Nineteen hundred years before Jack the Ripper terrorised women in the east end of London, a serial killer was at work in ancient Rome. Unlike the Victorian bogeyman, however, his identity was no secret. This perpetrator was instantly recognisable throughout the Roman empire, celebrated with statues and on coins. His name was Nero and the women he targeted were not strangers but close relatives, including two of his wives.
Most women are killed by men they know and that was true two thousand years ago, when even the most privileged were at risk from their husbands, fathers and sons. I’ve been writing and reviewing crime fiction for years, and I’m frustrated by the fact that real-life murders have so little in common with the elaborate scenarios – and over-contrived motives – that feature in so many novels.
With one exception, Nero carried out his murders at arm’s length, getting other men to do his dirty work. His first victim was his mother, the former empress Agrippina, who survived a farcical plot involving a collapsible boat, only to be hacked to death on her son’s orders. Next came his aunt, a wealthy widow, who was poisoned as he left her sickbed.
Nero turned next to his first wife, the emperor Claudius’s daughter Octavia, who was divorced, banished to a distant island and forced into a fake suicide. His second, Poppaea Sabina, haemorrhaged to death after the emperor kicked her in the stomach while she was pregnant. Astonishingly, Nero then proposed marriage to Octavia’s half-sister, Antonia. She bravely turned him down and the petulant emperor had her killed as well. His great-great uncle, the emperor Tiberius, pursued a vendetta against his ex-wife Julia, daughter of the emperor Augustus, engineering not just her death but those of both her daughters.
Much as I love Rome, I can’t help thinking of it as a vast crime scene. The emperor Claudius’s sister, Livilla, was starved to death in one of the city’s palaces by her own mother, after being wrongly accused of the murder of her husband. Claudius’s third wife, the young and naive empress Messalina, was run through with a sword on her husband’s orders in what is now the Borghese gardens.
In my new book, I describe these murders as femicides: the killing of women because they are women. Thousands of men died on the orders of the Julio-Claudian emperors, but the reasons were different; they were political rivals, who posed a threat to the regime, or had something (wealth or attractive estates) the emperors wanted. The murders of women by Nero and his fellow-emperors were uniquely personal, as femicides usually are.
The same is true today, evidenced by the fact that women are most at risk of being killed when they leave a husband or partner. Forget all those fictional scenarios where men abduct and torture strangers, taunting the police by displaying their corpses. Real-life murders of women are brutal and often involve a startling degree of violence, something now recognised as ‘over-killing’. Modern crime writers could learn a lot from ancient Rome, where men with absolute power created a template for the murders of wives, mothers and daughters they once claimed to love.
Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women is published by William Collins
Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac Joan Smith – (amazon.co.uk)
