If I was a murderer in ancient Rome (republic or empire), how would I carry the body out of the city in broad daylight? What would I dress in/do, so that it made sense for others that I was carrying a corpse?

by Aettlaus

I'm curious if your average Joe, or even a soldier, would question why I had a body, or if corpses where a common sight in ancient streets of Rome.

MichaelJTaylorPhD

One solution, twice attested in Roman Britain, was to bury a victim under the floor of a building. At Vindolanda, a young child was found buried in a barracks block in 2010. Previously, in 1930, two bodies (seemingly a man and a woman, although some dispute about the genders, sometimes described as two men) were found buried under a house near the Housesteads fort, one with a bit of a blade still stuck inside.

Another option was to dump the body down an abandoned well, which were commonly used as refuse dumps in ancient cities. There is a famous well in Athens known as the Agora baby well, mostly because it is full of infant remains, and seems to have been used by midwives to dispose of stillborn infants. But some of the remains in the well were adults , and seem to have been murder victims; Maria Liston, the forensic pathologist at the American School, has identified up to 17 potential murder victims (although a few may be hastily disposed war deaths after Athens was sacked by the Heruli).

https://bonesdontlie.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/murder-in-the-agora-aia-talk-by-maria-liston/

EdHistory101

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