After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Dark Side of Ancient Rome

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

As a lot of new listeners have joined us, and it's a bank holiday in the UK, we thought we'd re-run one of our earliest, goriest episodes. Trust us, this episode is a bloody delight: from flesh-eating fish and humiliating deaths inside sacks, to a deadly re-enactment of the Icarus myth. For a culture that is seen as an emblem of civilisation (whatever that means), the Romans expended a lot of creative energy on inventing new ways to kill people. And our guest today knows them all!Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling are joined by the one and only Emma Southon author of A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Her new book is A History of Rome in 21 Women.Mixed by Tom Delargy. Producer is Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hi, everyone. it's Maddie. I'm jumping on to say that we've had a lot of new and lovely listeners lately who've

joined us and we wanted to say that you are really welcome. Now because of this, and because it's a bank holiday here in the UK, we thought that we would rerun one of our earliest episodes, one with the great historian Emma Southern. It's all about the dark and gory side of ancient Rome. It's a good one. And trust us, it gets very dark, so needless to say, there is adult and sensitive content throughout this episode. We will be back with new episodes on Thursday, including the story of the Edwardian Dr Death. See you then. on Thursday, including the story of the Edwardian Dr. Death. See'm Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And today we're shining a light on murder in ancient Rome. Because that's what we do here on After Dark.

It was a really interesting conversation that we had with Emma Southern, right? Like it was one of those ones where there was a couple of times where you and I just looked at each other going, is this actually being said out loud? I mean, she's just the most fantastic guest. She is so incredibly knowledgeable and so generous with that knowledge.

And she's great fun as well. And we talked about possibly some of the most gruesome things we've ever talked about. For me, it's the flesh eating fish that stand out more on that to come. What about you, Anthony? What was your what was your favorite gruesome part of our discussion with Emma? I had never thought of the fact that if you were going to be killing somebody, which wasn't crime apparently, but if you're going to be

killing somebody what you should do is tie them in a sack with a dog, a snake and a plethora of other animals as well just to make the death a little bit more chaotic and a little bit more intense. I was like, it's so imaginative. I'm sorry there's a sack of animals and you're tying a human person into the thing as well. This is just the most intense. Not to mention, of course, flinging people across coliseums and all that. Like there is every type of death in this episode. And it truly is. Yeah. I mean, Emma has uncovered some truly remarkable ingenuity in human killing. It's grim. It's dare we say funny in places. You're going laugh at death, guys. Yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting.

And we should say that no dogs were harmed in the making of this episode. Well, actually, some dogs were, like they're ancient dogs. But some ancient dogs may have been harmed. We didn't harm any dogs. We have not done the harming of the dogs. Right. I think without further ado, let's hear from Emma. Emma Southern, welcome to After Dark. Hi, thank you so much for having me. It's so lovely to have you here. Big fans, big fans.

You will be very excited listeners to hear that we've brought Emma all the way here to speak about murder. Yeah, the best thing to talk about, but even better because it's Roman murder, so it's even gorier and weirder and more horrible than modern murder. We're so excited. Why murder in ancient Rome? What's different about it compared to murder any other time? People have been killing each other since the beginning of time and continue to do so. What's special?

That's the way to look at life, man. People have been killing themselves. The fundamental thing about humans is that we like to kill each other. We do. Some more than others. Yeah. Well, the Romans liked to kill each other more than most people. They were really, really murdery people. They don't have a law against murder for a surprisingly long time. So they have a kind of maybe sort of cobbled together, try not to kill people law in the 12 tables, but it's not really anything. It's just like, do your best.

So just to get this right, it is legal to kill people? Kind of, yeah. In your nature room. But it's a civil matter is what it is. So if you killed me, then my husband could take you to court and be like, Maddie, you totally did this murder. Sounds about right. Could he kill me as revenge for that?

Would that be okay? I mean, yes, but then your family would have to come back. It's a downward spiral. But they are very litigious and Romans love what they love even more than killing one another is taking each other to court. So he could take you to court or he could go to your family and be like, look, she murdered Emma, you give me some money and we'll call the whole thing quits. But it would be a civil matter so they've not got like a police force or anything involved until like 80 BCE, which is like late republics are quite late, 700 years into Roman times. So what was the what was the kind of outlook on murder then? Were people kind of just going

oh such and such was murdered the other day it's just a cause of death? Or was there like any kind of moral attached to it? There is a moral, like try not, like don't do it. I mean, if people do murders and nobody's going to invite you to dinner. But one you have, people don't really go around murdering other free people that much. And that is a really big distinction

because they have slaves and they have so many enslaved people by the time, like they're expanding constantly. And the thing that the Romans do as soon as they have slaves and they have so many enslaved people by the time, like they're expanding constantly and the thing that the Romans do as soon as they have invaded somewhere is they try not to kill that many people because they make so much money off of enslaving and selling people. And they call this war commerce, which is lovely. But they have so many enslaved people in their houses, in their fields, in every form of industry, and those people you can kill with impunity. So if you need to take your temper out on somebody right up until the fourth century, like mid fourth century is when you get the first law that says you can't murder enslaved people, but in these specific ways. And then it does like a whole page in the law books that survive from

them that is all the ways that you can no longer kill an enslaved person. So it goes, you can't beat them to death unless it's by accident. If you're beating them and they happen to die, then that's fine. Obviously you can beat them really hard, but just don't let like on purpose. You can't beat them to death. Can't set fire to them. Can't push them off of a cliff. You can't drown them.

And it's just like this huge list of ways that people apparently were killing enslaved people all the time. So if you have that kind of desire to take your temper out on somebody, then there's always an enslaved person who's nearby. And if it's your enslaved person, then you don't have to do anything. And if it's somebody else's enslaved person, then you just have to pay them what they're worth. And would enslaved people be entitled to murder as a reaction to that? Absolutely. There is actually a very famous case from the reign of Nero because the law was by the time of the empire, the kind of emperors, there are so many enslaved people in Rome that it's actually made the free Romans quite anxious. So they instituted this law

that if an enslaved person murdered their master, their owner, their enslaver, then every single enslaved person in the household would be executed in retaliation. So really reasonable. Extremely reasonable and much like the Romans do in everything, in no way is it wildly out of proportion. But what happens is a Gaia who used to be the urban prefect, who's very, very rich, is murdered by one of his enslaved attendants, possibly because he promised to free this guy and then

reneged on his promise, which is a terrible thing to do. So he kills him and the army are preparing to kill all of the other slaves, but he has in that house, just in that house in Rome, 400 enslaved people, including women and children. And so when they're all taken to be crucified, and this happens in a very public place in Rome, and the people of Rome, the kind of non-massive slave-owning landowners, riot basically and try to stop it. And so it goes to the Senate who have a discussion like are the people right and we should stop this and this is actually extremely bad or will we write all along and we should do this? And the argument is preserved by Tacitus and he says like, basically the argument

against is, ooh, that's terrible. But the argument for is as free Romans, they all also have everybody in the Senate also has 400, 200, several hundred enslaved people in their house. They don't put their own clothes on, they don't do their own hair, they've never done anything like, they don't tie up their own shoelaces. They have just enormous armies of enslaved people in their houses. And the conservative argument says if we don't do this, then all of those enslaved people that put you to bed and make your food and pour your water they'll know that they can kill you and get away with it and how are you going to go home and go to sleep if you don't do this and make them know that there

is going to be consequences and not just for them but for their wives for their children for their brothers for their friends and and so all of the men in the Senate go, no, yeah, you're right, my peace of mind is more important. Like this system of slavery is way more important than these people. And so they send in like half a legion to surround the entire group of enslaved people and they crucify them. Wow. Yeah. In one go, 400 people. Yeah. It's not the most people they ever did in one go. I think 6,000 is the most. In one go. Yeah. I mean, that's a village. It is. It's that's after the Spartacus uprising. So when they eventually finish him off, they everybody who is with him, they

crucify them all along the Via Appia, the main road outside of Rome. So all along the road,ia, the main road outside of Rome. So all along the road there's six thousand. Emma just looked at me during that one, she said, the Spartacus uprising, like I knew what that was. I may have a PhD in history, but this is all new to me. Us two 18th century historians just looking at each other like, wow, hold on, this is history then? You've never seen Stannis Kubrick's Spartacus? There's not all that bit in it, weirdly. That's my kind of history, if it's on the screen. So one thing that really strikes me about

that though is that it's really as much about the spectacle as the punishment, right? And one thing that you've kind of briefed us on before we started recording Emma is the sheer variety and inventiveness of how the Romans killed each other. Do you want to talk us through a few things? Now the first thing I want to talk about, flesh eating fish. Tell us more. So this is one particular guy and this is the best example of you can be a genuine psychopath like Ted Bundy levels of swivel-eyed and cruel in the Roman world and everybody will treat it like a minor personality quirk as long as you're only doing it to enslaved people. So we only know this story and that he did this because he tried to do

it in front of the Emperor Augustus, who was a friend of his. So it's a guy called Vettius Polo, who is a kind of man about town. He's like a very rich kind of merchant guy in late Republican early Imperial Rome. And he's notorious for owning lots and lots of wild animals, like exotic animals is his big thing. And he invites Augustus around for dinner. Augustus goes, and then one of the people, the enslaved people bringing dishes drops a crystal bowl and breaks it. And Vettius Polo goes, right, that's it, execution. Can't be doing that in front of the emperor. One strike, you're out, execution. And the slave drops their knees to Augustus and says, please don't let him do this.

Please, I beg you. He's not just going to execute me. He's not going to crucify me like the normal guys do. He's going to throw me in the pit of lampreys and reveals that somewhere in his house, Spolio has a pit of sea lampreys. Like a Bond villain. Yes. So this is like one of his exotic things that he has in his house.

And sea lampreys are, and I highly recommend anybody Google them because it's really hard to really impress how horrifying they are. They are about two or three foot long. They've got no face what they've got is a just a big circular mouth which is just teeth or like circles and circles and circles of teeth and what they do in the sea is they latch onto bigger fish and then they just kind of rasp off the like a kind of leech but worse and they just kind of suck off the flesh and then swim away. How many times have these fish been undercover of vogue? Because they sound stunning.

I mean they are under no circumstances genuinely horrifying. They're one of the worst things that exist. They're older than dinosaurs. Like they evolved perfectly to be nightmarish for all things millions and millions of years ago and then never changed because they're terrible. And Puglio thought this was great. And so apparently what he was doing was in order to punish enslaved people in his household was throwing people into this and then letting their lampreys latch onto them and rasp them to death, essentially. Not quick, right? No, because one, lampreys don't really like warm-blooded things. Like they almost never

bite people because they like cold blooded meat. So you'd have to have them really be hungry in order to eat you. But also it's going to be a wound and then you're going to bleed to death basically. They're going to rasp a bit off of you and then you're going to bleed slowly and horribly and painfully to death in the middle of one of the nicest houses you've ever seen. There's something so horrifying of course, but there's so much there about the performance of power as well, right, and that this is in front of the emperor. And I'm really interested what you said about the fact we only know about this because the

emperor was there and therefore it's written down and it's an anecdote. Yeah, and it's only written down, not because Augustus is like, don't do that, but because he has a, it's written down in tracks about his clemency and about how he never gets angry about stuff. And so his response is to say, don't do that. That's deranged. But also he has all of the rest of the china and crystal in the house smashed in order to tell Velia so that's not okay. So we only know about it because of Augustus' reaction. If he had just been like, or if he had been one of the worst emperors and thought that was very funny indeed, then we

wouldn't know about it. So we have no idea how many other people were doing stuff like this in their house and doing these really performative, spectacular, horrifying punishments to one another or to the enslaved people. We know they were crucifying them all the time. We know they were putting them on islands whenever they got sick to die because Claudius makes that illegal. And we know that they were doing things like beating them to death, burning them to death, drowning them and things like that, but these kind of elaborate punishments. And see, this is what happens when you start talking about the raiment and murder is you start going like, and obviously they were beating them to death and burning them together

as though those things are soul crushingly terrible. As if they're just, oh yeah, those are the normal things that we do every day. Yeah. And the fact that, you know, a lot of these things seemingly at the whims of the people enacting those punishments and then the people who are like, actually guys, maybe we don't do that. That seems completely random and down to individual personalities. Yeah, because so much of this is down. There's no real state for most of Roman history. There's no official police force or written down set of laws until quite late in Roman history. And so everything is kind of at the whim of weather.

It's a free for all. Yeah, it's what's called a self-help legal system. Oh, wow. Yeah, which is about as effective as that sounds. A bag full of things that a dead person is inside. Yes. Tell me about this bag. That actually is a punishment than the Romans could enact to the one type of murder that

they thought was worth legislating against, which is parasite, or especially killing a father, patricide, because fathers in Roman culture are just unbelievably important. They're the most powerful, most important. And respect to your father is not just a filial duty, but a sacred duty and it's against the gods to hurt your father. Disobeying your father is bad enough. Hitting your father would get you dragged up into a court if somebody wanted to. But killing your father, if you get accused of that, that's the kind of thing that the Romans find like profane, like genuinely upsetting in a way. And so they devise this punishment which we call the sack. I don't like this already.

Which is if you are found guilty of patch side of killing a father, then you are sewn inside a sack with a dog, a chicken, a monkey and a snake. Is it always those animals? Yeah. Are they alive? They're alive. Okay. And thrown into a body of water.

So if you're in Rome in the Tiber or the sea or whatever is closest, wherever you are in the emirate, thrown into a body of water. And then you are left to drown while also fighting for very frightened animals. And it is very, very strange. It's a very horrible way to die. And when they talk about it, they talk about it in a way that is clear that they know it's a horrible thing to do. Cicero claims that the sack is done so that even when you die and then you wash up on the shore, that your bones will never know the freedom of air and soil

ever again. So you have profaned so badly against the world that you are never allowed to touch the world ever again. The animals, no one ever tries to explain those. They're like, yeah, and obviously we put the chicken in there. And then that freaks out. Do they have symbolic meaning? So it's just to corrupt the human body, I guess. Yeah. It's like embarrassing to be mixed in with these things. It's going to be deeply frightening for everyone involved, because I feel like even being stuck with one of those animals in a bag

while drowning, they're going to be freaking out. And can you pick your own dog and your own snake and your own monkey and your own chicken? Would you want to take your own dog? Oh, I don't know. It'd be better than a stranger's dog. Anthony has a very badly behaved puppy, so maybe that's cool. Maybe, yeah. I'm not going to drown her just for clarity's sake. Just to be clear.

I don't know if I'd want to go down with my dog and be like, at least I have the comforting presence of a dog that I love, or if I'm like, no, save her. Yeah, yeah, true. It's true. I mean that says so much about the Roman psyche, doesn't it? It's absolutely fascinating. So obviously one of the sort of the most famous ways that Romans are killing each other in terms of spectacle is in the Colosseum. So let's talk a bit about gladiatorial combat and death in that scenario. Is that seen as separate from these other ways of killing that are happening?

It is. To me, I included it in the book because to me it is the same. It is very deliberate and sometimes very, very deliberate, like pause and a decision and the gladiator says, do I kill this guy? And whoever is the editor, it was called the editor, the person who's running the games. And I had to work so hard not to make jokes about that in the book, about editors having the power of life and death. We all have very nice editors here. I do. We all love our editors. But it's deliberate homicide, which is murder by definition.

It doesn't happen as much as people think it does in the arena, so gladiatorial games are somewhere between kind of boxing and fencing, but turned up to 11. The pleasure of it for the most part is watching two highly trained or two groups of very highly trained warriors fight each other until one of them is forced to submit. And so watching that kind of, it's not something that I would go to see, I don't think because I don't like boxing, but it is watching two kind of very well trained, very expert fighters fight one another and like the parrying and the maneuvers and you can get excited about that stuff. But then at the end, they will be bleeding and hurt. And as

far as we can tell from kind of graves and things like that, a lot of them just die off stage from head injuries, from broken bones, from wounds that don't heal. But there is always the possibility that it always ends with one going down and then the editor deciding whether they can live or die by turning the thumb, which I don't know what that means. Yeah. And is it true that we don't actually know which way up or down the thumb was in relation to? We don't know. All we have is we have one reference to the turning of the thumb, the

editor turning the thumb. But we don't know. You should watch Gladiator, the answer is in there. It is a very accurate film. I'd say it's spot on in terms of all the history and it's all great. You're very welcome, that solved that mystery. I can't believe they have thought of that. Ridley Scott, their aunt. Yeah, it was there all along. So most of the time they're probably going to say no, one, because the gladiator is very expensive and you have to train them

and you can't just go killing them off all the time. But sometimes they're going to say yes if the audience wants it or if it seems like a good ending or if it just seems right in the occasion. And then they're going to put a gladiator straight through the jugular. Okay, so it's quite, they're not messing around after the big spectacle of the fight. It is quite a clean. It is. Although when I was researching this, I was like, I wonder what that would look like. Is it going to be like, nobody's really going to see very much because they're far away

in the arena. But some people who like doctors and an army specialist person, who I didn't want to ask how he knew, told me that it will be like the inn will be pretty clean. But once they take the sword out, because of the adrenaline and because the amount of effort that it takes to get blood up into your skull, you're going to get like a four to six foot spurt of blood. And so that would look pretty spectacular. Spectacular, yeah. That's a real crowd-feaser.

And it really would Spectacular, yeah. That's a real crowd teaser. And it really would make people, yeah. I like the way we all went at the same time, spectacular. See the thing is that when you think about it, you would be like, if you were there and you'd gone and you saw it and it was a run of rare occasion, you kind of would be like, wow. Yeah. You're getting your money's worth.

Yeah. This is gruesome, but at the same time, look at that flow. I mean, that is a real, yeah, like that's six've six foot of blood you're not gonna see that every day. So in terms of the fighting that's going on before these spectacular spurting deaths are happening or not happening depending on the whims of the editor and whoever else, what kind of fights I know that they am I right in thinking they recreated battle scenes and myths sometimes was that a big part of it Was everything really choreographed and scripted? So they're choreographed in a way, there's certain, there's like various classes of Gladiator.

So everybody has their like specialisms. So you get like the Mermelo, which is the kind of famous one. You see them in Gladiator with like the big round hat that looks like a diving bell thing. And then you have like galley and you have like guys with nets and guys with tridents and all of these different types. And then they are paired in specific combinations. So you will always see like a, you'll never see like a light armed one who's just got a net and a trident against a heavily armed one who's got a giant broadsword or whatever. So they're matched quite evenly.

Yeah, so there's always going to be an even match because nobody wants to see a Premier League team play a part-time team from your village. I'll pretend I understand football for that analogy. When I was writing this, I had to do so much Googling. For some reason, I thought it would be a really good idea to put loads of football metaphors in. Just Googling sports analogies. Yeah, like what is the best football? Football FC. But nobody wants to see that. And the same way they don't want to see like a puny guy

with a net fighting a big guy with a sword. They want to see two big guys with swords fighting each other. And there are going to be like moves that everybody knows. They're going to be like, oh, he's doing this one. He's got that tactic. And then when on special occasions, you do get these really massive recreations of battles, but they tend to be executions rather than gladiatorial for the most part. So you get things like Claudius had this big thing where he drained a lake and it ended up being a minor disaster because they had this whole party and everybody went out from Rome to go and see it. And he did this thing where he recreated a huge naval battle with enslaved prisoners on rafts, like fighting each other and people. This is the only place where it

is recorded that the we who are about to die salute you. That's the only time that that was as far as we know that was ever said. Okay, so there is some truth in that. Yeah, I'm glad it is. I'm telling you guys, primary source. Yeah, so they all have this big fight on the lake, loads of people die, it's full of bodies, and then they go to open the kind of gates to drain it and then it doesn't work. They've not dug it deep enough and so it's just really embarrassing and everybody has to go.

Oh gosh. So they die for nothing. And then he does it again six months later. But you do get and they sometimes will build kind of big like special sets so that they can do this. But they do tend to be executions. Like everybody who is involved in this is going to die. And if they don't die in it, then they're going to be. And what kind of numbers are we talking here for those kind of arranged executions? Probably in the hundreds, I would say. It's going to be in three figures. So it's going

to be pretty spectacular. Also just the expectation on the enslaved people to go, right, you're going to die on Wednesday, but before you die, here's an entire script that you're going to have to learn. And they're like, oh, what's in this for us? Nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you get this a lot because executions end up being so common that they have to liven them up, basically. To one, just to show off what they can do. And two, just to keep it entertaining so that people will still come and see them.

Because you need people to see the execution in order for the execution to have an impact. If you execute people off stage in the Roman psyche, then you've, like, what's the point? The point is that everybody needs to see that this is what happens when you do anything against the Roman state, and it's brutal, brutal and it's horrible and it's humiliating. And so you do see most of the descriptions that we have apart from the opening of the Coliseum, but we have descriptions

from early Christians who were executed and who were often pushed into engaging in big mythological reenactments that would end up with them being executed. And so like Saint Perpetua who is executed in Carthage in 212, they try to make her dress up as a priestess and then kind of frolic about in this mythological scene and she's like, no. Like if you're going to execute me, you're going to execute me with some dignity. They do not execute her with dignity. She is gored by a cow. Butred by a cow. But they do like press these into people and some people obviously do push back and they're like, okay, if you're not going to go out there then, or if you're going to make it look rubbish, then we won't make you do it. But a lot of the time people will go along with it and a surprising amount of the

time will join in the fighting and possibly in the hope that they might be able to, because everything's such a whim in Rome, like you never know when you're going to fight really well and then the emperor or the editor or someone will go, oh, he was really good, save him. So there is opportunity, potentially. Potentially, I mean, not very much, but you never know. Or the emperor will just be like, no, these people here, unlike any of them, just murder them all. Time to go. It's really a 50 50. Was there moral objection from Romans about this? Were there any Romans who didn't?

Sounds like a great my dad. I mean, if there were, they weren't recording it. Christians were unhappy about it for fairly obvious reasons. Mainly that they were very often by the second century, the guys that were- Yeah, they were being made to do the bad choreography. And so they thought it was very bad. They also just generally don't like games and things like that. And so they have quite a lot of moral objections. And you get kind of, like stoic philosophers will sometimes talk about how they don't like the lack of control, basically.

So Seneca writes a bit about how he doesn't really like the games that much and Cicero does. But it's related to their philosophical outlook, basically, rather than any great objection to the murdering part. It is the crowd kind of interaction that they're less keen on. But if there were, they didn't survive. There are no kind of great surviving tracks against these executions. And most of the things that do survive are the celebrations of them.

The, oh my God, you won't believe what this guy did. They record them because they are so weird to see and so like outrageously theatrical and elaborate that people write them down in a kind of, wow, that was wild. And that is how they survive rather than people writing them down being like, they made this guy into, they dressed him up as Icarus and then just wanged him across the arena. Which is a thing that happened in the hundred days of the opening of the Coliseum where dressed him up as Icarus and then just wanged him across the arena. Wow. Which is a thing that happened in the hundred days of the opening of the Coliseum where they dressed Agarpe as Icarus and then…

Well, it was a hundred days to film, right? Yeah, there was a lot of some ideas. And they had some ideas. Some of them were unbelievably horrific. But yeah, one of them is that they… Wow. With the intention that they knew he would die at the end. Oh yeah, but the intention that he would die on impact.

Yeah. Like that's the whole… They do the whole myth they knew he would die at the end. Oh yeah, with the intention that he would die on impact. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that's the whole, they do the whole myth and then he... And there's another one where they had this kind of, this all comes from Marshall's descriptions. He wrote loads of poems about the opening of the Coliseum under Titus. And so he's written all of these lovely poems about the things that he saw. And so there's one where they kind of set up this beautiful scene of a kind of bucolic garden and there's like little bunnies hopping about and they've dressed up these people as like orpheus and he's lying down in the garden and then a bear just eats him.

Well that's one way to go. Fantastic. Yeah. And so they're like very, like they have narrative tension. Like you know something bad is going to happen but you don't know when and you don't know if you like it. But the bunnies are nice. Yeah. And you know the bad thing is coming. So we've done a really performative killing of all kinds. What about magical killing? What about killing that's happening surreptitiously from a distance? This is a thing in Rome.

This is a thing that I think that people don't talk about enough, which is that the Romans really really strongly believe in magic. They really think it's a thing that is dangerous and that could come and get you at any moment. That has a tangible impact in the real world. And so you get lots of epitaphs, for example, like tombstones that say Sandra died at 28 because she was killed by witchcraft by somebody unknown. Poor Sandra. Poor Sandra. And like this person has died of long illness and sometimes they'll say,

you know, she was ill, poor Sandra was ill for, sorry if anyone's called Sandra. I hope you're all right. Sandra's fine. Yeah. She died of long illness for a year and eight months and we know therefore that it was witchcraft. Somebody cursed her and we don't know why. Or you will sometimes they'll say they know exactly who cursed her. So I'd be like, my daughter died after a year of long illness and she was cursed by my ex-freed woman who I married and then she left me, which is a real one that happened where an eight-year-old died and her father

put up this massive tombstone that says she died because I freed my enslaved person and married her and you'd think she would have been grateful but she wasn't and she just ran off with someone that she actually liked and then cursed my daughter. Actually that's something because in the 18th century, which Maddie and I tend to look at in her own work more often, witchcraft and magic is very gendered generally, where mostly towards women. Is that what you find that in ancient Rome too? Not so much. You do very much get men who are accused of magic as well. And wizards are a big thing. So the biggest cases that we have poisoning is a woman's thing, but magic is for both. So you have Germanicus who is killed. He's a prince of Rome. So he's the adopted son

of the emperor Tiberius. And everyone thinks that Tiberius hates him because he's cooler than Tiberius and better looking and has more children. Those things mean that Tiberius hates him. And he- Those are the criteria in ancient Rome for masculinity, right? And people actually like him and nobody really likes Tiberius. Tiberius is a very awkward man. He doesn't like anybody and nobody likes him.

Whereas Germanicus is a kind of charming and delightful man and everyone thinks he's charming and delightful. And he's magical? And no, he's not magical. The person who allegedly kills him is magical. His guy called Piso. So Germanicus goes off to the east and he dies in Syria of kind of mysterious unknown illness. Unrelated, he had just come back from a Nile cruise. So he dies of something unknown, and everybody believes that Piso has killed him by putting curses and magical things, which are described as blood-soaked ashes and human remains, in his walls of his house, and that this curse has killed him. I'm speechless.

I mean, it's probably true. It wasn't the cruise. It wasn't the cruise. It's never the cruise. No, it's never, never any of the disease. I mean, okay, I know we need to wrap things up, but there's so many questions. And I just want to ask Emma just one thing before we wrap things up. You clearly have, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, quite a lot of murders in your head. Yeah. You ain't at Roman Murders. Is there one that's your favourite? My favourite actually is one of the very few cases that we have of like real domestic murder, like interpersonal murder, which is when a guy threw his wife out of a window, like on

the Palatine Hill in the middle of Rome. He just chucked her out of a window. And there's kind of possibly maybe there was something going on with like some family stuff to do with him abusing some children maybe, but he threw her out of the window and then just kind of tried to style it out essentially. Was so really expected that nothing would happen to him because he was very high ranking and he told everybody that she had sleepwalked her way out of the window while he was asleep and he had just woken up to find her that way.

Suspicious. But her father was a very close friend of Tiberius's and Tiberius would take these whims sometimes where he would go off and investigate stuff. So himself. Yeah. So he went and colombo the situation and actually went to the house when the murder occurred to see the scene of the crime, which happened so rarely in Rome that they hadn't tied it up. And Tiberius sees what's described as evidence of force employed. So like the curtains have been pulled off the wall, like the furniture's all over the place. But no one has bothered to try and cover up the crime because it's just

so unlikely that anyone is ever going to come and look and see what's going on. And as a result, he allows a prosecution to be brought against the husband and the husband is convicted. And then his friends try to get him off by saying that his ex, his kind of previous wife before the one he killed had cursed him. And so that was why he had done it. It wasn't because he was a bad guy. It was because he had been cursed by magic. It's because he has one ex that's a witch and the other one's sleepwalked. Yeah. So this ex-wife is like, hang on, hang on, I'm a what now? I was just shopping.

I've literally, we've not spoken in years. Yeah, and the whole situation is just so obviously, it's just so out of what you would expect. Like you expect if someone does a murder the first thing they're going to be like, oh my god, hide the evidence. But he's just so convinced that there will be no chance that he'll ever, that anyone is ever going to question him about it. So anyone would ever question his word that, oh, she just sleepwalked out the window, that he just doesn't bother to tie to her. Also, side note, Tiberius would have had a podcast.

Oh, yeah, he definitely would. There's a whole thing with him investigating dinosaur bones as well that's great. Season two. Yeah, someone write this now, please. Emma, I think that's all we've got time for. Thank you so much. This has been quite literally a bloody delight.

So thank you. Yes, Maddie. Sorry for all of the nightmares I've given you. Thanks for listening to After Dark and to Emma Southern for being the most fantastic guest. Now, if you want to find out a little bit more about Emma's work and why wouldn't you after that teaser of an episode, then you can go to EmmaSouthern.com or you can find even more deaths in History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women, her new book which is out now. If you enjoyed this episode of After Dark, please follow wherever you get your podcasts

and if you'd really like to, you can drop us a review and those are always welcome.