Are they and welcome to Emperor's of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrobe University.

I'm your host Matt Smith and with me today is Dr.

Riano Evans, senior lecturer in classics and ancient history at Latrobe University.

This is episode CXI. assassination.

Assassination seemed to be a fairly regular occurrence in the right Roman circles

and the gossip around the Senate floor must have frequently turned to who's knifing who.

So grab the a dagger or a handy nearby table leg as we discuss this, dare I say it, time-honored tradition.

Here's Rianna Evans.

Assassination I am taking as the murder of somebody who is well known,

which covers almost everybody that we know of from Antiquity, but I'm

concentrating here particularly on political assassination, which means that it's going to concern

Roman leaders.

And not assassination of character, by way we should say when it comes

to political machinations. There's a lot more of that. There are degrees of this I suppose. For example,

I'm not going to deal here with Cicero, although some people would technically put him into that category, and I can see that being quite viable.

Technically, he was proscribed, he was put on a list which meant that he was available to be

killed that it was legal to kill him of course this is right at the end of the

republic when the definition of what's legal depends on who you are.

There are some much clearer cases where there is a plot.

Cicero was running away, he knew that they were coming for him.

Quite often the emperor or person involved won't know. Yeah. It's a surprise.

Yeah, okay, so technically that's an execution so we're not going to be dealing with that. So how far back in

...