I wish that all my history classes had been taught by Emma Southon or someone who has her talent for highlighting the absurd and revivifying long-dead people. Even though A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is all about death and the gruesome ways that it found people during the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, Southon’s gift for discussing Roman foibles really brought the historic figures to life in a way that just talking about their triumphs can’t. Books like this one feed my love of history and I plan to recommend it highly to anyone who expresses even the slightest interest in ancient Rome in my proximity.
I read A Fatal Thing at a serendipitous moment in the zeitgeist. True crime is incredibly popular and ubiquitous enough that a lot of us have a fair understanding of means, motive, and opportunity; police investigations; and criminal procedures. The way we do things is built on centuries of legal proceedings and progress in forensic science. If you take a look back at cultures that existed before English common law, such as the Roman Republic and Empire, it’s downright baffling to try and comprehend a society that relied more on family counsels, political wrangling, and outright revenge to find justice after a murder—or, even more confounding, to realize that some murders weren’t considered crimes at all.
Each of the chapters in A Fatal Thing focuses on a different segment of Roman society: enslaved people, prisoners, Roman citizens, politicians, criminals, the Imperial family, etc. By examining the deaths of these groups of people, Southon was able to dive into an astonishing array of topics in Roman history. I honestly feel like I got a semester or two’s worth of history stuffed into my head after reading this book. And I can’t say enough how much I love Southon’s pithy way of looking at things. This short example about the end of one of Augustus‘s heirs is a great example:
The Parthian-backed rebel king, who I feel deserved the throne just for being named Abbadon, sent Gaius [Augustus’ heir] an invite to chat in his camp. Come over to my military camp, the enemy said, let’s have tea. Gaius, being apparently an idiot, pottered over, possibily bearing a gift, and was shocked – shocked! – to discover that it was a trap and there was no tea, only stabbings.
Southon also makes a lot of jokes about Roman naming conventions, in which everyone is named after the pater familias. It’s really hard to tell a story when everyone has pretty much the same name.
I was fascinated by Southon’s deep dive into over a millennium of murder. Because we’ve done things the way we have for so long—i.e. jury trials, appeals, etc.—looking to the past caused a lot of sharp realizations on my end. For example, I was very unsettled by the realization that the Romans didn’t have police. How on earth could people live in cities as big as Rome and not have police enforcing the law? Or how can a whole society not only not have a concept of cruel and unusual punishment but turn executions into public entertainment? But perhaps the hardest realization was how much has remained the same. Although they didn’t really think this way, there were people in Roman society (enslaved people, people on the lower rungs of the social ladder) who could be killed with impunity as long as they weren’t too gross about it. Today, we talk about the “less dead.”
A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is one of the best works of history I’ve ever read and I encourage everyone who has an inkling in that direction to run, not walk, to find a copy.
