Getting away with murder: The literary and forensic fortune of two RomanExempla

Abstract

Valerius Maximus tells two stories of women who, having killed close relations to avenge murders committed by their victims, were brought before a court but neither acquitted nor convicted. Of these stories, the second, concerning a woman from Smyrna whose case was adjourned by the Areopagus for a hundred years, enjoyed a literary fortune, being taken up by Aulus Gellius and from him by Ammianus Marcellinus, John of Salisbury, Rabelais, and Montaigne; the only author to take the woman’s sex into account, John of Salisbury, held that she was in the wrong. However, it was from Valerius that the two stories passed into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century civilian jurisprudence, which used them, without consideration of their subjects’ gender, to illustrate the principle ofiustus dolor, or justified grief, as a defence or mitigation in cases of homicide; the Woman of Smyrna was even exploited, with a misrepresentation of the facts, to defend the conduct of Guido Franceschini in the case that gave rise to Browning’s poemThe Ring and the Book.