a crime of murder, at least not in the way that we have it. Murder is a crime both against the dead person and their loved ones, but also against the State. Romans would see that as deeply weird. Murder was a private business. Instead, what they had was an absolute shit-ton of homicide.
After all, Rome was an empire built on slavery and war, where something like 50% of emperors were assassinated or couped (and another 10% committed suicide in the face of immediately fatal circumstances). Republican politics from Sulla to Julius Caesar was a process of armed gangs being used to settle issues. So there were a bunch of high profile public murders which shaped the destiny of empire, and then the ordinary day to day practice of gladiatorial games interspersed with public executions against people the state deemed enemies.
But someone close to you got murdered, the options were very different. Most killings were a matter for the familia, the large lineage/patronage networks that control Rome. If it was interfamilia, say a husband murdering a wife, the matter of justice would be up to the patriarch to decide. Murder between familias was a matter of lawsuits (and the Romans loved lawsuits), or good old fashioned feuds.
Southon skips through different types of murders, including those by and against slaves, by magic and poison, and by imperial informers. She has a refreshingly open attitude towards the classics, noting that our surviving sources were written by incredibly wealthy men postulating an official attitude of stoicism totally at odds with how they, and most ordinary Romans lived. In short, Cicero may have written a lot, but even if he's at the high end of reliable for Romans, it'd still be like taking Alan Dershowitz at face value for 21st century American culture. The flip side of this openness is very colloquial writing style. I'm not a person who says that the classics must be staid and inaccessible, but this book is written like an extended social media post. Tweet 1/2754, and so on. The style is engaging in the moment, but I think it'll age like milk. In a hot car. In Arizona.
But hey, given the state of the classics, I can't say doing it the old way was working. I think I'd rather read this than The Inheritance of Rome. And Southon is up front about her assumptions and inferences from the surprisingly spotty record.