A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

By Emma Southon

Page I bailed on: 140

Verdict: I felt somewhat the same way to this one as I did to Murder Book. Just not my thing. I love reading ancient history, and this seemed like a good fit with my true-crime site, but it’s written in the same jokey, irreverent style that I can only take so much of.

On Southon’s website no less an authority than the Wall Street Journal declares that “At a moment when the study of classics struggles to escape its starchy, imperialist legacy, Southon’s cheeky enthusiasm feels like the path of salvation.” So that’s the pitch: making classical literature and history more accessible to people who wouldn’t normally read a book on this subject. However, I would normally read a book on this subject, so the path of salvation just felt to me like dumbing things down. There are a lot of books on ancient Rome written for a non-academic audience that don’t sound at all like this, and I think they’re not only more enjoyable but more accurate as well. Being a slave in the Roman Empire was no picnic, for example, but I don’t think it’s true that all slaves were “subject to the most extraordinary violence every day.”

I’m not saying Southon doesn’t know her stuff. I’m sure she does. But the writing here is all “yeah,” “yada yada yada,” “wow,” “really really,” and “sorry not sorry.” We’re even told that killing Caesar was “a pretty big fucking deal.” Which it was. Sure. And then there all of the pop culture references that made me feel like I was doing an Internet quiz. I know who Marty McFly and Patrick Bateman are, but mistakenly thought Shaggy was a reference to the character from Scooby-Doo and pulled a blank on Grand Designs. Is this a home reno program? I wasn’t interested enough to find out.

According to the Booklist review, writing like this “provides not only humor but a sense of relevance to today’s world.” I don’t know what “relevance” means when it’s used this way. Southon is apparently involved in some kind of history podcast, and the prose here has that sort of random, conversational style. Maybe it works better as an audiobook. But then Mike Duncan’s book on ancient Rome, The Storm Before the Storm, which was very popular with a mass audience, also grew out of a podcast and it wasn’t written like this so I’m still wondering who this book was directed at.

It’s likely you’ll learn something, but Southon just tends to go from story to story,  a number of which she confesses are totally irrelevant, without much of a larger point to make. I stopped where I did because it was the middle of a chapter on slavery and murder and even though I’d been dimly aware of the politically correct movement to replace the word “slave” with “enslaved person” I hadn’t actually confronted it before. I’m sure it’s well meant and can be justified, but to call it awkward isn’t the half of it. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

The DNF files