Murder Was Not a Crime: Homicide and Power in the Roman Republic

One. Killing and the King

killiNg aNd the kiNg According to Roman tradition, the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, a man with a reputation for justice and piety, promulgated a law that prohibited murder.1 One reason for the promulgation of the law during the monarchy is that the monarchs were trying to establish their own power in the face of what had preceded them, and one means of doing so was to control the power to kill. The kings arrogated such power for themselves and they defended, limited, or prohibited it in others. In addition to the self-interested motive of establishing and centralizing power, the kings also needed to ensure the stability of the kingdom. That stability was ensured by the maintenance of a good relationship with the gods, which an act of homicide could jeopardize. Thus, a murder law existed during the Roman monarchy because it served to establish and preserve the power of the king, and it served to keep the community safe. A caveat is necessary here. No primary literaryevidence about the monarchy exists, and references to this period by Roman authors writing centuries laterare awash with legend and folkloric motifs. Later in this chapter, some reasons are provided regarding why some of the evidence might be taken seriously. The primary reason for including the discussion of the monarchic murder law in this book, however, is that it was the reported presence of a murder law in the monarchy and the apparent absence of one during most of the republic that began my thinking about the particular relationship in Rome between homicide and power. Even with the problematic nature of the sources, I ask more skeptical readers to consider the possibility that the distribution of power in the monarchy may indeed explain the existence of the attested murder law. Five main points explored in this chapter reveal the intricate connection between the murder law of King Numa and the nature of monarchic power. First, the sources say that during the monarchy murder was reguone 10 murder was not a Crime lated by law. Second, the nature of power in the monarchy was centered in the hands of one individual.Third, the tradition credits the second king of Rome with the promulgation of the law. If accurate, this would mean that the law was promulgated at a time when monarchic power was still being established, and thus the timing lends further credence to the idea that the law itself reflects the nature of that power. Fourth (relevant not only for this chapter but for the book as a whole), in Rome forms of power were frequently defined by the right to kill. Fifth, the king had jurisdiction to try and to punish offenders in cases of intentional homicide. In other words, the king claimed for himself the right to kill. the Lex Numae Each of these issues will be addressed extensively below, but first, an examination of the law itself is appropriate. The lex Numae proclaims, si qui hominem liberum dolo sciens morti duit, paricidas esto.2 If anyone knowingly with guilty intent kills a free person, let him be [a?] paricidas. The law itself is quite simple; the difficulty for modern scholars, unlike the Romans living under Numa’s rule, results from not knowing what the word paricidas means.3 But even though we know neither the specific derivation of the word nor its precise meaning, it is probably safe to say that in Numa’s law, paricidas indicated a person subject to a capital penalty. Another one of Numa’s laws suggests this meaning, for it states that in cases of unintentional homicide the life of a ram is to be sacrificed in place of the life of the killer: in Numae legibus cautum est, ut, si quis imprudens occidisset hominem, pro capite occissi [agnatis] eius in [contione] offerret arietem.4 It is the concern of a law of Numa that if anyone unintentionally killed a person, in the place of his head he would offer a ram to the agnates of the victim in [an assembly]. If the spilling of blood must occur to satisfy an unintentional homicide, then, a fortiori, blood spilling must occur in cases of intentional homi- 11 Killing and the King cide.5 Furthermore, this law on unintentional homicide states explicitly that the ram takes the place of the head, presumably of the killer himself (or herself).6 Punishment for killing...