This might belong in IMHO, but I’ll give it a shot here.
To wit: if “Jack the Ripper” had struck Rome in say, 178 A.D., would his rash of killings have been infamous enough that they’d still be in the historical record today? Or is much of his “notoriety” dependent on the state of the news media around the turn of the (last) century?
Well, thanks for your time,
Ranchoth
I’d agree that this is mostly a matter of opinion, but mine is that Jack the Ripper’s legend was a product of the time and if he had committed the same crimes in most other eras would be largely unknown.
Maybe a Jack the Ripper style killing spree did happen, and we just don’t know about it. (Considering the population, I’d imagine that it did.) The techniques of law enforcement and investigation weren’t very advanced, and without them, it’s almost impossible to track and catch a serial killer.
But they didn’t “track and catch” Jack the Ripper!
To answer the original question, my opinion is that we would probably not know about it. The major difference being the lack of mass media (newspapers) in ancient Rome. Jack the Ripper is known now because of the enormous attention given to him by English newspapers at the time. And the government/the newspapers had a political incentive to emphasize the Jack the Ripper story (distracted attention from all the poor & starving people in Victorian London). But in ancient Rome, the incentive would have been for the government to downplay any such story.
Also, it seems to me that such sexual psychopaths are only spawned by very repressed, prudish societies like Victorian England. Even if what we’ve heard about ‘Roman Orgys’ is only partially true, there just wasn’t such a sexually repressive atmosphere in Rome (until Christianity took over).
The “sex” aspect of the RIpper stories was more implied or made up than real. regardless, its possible we’d have know about the Ripper, but much more indistinctly. A more possible reaction would have been a panic in the poorer sections of Rome, leading to this entry…
Jack the Ripper (from the Latin “Repwe Shek” via the French “Zshek de Ripeur”. Noun, slang.
(1) One who slays, murders or otherwise kills in an exceptionally violent manner.
(2) A rapist.
(3) Death, as an anthropomorphic persona.
This word may originate from an early term for “Death” as a person, as in (3). Alternative theories posit that it descended from a semi-mythical 1st century BC murderer in Rome.
1.) Possibly. It would depend upon whether or not some wrote about him, and how well, and whether the caprices of history allowed that manuscript to be protected and carried down through the ages. I’d bet that there were spectacular crimes in the Roman world, but they couldn’t compete with the scandalous doings of the Emperors, so we have Suetonius, but not Jackus Ripperus.
2.) This thread reminds me of one of Lindsay Davis’ Marcus Didius Falco Roman mysteries – Three Hands in the Fountain, about a Ripper-Like killer in Titus-era Rome.
I doubt it. When you had your own leaders doing acts of insanity, Emperors like Caligula, Commodus, or Elagabalus, someone like Jack the Ripper would seem tame to the general population of Rome.
Rome had mass media of a sort, in the form of the Acta Diurna (I think it crops up in the Falco stories as the “Daily Gazette”), a sort of bulletin-board affair that carried both public announcements and private news. A brief online trawl tells me no genuine fragments of it remain extant.
In addition, we know a certain amount about daily life in Rome from all sorts of sources; graffiti, letters, curse tablets, surviving literature … you can read Martial and be informed as to the sex lives of all sorts of different people. If there had been a series of crimes which scandalized the people of Rome in the way that the Ripper murders did London, the chances aren’t bad that some sort of record would be preserved. But any number of serial killers could have lurked in the Roman underworld without, necessarily, drawing sufficient official attention to themselves for records to get made … law enforcement in ancient Rome was exiguous, to say the least.
Rather, say that for most of Rome’s history, law enforcement was non-existant.
Throughout the Republic, there was no formal body entrusted with law enforcement, as the Senate feared that such an armed force would lead to a coup.
Wealthy private citizens had small groups of slave bodyguards, usually ex-gladiators, to protect them. But everybody was supposed to enforce the law themselves. Didn’t really work well.
The streets of Rome were deathtraps after dark for any honest man. Armed robber gangs prowled the streets, looting & killing at will. Most people locked up & stayed home.
This state of affairs continued well into the Imperial era.
Jack’s victims would never have been noticed.
And, if he had cash, he could have bought female slaves, & freely massacred them in the streets, if he wished. After all, he would have owned them…
That last point isn’t strictly true, Bosda - slaves, although chattels, had some rights under Roman law (varied, rather, by period - we’re talking well over a thousand years of history, of course). Some general discussion of this here. And people who ill-treated slaves certainly did receive a negative public reaction; there’s at least one famous case of a man who was shunned for reportedly feeding his slaves to his carp (unfortunately, not so famous that I can actually remember his name - I think I came across this one in Ugo Enrico Paoli’s Rome, its People, Life and Customs, that constant companion of my boyhood).
Law enforcement was, certainly, extremely limited - as you say, you couldn’t walk the streets in safety at night. It was accomplished, though, at least partly through the client/patron system that was fundamental to Roman life; if you were wronged, you would appeal to your patron, who, if necessary, would appeal to his, and so on up until you reached someone with enough clout that whoever wronged you would have to listen to them. Certainly, this kept the Roman law courts busy with cases at all levels of society (I spent enough time reading Cicero in my depraved youth to be moderately familiar with Roman law … ) Rome was certainly not a safe place to live by anything like modern standards, but it wasn’t actually anarchic - well, not for most of the time, at least.
My guess is that if mutilated bodies were found, the deed would be blamed on either different ethnic groups/political enemies, or demonic forces. Fear of the unknown.
Thus sprang up legends ranging from Jews killing Christian children to werewolves and vampires.
This letter from George Bernard Shaw to The Star about JtR does not support your statement about the incentives for the government/newspapers. The newspapers’ coverage apparently created sympathy for the poor of Whitechapel. It’s hard to see how the government would want to emphasize that.
I know this, but they were able to track his activities to some extent by using techniques that weren’t developed in time of the ancient Romans. For example, they were able to ascetain in which direction the killer drew the knife, about what type the knife was, and that these acts were comitted by the same man. Forensic science was in its infancy, but they did have better techniques than did the Romans. They may not have caught him, but they were able to identify a victim of his when the body was found. (Though some Ripperologists vary in the amount of victims which should be attributed to him.)