Kathleen E.’s Reviews > A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome > Status Update

"It was...disruptive innovator Julius Caesar with his brilliant mind who found a way around this funeral situation and changed things forever. In 65 BCE, when JC was a low-key magistrate with a profile to match the amount of fucks he gave about tradition, but an unstoppable ambition, he held some gladiatorial games in the Forum Romanum in honour of his dad who had died two decades previously. It was genius."

"The existence of multiple overbearing women who kill their husbands for their sons in Roman literature did not mean that they did not exist, nor that they were the only husband-murderers who existed. It merely means that they were the only ones the Romans were afraid of."

"...there was no written law. What was and wasn't legal was up to the king, and then, when kings were booted to the kerb, to the priests. In 451 BC, however, it was decided, for whatever reason, that this situation was not a sustainable or useful way forward for Rome. [...a] committee of ten men with consular imperium, put together ten tablets of laws and then bolted on another two tablets the following year."

"What I am getting at here is that murder is a constructed act. The only black-and-white part of a murder is the bit where one person killed another, and that's actually the homicide bit. Homicide is clear cut, but murder is a label we apply to some forms of homicide, and that label changes across time and space."