Emma Southon > Quotes

“Rome was built on the blood of Remus; the Republic was born from the death of Lucretia; the Empire grew from the assassination of Caesar.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“As had happened with Julius Caesar, it turned out that the people of Rome were actually quite keen on Gaius and were not fans of presumptuous senators and magistrates making unilateral decisions about the nature of Roman government with swords. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, they believed, not from some farcical bloody murder. Strange men in corridors distributing stab wounds was no basis for a system of government.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“As wood shattered bones and blood began to flow, the Republic was being inexorably mutilated along with the faces of a lot of Roman people.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Tiberius's brother, Gaius, was an absolute riot. Said to be the first person in Roman history to pull his cloak open and expose his shoulder while speaking, which is both pointless, and a bit sexy.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“While the wound was not fatal, Victorian medicine unfortunately was.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“the emperors who did this kind of thing were implicitly – and sometimes pretty explicitly – interpreting themselves as the state of Rome itself, rather than a servant of the state.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“In among all these little stories are two extraordinary tales of women who were neither acquitted nor convicted in their trials. Each woman is unnamed because the Romans try to avoid naming women if they can help it. One annoying walking uterus is much the same as another to the Romans.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“As the excellent Gretchen Weiners once said, ‘Brutus is just as cute as Caesar, right? Brutus is just as smart as Caesar, people totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar, and when did it become OK for one person to be the boss of everybody because that’s not what Rome is about!”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“In the historical record, the year 38CE started very badly with a bizarre act of public suicide. A slave called Machaon walked into the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline – one of the biggest and most sacred spaces in the city – carrying a puppy and a knife. Skip this next sentence if you are particularly squeamish. He climbed up onto the altar, screamed terrible predictions for the coming year at everyone watching and then killed the puppy followed by himself. I can only assume that he did this in an attempt to get himself in the history books, which was very successful as here I am in 2017 in my office thinking about him because he killed a puppy 1,979 years ago.”
― Emma Southon, Agrippina: Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore

“Appian tells us that the rich were hugely upset that the land that they had worked very hard on, and dedicated many enslaved people to, was going to be stolen from them so they’d lose all their work. Also, some of them had bought that land fairly from neighbours after the neighbours stole it from the state and people of Rome, so they were definitely being treated unfairly.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“If you’re bothered by something outside yourself, it’s not that thing which is bothering you but your reaction to it. So stop reacting to it . . . Take away your opinion and the complaint is taken away.20”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“This is how much Romans hated kings – it was illegal to shout ‘king’ at people in the same way it’s illegal to do the Nazi salute in Germany.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Murder is defined in England and Wales as ‘where a person (1) of sound mind (2) unlawfully kills (3) any reasonable creature (4) in being (alive and breathing through its own lungs) (5) under the Queen’s Peace (6) with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm’. All six conditions have to be met in order for a homicide to be considered a murder in an English court.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“the empire and began ruling as an official entity known as the Triumvirate in 44 BCE. Their rule was a reign of terror”
― Emma Southon, A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire

“[Cato] declared that the way to basically inoculate female genitalia against all diseases was to expose them to the warmed urine of a man who eats a lot of cabbages. Specifically, he recommended cutting a hole in a chair and getting the woman to sit her nude bottom down on it. Underneath the newly created and probably quite uncomfortable commode would be placed a bowl full of his own boiling cabbage piss, the smell of which must have been ungodly... until Cato decided that her fanny had been cystitis-proofed with piss gas, I guess. The image of Cato's grim, grim face glowering down at his poor wife as she hovers over a bowl of his stinking piss because she got thrush is almost too much to bear, to be honest.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Lucretia”
― Emma Southon, A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire

“Enslaved people were, obviously, always infames. They were basically dead anyway.1 The concept of infamia is fascinating to modern readers of Rome because the idea of telling a person to their face in a court of law that they literally don’t matter as far as the state is concerned seems utterly wild. Infamia meant that a person was excluded from the legal system, unable to prosecute harms against them and unable even to make a legal will. If you were infames and someone tried to kill you, tough titties. The law won’t help you.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Worst of all, when Lucius Tarquinius engaged in public building projects, like the Great Sewer, he forced free people to work instead of using enslaved labour. Romans found this to be wildly offensive: what was the point of enslaving people if they didn’t do all the work?”
― Emma Southon, A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire

“The seemingly random nature of these executions, which took place on the merest whim of the emperor, scared them. It rightly scared them because it restricted their freedom to do and say and write things without fear, but it also scared them because the emperors who did this kind of thing were implicitly – and sometimes pretty explicitly – interpreting themselves as the state of Rome itself, rather than a servant of the state. The legal justification”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Always remember that he took his troops across the Rubicon not to save Rome, but because he had refused to give up his job as governor of Gaul as it protected him from being prosecuted in Rome for crimes he had committed.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“surprised that they didn’t take this opportunity to declare a national emergency and appoint a dictator, but suspects that they were so riled up, they completely forgot that appointing a dictator and legally suspending democracy was possible.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“He was one of those men who didn’t distinguish between infamy and fame. Like Donald Trump running for election, Regulus didn’t care if people were saying good or bad things about him, as long as they were saying his name; whispering and pointing as he walked through the Forum, gossiping about him over dinner. It was all fame. Even better, Nero was thrilled. Nero saw Regulus as a heroic protector of his majesty and reputation and rewarded him with seven million sesterces and a priesthood.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Murder had been introduced as a solution to Roman political arguments and it could never be taken back.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Then there’s voluntary manslaughter. This is when you meant to hurt the victim but not to kill them.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Julia was thirty-seven when she was exiled. She had been married three times”
― Emma Southon, A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire

“Stoics hate reality; it’s too messy and emotional.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“Balbilla considered herself a woman and a poet equally”
― Emma Southon, A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire

“The poisoner of the people was a woman called Pontia, about whom we know very little except that she was the butt of many a scandalised poem in the high Empire. She appears first in Juvenal’s festival of misogyny, his sixth Satire, as an example of the very real and specific evils women could perpetrate. In Juvenal’s poem, Pontia is depicted as killing both of her sons by lacing their dinner with aconite and being utterly unrepentant about it. Juvenal’s Pontia laughs that had she had seven sons, she would have killed them all, leading Juvenal to compare her to Medea, who killed her children to spite her cheating husband in Greek myth and tragedy. Pontia appears again in several epigrams written by the absolute”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“But most forms of homicide are illegal, and there are lots of them. The lowest forms are called involuntary manslaughter in English and US law, and culpable homicide in Scottish law, and a bunch of other things in other places. They are incidents where maybe the perpetrator didn’t mean to kill that other person, but still someone died and it was definitely their fault.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“they fight and die to protect the luxury and wealth of others. They are called masters of the earth yet have not a single clod of earth that is their own.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome