Three Ways to Die in Ancient Rome
Some surprising and not-so-surprising examples of how the eternal city might kill a reckless time traveller.
1. Simply existing in Rome in Autumn
Rome was an unhealthy place. With a population of over a million people at the turn of the second century AD, no amount of public amenities was ever going to stop the ancient city from becoming a pathologenic disaster. To make matters worse, the city’s food supply chain extended as far as Upper Egypt — heightening the chances of a deadly new pathogen entering the system. Even before tackling the multiple plagues, it’s worth emphasising just how unhealthy Roman cities were to live in. Archaeological sites have turned up masses of skeletons which have been analysed, giving us some concrete data to work with.
Romans were the manlets of the Mediterranean. And as a certified Short King™ myself, I say that with the greatest of compliments. The height of deceased individuals can be inferred in two ways. First, by measuring the length of a complete skeleton. And second, by measuring the length of the femur (the largest and most durable bone in the body). Which one you choose to use depends on how big a sample size you want and how much skeleton is available. When it comes to 2,000-year-old dead people, the femur is a pretty good bet when it comes to the volume of surviving bones. From this data, we’ve discovered that not only were Romans short relative to us today, but they were shorter than the Italians who came before and after them. Not only that, but surviving teeth samples also show endemic levels of linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH), a developmental disease brought on by malnutrition. Again, at rates far higher than anything that came before or after.
It’s pretty clear that most Romans were malnourished. What’s more, the Romans were even more malnourished than Iron Age Italians. At this point, it’s handy to understand something important. Nutrition can be explained in an (extremely) over-simplified equation: FOOD INTAKE minus DISEASE equals NUTRITION. Eating enough of the right food is only half the battle. Your body is constantly fighting disease and the intensity of your local disease environment can impact your nutrition massively. The Roman diet certainly wasn’t great (regularly substituting grain for protein), but the evidence can only be explained by an extra virulent disease pool in the Roman empire. Specifically, Roman cities. And Rome was worst of all.
But disease virulence isn’t the same all year round. Galen and other ancient doctors debated endlessly which season was the worst for human health and concluded that “autumn is particularly baneful.” Epigraphical evidence has backed up that ancient view, with a large spike in mortality observed in the late summer/early autumn months. It’s also clear that Republican Senators and aristocrats routinely vacated the city during these months to avoid diseases, especially malaria, carried by the mosquitos which thrived in the surrounding as-yet-undrained marshland.
Considering that simply existing in a Roman city in Autumn was something actively avoided by actual Romans, I’d recommend you do the same.
2. Because your dad said so
It’s because of that damn phone. Or anything, to be honest. I don’t think you’d be shocked to learn that Roman society was entirely patriarchal, but the extent of this patriarchy often isn’t well known. In Roman law, the head of the family (familia) was called the paterfamilias (quite literally ‘father of the family’), applied to the eldest living male within a “household”. Elite Roman households were typically multi-generational but, more importantly, they were also legally multi-generational, meaning a great many people could conceivably be under the thumb of a given paterfamilias.
To give you an idea, let us imagine three generations of a Roman family. A grandfather, his two sons, their wives, and their children. Within this homely arrangement, despite the grandfather's children being adult males, the grandfather is the paterfamilias and is thus entitled to, in theory, absolute power (potestas) over the entire household. He has full ownership of the property and money of the entire family, even the possessions of his adult sons. Moreover, the paterfamilias alone could start proceedings in the courts, dispense property, and make legal wills. His consent was required to facilitate a valid marriage (along with the consent of the paterfamilias of the other party), although only one paterfamilias was needed to instigate a divorce. Should the paterfamilias die, Ulpian tells us:
Whoever were under his control start to have their own familiae, as each [male] individual takes on the title of paterfamilias.
The familia of the next generation did not legally begin until the previous generation died. This throws up all sorts of weird questions about practicality. How did young and upcoming sons of elites engage in clientage? How did they organise their own households (assuming they lived separately from their legal paterfamilias)? Are we supposed to believe women had no influence in the Roman family at all?
The realities of Roman life expectancy probably helped temper quite how dysfunctional a system like this could become. Reconstructions of Roman life tables have yielded an average age of death in the mid-twenties. While multi-generational households were typical, multiple contemporaneous living generations were not. Ulpian makes it clear that even minors could become paterfamilias if their father died before they came of age. Clearly, this fact would overcome some of the practical issues generated by this legal definition.
But what about life and death? Well, as has been established, the totality of the legal power theoretically available to the paterfamilias was essentially boundless. If he wished, he could even kill his relatives. When a family member under the potestas of the paterfamilias gave birth, the baby was ceremonially laid at the entrance to the family home. It was the right of the paterfamilias to either recognise the infant as legitimate by picking it up and bringing it into his home to be raised or to refuse and condemn the child to exposure (death) or enslavement. Summary execution of adult relatives was not out of the picture either. Roman jurists record with some trepidation the legal power of a paterfamilias to inflict punishments upon those under his power without a trial or even the knowledge of local magistrates. Provided, that is, a family council — a hearing of some kind — is held first.
Of course, the exercising of this theoretical power, and the power of the paterfamilias in general, was significantly less sexy in reality. The paterfamilias was constrained by social conventions, moral norms, and other laws. Arbitrarily killing members of your own family was sacrilege and a surefire way to ensure your own condemnation. In fact, there are very few examples indeed of this privilege being used at all. In one case, a certain Aulus Fulvius was implicated in the Cataline Conspiracy of 63 BC and, as Sallust puts it:
Aulus Fulvius, the son of a senator, whom, being arrested on his journey, his father ordered to be put to death.
In this instance, the right of the paterfamilias over life and death is invoked to justify what is essentially an extra-judicial killing (which were all the rage during the Cataline Conspiracy). The father allegedly argues that “he had begotten him, not for Cataline against his country, but for his country against Cataline.” Moreover, there is one other example of this legal right to kill being deployed in defence of the res publica. Outside of these very specific circumstances, however, the killing of family members by a paterfamilias is practically unheard of.
Perhaps it’s just the principle of it. These theoretical legal rights were enough to enforce a cultural ideology of patriarchy and strict adherence to societal norms. Whether or not it was wielded in reality, the paterfamilias represented the ultimate legal power, the power of life and death.
Beware ur da.
3. Checking the Astrology app on your phone
Okay — so maybe I’m not being entirely serious about this one. No one actually believes in astrology anymore, right? The Romans certainly did. Astrology was widespread in Hellenistic Greece before being imported into Roman culture along with so many other Greek fashions and concepts. Surprisingly, it was Julius Caesar’s decision to reform the Roman calendar and bring it back into step with the astronomical year which solved many of the issues involved with casting accurate horoscopes. Consulting the stars was especially popular with ambitious Republican Roman elites who wished to know the future and plan accordingly. Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, and Sulla all allegedly received “guarantees” that they would die of old age having lived a life of glory. Only one of those four men got that ending.
By the time of the Principate, the power of horoscopes was being utilised by the nascent emperors and incorporated into imperial ideology. A big part of the justification for the emperor being the emperor was that he was chosen by the Gods and fated for greatness. As such, birth charts and star signs are featured occasionally in imperial iconography. The example below includes the star signs of both the emperor Augustus (Capricorn) and his successor Tiberius (Scorpio).
In the Historia Augusta, emperor Septimius Severus (193–211 AD) is said to have had his own horoscope painted on a ceiling in the Imperial palace and used horoscopes to help himself remarry in 187 AD after his first wife died:
He had lost his wife, and now, wishing to take another, he made inquiries about the horoscopes of marriageable women, being himself no mean astrologer; and when he learned that there was a woman in Syria whose horoscope predicted that she would wed a king, he sought her for his wife, and through the mediation of his friends secured her.
Oh, Septimius, you’re such an Aries. Of course, this story has a twinge of convenient hindsight attached to it since it was obviously written after Septimius Severus became emperor. But an aspect of this source falls foul of an intriguing Roman law and leads me to my final cause of death. As noted, the emperor Augustus was keen to utilise horoscopes and astrology to promote his own right to rule but was also acutely aware of the destabilising effect consulting the stars had on ambitious people. As such, he issued an edict outlawing the private use of astrologers. Cassius Dio gives more information:
The seers were forbidden to prophesy to any person alone or to prophesy regarding death even if others should be present.
By the time of Septimius Severus, consulting oracles, seers, or horoscopes in order to learn about the health or date of death of the emperor was an act “punishable by death.” For both the consulter and the seer involved. Septimius being told his future wife “would wed a king” and him assuming it would be him certainly says a lot about the health of the previous emperor and what sort of fate he might befall. Septimius already beat some charges of using horoscopes while governor of Sicily. In fact, he beat them so hard the guy accusing him got crucified. Cold.
While he was in Sicily he was indicted for consulting about the imperial dignity with seers and astrologers, but, because Commodus was now beginning to be detested, he was acquitted by the prefects of the guard to whom he had been handed over for trial, while his accuser was crucified.
Still, privately checking horoscopes and enquiring after knowledge derived from the stars was a deadly business in ancient Rome and, certainly, something time travellers ought to be aware of.
Further Reading:
Flower, H. I. (edd.) (2006), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic, Cambridge University Press. — Chapter on Family and Domus
Harper, K. (2017), The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Princeton University Press.
Volk, K. (2006), Manilius and his Intellectual Background, Oxford University Press. — Chapter on horoscopes and astrology
