Interview with Dr Garrett Ryan
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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. Episode 159. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Rosland Weyberg Thun. And tonight, I have truly a treat for you.

This show aims to cover the entirety of the phenomenon of serial murder. And one aspect of this that I have not touched upon before is that of ancient serial killers. Joining me to discuss this fascinating topic tonight is none other than Dr. Garrett Ryan, host of the excellent YouTube channel and podcast Told in Stone. Enjoy.

As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...

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As mentioned in the last episode, going forward, all TSK episodes will be available 100% ad-free to my TSK Producers Club on patreon.com slash theserialkillerpodcast. No generic ads, no ad reads, no jingles, I promise. And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month,

That's only $7.50 per episode. You are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club, too. So don't miss out and join now. Dear Dr. Ryan, may I call you Garrett? But of course. It is a true pleasure being able to interview a true academic like yourself on my humble show. As some of my dear listeners might know, I am quite the history buff.

So, having the wonderful host of the YouTube channel and podcast, Told in Stone, here tonight is a true treat. So, Garrett, can you be so kind as to tell our dear listeners who you are and what your background is? Sure. At first, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. So, as Thomas mentioned, I have a background in the classics. So my

My doctorate is in ancient history, and a couple years ago I began a YouTube channel and podcast called Toltonstone, which explores ancient history, Greek and Roman history, from many angles. So buildings, customs, daily life, all manner of aspects, trying to get the overlooked sides of antiquity to the attention of everyone who cares to listen about it.

Fantastic! I enjoy working with academics on my show. I've had another PhD, a woman, I don't remember her name right off the top of my head, but there simply isn't any substitute to the deep knowledge that a PhD brings to the table. Now, the reason I originally wanted to reach out to you, Garrett, is your video regarding serial killers in ancient Rome.

It's a really quality video, and I recommend all my listeners to head on over to Garrett's YouTube channel, Told in Stone, and check it out. My show has, over the years, garnered stories regarding serial killers from over a relatively long time period, from Erzsébet Bathory in medieval Austria-Hungary to active killers that are out there on the prowl as we speak.

But I have not covered a single killer from ancient history. And this is something that the Serial Killer Podcast needs to amend. So, Garrett, can you please tell us what do we know about serial killers in ancient Rome?

Well, in many ways, disappointingly little. As of course you know, the whole category of serial killer is modern in many ways, a product of modern criminology, modern policing, and modern concerns of public safety. There always have been people with these psychological issues that drive them to kill, but they don't come to the public's attention in the way that they have in the last century or so, in antiquity.

So in my video, I tried to call little bits of evidence from the whole pool of agro-human literature that might attest to the existence of people like this. And I worked through a few possibilities, discounting some of the obvious ones that might come to mind. So for many people, they might assume that, say, the emperors are serial killers, people like Nero or Caligula or Caracalla.

And they certainly weren't very nice people. You wouldn't want to hang out with them, say, or be one of their subjects. But we can't really describe them as anything like a modern serial killer. You know, they're driven by all kinds of political needs. Our sources are complicated. We can't just label someone like Nero, for example, a psychopath. You can't diagnose him in a modern sense.

So we have to look, I think, a little bit deeper into our sources. And what I came up with in the end was two possibilities, both from the very voluminous works of the Dr. Galen, who's probably Roman history's greatest doctor,

Galen mentions a thief, a brigand, who lived in what's now Asia Minor, in Turkey. This person was notorious for killing anyone who happened by his mountain fastness, where he lurked. Now bandits were known in ancient history as being cruel. It was kind of a literary trope. But this person, who actually did exist,

seems to have been genuinely disturbed. Most people would kill, most bandits would kill to avoid detection. But this guy was something of a sadist. Anyone who he caught in this mountain pass, he would hack their legs off and let them bleed to death. And this person, this kind of obscure bandit in Roman Asia Minor, seems to be one candidate for an Asian serial killer.

The other one, the other, I think, best candidate is an innkeeper who we don't know much about him, don't even know his name. But apparently he kind of like a real life, like an H.H. Holmes say figure, he ran an inn in this Roman city and he would kill his guests, by what means we don't know, and then feed their flesh to the other patrons in the hotel restaurant.

And his terrible crime was discovered when someone found a human finger bone in their stew. The authorities came down and executed the man. So we have these two kind of stray anecdotes about people who seemed like our definition of serial killers. And there doubtless were many, many more. But you talk more about other possible categories of people who would fit into our definition of serial killer. But it certainly did exist. And it was interesting to find that out from my search of the sources.

Extremely fascinating. And the two killers that you mention, you don't happen to have their names, do you?

No, I mean, I can find the one from Galen. I should know that brigand. But the innkeeper is never named. And neither man appears anywhere besides this single passage in the works of Galen. You know, they're sort of just almost like type figures, you know, kind of these villains who are known to have existed, but, you know, weren't notorious in a way, say, like John Wayne Gacy or, you know, someone like that would be today. Hmm.

Right. And do we know the fate of these two? Were they apprehended or were they simply just mentioned briefly?

So the innkeeper was caught, and on being caught, Gilead says, was brought to punishment, which means he was certainly killed, quite likely in the arena, actually. As I mentioned in my video, the most heinous criminals that the Romans knew of, people who rebelled against the rebels against the state, for example, brigands, bandits,

And some of these prisoners of war were brought into the arena and executed as a public spectacle. It was meant to be sort of an edifying thing. So people would know their crimes and would be deterred from doing anything similar. And so it's a fair chance this innkeeper died in the arena, either by being crucified there, being torn apart by wild beasts. There were various cruelly inventive ways that the Romans disposed of dangerous criminals.

But the bandit may have escaped. At least he's not mentioned ever being caught in that one passage. Bandits were hunted often, actually. I mentioned in the video that kind of the closest equivalent to cops hunting serial killers in the modern time were these people who were professional bandit hunters, mercenaries, bounty hunters, who were commissioned by cities or even by the Roman government to seek out killers and bandits along the roads and either bring them to justice or kill them.

And so there are people, I mentioned this guy, there's this huge guy who lived near Athens in the wilds who was hired by the city of Athens periodically to clear off the highways. He kind of lived off in the wilds, camping in the woods, ambushing bandits who were lurking by the roadside. So if they caught bandits or people who were known to be killers, they would crucify them by the side of the road as a warning to other bandits or bring them into a city to be killed in the arena.

We don't know if this particular bandit, the one who hacked off people's legs, was brought to justice. If he was that notorious, he probably was eventually, but Galen never mentions what actually happened to him. I see. And let us pause briefly and enlighten our listeners just a little bit.

Regarding the details, I like to do that on my show. You mentioned Asia Minor. For our general populace, where is Asia Minor? So Asia Minor is more or less modern Turkey. It's the big peninsula that stretches out from Armenia and the Caucasus off towards Greece.

Yeah, sorry, I kind of fall into these ancient habits of geographic names. But yeah, it's just modern Turkey, basically. And this guy, this bandit, was in South Central Asia Minor in Pamphylia, kind of near actually where the beach resorts are now, interestingly, like Antalya, kind of that area. Really? Right. Fascinating. It's very interesting how us Westerners, we at least

the way I was brought up in school here in Norway, we tend to think about the Roman Empire as a very Western thing, a thing very oriented on the West, like France and Spain, Portugal, and of course Italy, and to a certain extent, Greece. But in fact, the Roman Empire was massive and encircled the entire Mediterranean Ocean, correct?

Yes. In many ways, the bulk of the Romans' wealth and their population was in the East, actually. We think, of course, of Britain and Gaul as being Roman territory, and of course, Italy itself. But more than half the Roman Empire's population lived east of Greece.

in what's now Turkey and Syria, Egypt, Palestine, and North Africa. You know, these places which are now seem so separate from Western Europe were very organic parts of the Roman Empire. And in many cases, it's wealthiest and most important provinces. Yes. And later on, after the invasion of the barbarians, the Germanic tribes into Rome, the Roman Empire continued to exist from Constantinople, yes? Yes.

Yes. Yeah. Of course, we call it Byzantium or the Byzantine Empire. But that was the Roman Empire. You know, it survived the Western half another thousand years, really remarkably, which really brings home how important those eastern territories were, you know, how rich and how prosperous. Exactly. So to continue a little bit, let's talk about murder. Always a fun topic. Yeah.

A popular myth, true or not, is that Joseph Stalin said that one death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic. Because when we really think about it, who are the worst killers in history? Surely not the classical serial killers. Even the world record holder Pedro Lopez only killed a few more than 300 people.

Compared to, let's say, Mao, who personally ordered the deaths of thousands, and whose policies caused millions to die, Lopez looks like an altar boy. And you touched in your video briefly upon the subject of emperors. And what Roman emperor, both Western Empire and Eastern, by the way, would you say was the most bloodthirsty?

Hmm. That's a tough competition, as you might imagine. In some ways, actually, Julius Caesar, who isn't really an emperor, but kind of the precursor of the emperors, is the greatest killer in that sense, because he conquered Gaul, modern France, in a decade of extremely bloody campaigning that may have killed as many as a million people. We don't know the exact numbers. We almost never do in ancient history. But Caesar's campaigns were incredibly destructive, and directly or indirectly,

probably cut the population of Gaul almost in half in some places. So extremely devastating.

As the emperors themselves, it really is remarkable how casual they are about waging these extremely bloody campaigns. There's a wonderful story about the Emperor Domitian, who's gambling in the palace, he's playing dice, basically. And he casually mentions to one of his subordinates, he wishes that a certain tribe in North Africa, I think the Nassimones or something, would no longer exist. And so the message is brought out to the governor of North Africa, and sure enough, they wipe out the entire tribe on the emperor's whim.

And so things like that kind of bring home how the Romans felt about the really extirpation, in some cases, of their enemies. So we think, of course, of people like, I mentioned Nero or Caligula as being bloodthirsty. But when it comes down to it, they didn't actually kill that many people. The problem was, from a Roman historian standpoint, they killed the wrong kind of people, senators. And of course, the senators, the people who write the histories, object to that very strenuously. And that makes it into the history. So remember them as being the great killers.

In fact, Caligula probably killed a few dozen Roman aristocrats directly. Nero was more bloodthirsty because he put down a rebellion against him, the Pisonian rebellion, and forced many Roman aristocrats to kill themselves to avoid reprisal. But neither of these emperors really waged serious campaigns. The generals did, but they weren't really military emperors.

The greatest military emperor of the early imperial era is Trajan, who's remembered as being a great emperor. He was just at home. He played nice at the Senate. But abroad, he was a terror. So in Dacia, modern Romania, Trajan conquered that country in two very bloody wars, which are commemorated on the column of Trajan, still standing near the Roman Forum.

And we see on the columns and evidence and, you know, from the fragmentary histories of what happened in Dacia, but certainly hundreds of thousands were killed during those campaigns. And again, even Marcus Aurelius, the great philosopher emperor, who was personally extremely virtuous, or at least is remembered as such. But you look at the column of Marcus Aurelius, which commemorates his campaigns against the Marcomanni and Quadi in what's now the Czech Republic.

And we see scenes of barbarians being executed, you know, in long rows, you know, soldiers with swords standing over them. We see villages being burned, prisoners being taken, people being sold into slavery. And so any Roman campaign had these huge collateral damage, with often hundreds of thousands being killed. In fact, you couldn't celebrate a triumph in Rome without killing a certain number of the enemy. And so there was this kind of...

In the sense that even a very virtuous person, a virtuous commander, leader, emperor, was expected to be a murderer abroad. That Roman justice was brought to the point of the sword, and there's just no way around that. And so in terms of, you know, the bloodiest of the emperors, it may well have been someone like Trajan. Remember, it's being a good emperor, but one whose campaigns killed hundreds of thousands beyond the borders of the empire.

And of course, civil wars were even more destructive in many ways. You know, even like, say, Constantine, remembered, of course, as being, you know, the one who brought Christianity to the empire, waged a series of extremely bloody civil wars against his opponents, which caused massive destruction. And so any emperor who cared a name, really, unless they waged any kind of war at all, had this enormous death toll to his credit, which we tend to overlook when evaluating what they did as emperors, as sovereigns of Roman people.

Absolutely fascinating. There's so many things there that I wish to expand upon. And the first thing that you brought up that I personally find very interesting is, of course, Julius Caesar, or Julius Caesar, as he would have been known, and his conquest of Gaul.

He wrote a book about that, didn't he? Yes. Where he referred to himself in the third person. And I suspect that he did not mention the millions being killed in that book. No, no. I mean, we had that actually from Strabo, a Greek geographer who wrote about a generation after Caesar and mentions the vast toll. You know, Caesar himself does mention when, you know, he exacts reprisals on the Gauls.

always presents it as it being kind of a just revenge, you know, that the Gauls do something first and then he's, you know, being, you know, the avenger of Roman pride or of, you know, say Roman deaths.

Of course, it's a very self-serving work. It's written for consumption back in Rome. It's read by Caesars, you know, by the public. People will be voting for Caesar and admiring him. But it very much kind of glides over the terrible toll that the Gauls suffered. Actually, there is one exception that I think of immediately, and this is the most famous, kind of the culminating battle of the Gallic Wars. It's the siege of a place called Alesia in central France.

And this chief named Vercingetorix had kind of marshaled all of the tribes of central Gaul together in a coalition against the Romans. And so they had, you know, gathered a huge number of people, more than 100,000 people in this small stockade, basically. And so they're running out of, the Romans besieged them, and they run pretty quickly out of food. And so Vercingetorix decides to expel all non-warriors from the stockade. So the women, the children, the elderly,

with the hope that the Romans will accept them in their ranks, or at least kind of let them pass through. And the Romans don't. It has forced all these people to starve to death, basically, between the lines of the Gallic stockade and the Roman siege wall. And so there was this kind of, I guess, unapologetic brutality often to what the Romans did, which they would present as being part of a just war. But when it comes down to it, it was just slaughter on a massive scale.

Yes, I don't know if you've read the French comic Asterix and Obelix. Oh, yeah. Yeah, where every time Alicia is brought up, the reaction is, there's no such thing. Oh, yeah. And Vercingetorix, the great Gallic chief,

warrior chief. He was captured, wasn't he, and brought back to Rome and was featured prominently in the triumph of Julius Caesar upon his return, correct? Yes, and actually that brings us to an interesting topic of kind of a ritual murder in the Roman world. So Vercingetorix is kept in prison in Rome for several years

And there's an interesting coin that has his head on it from towards the end of this period. And it may be kind of stylized, but it shows kind of this very gaunt figure, kind of gaunt and haggard. And it may be what he actually looked like after being in prison for all those years. So there's pretty much this pit on the edge of the Roman Forum, this covered pit called the Tullianum. And that's the prison in which prisoners of state are kept. And he's kept in kind of the dank pit at the base of this prison.

And on the day of Caesar's triumph, so he's prayed through the streets of Rome, you know, kind of put on a cart and, you know, jeered at and mocked by the people. And then he's brought back to this pit, this Tullianum in the Forum, and strangled as Caesar's making a sacrifice to Jupiter on the capital line.

And so, again, this sort of interesting thing that to complete the triumph, the enemy leader has to be ritually killed at the moment of the sacrifice to Jupiter, just before it actually. Again, there's this idea that Rome's conquests always have this unapologetic element of brutality to them.

That's extremely interesting. I knew that Vercingetorix was garroted, wasn't he? Yes, yes. But I did not know that it was part of the sacrifice to Jupiter, the capital god in the Roman pantheon. Again, we in the West have this idea that human sacrifice wasn't really a Roman thing. But when you put it like that, it really does sound like human sacrifice.

Yes, it's interesting. Actually, so I have this book that answers, you know, several questions about the ancient world. It's called Naked Statues, Facletiators, and War Elephants. Frequently asked questions about the ancient Greeks and Romans. And one question there is, did they practice human sacrifice? And the answer really is yes, though they didn't do it very often. So for the Romans, right, so there's these, there's kind of a distinction between human sacrifice, sacrifice right to a god, you know, on behalf of the god.

and kind of ritual killing. And there's much more ritual killing, ritual murder in Rome than there is human sacrifice. So Vercingetorix, for example, is kind of more of a ritual killing. He's not sacrificed to Jupiter directly. His kill is part of a ceremony that culminates in his sacrifice to Jupiter. Kind of a, you know, hazy line. There's a distinction. And so the Romans, um,

Often they accuse other peoples of practicing human sacrifice, among them the Gauls themselves. So the Gauls notoriously built these giant wicker men who would be stuffed full of prisoners, sometimes hundreds of prisoners, and set alight as a giant human sacrifice for some god or other. The Germans also were notorious for capturing prisoners and then sacrificing them to their gods.

But the Romans themselves did occasionally indulge in human sacrifice. So several times in the Republic, they sacrificed some obscure ritual, a Greek and a Gallic couple, so four people total, were buried alive outside the city gates. And it was meant to be only at the time of extreme stress when Rome was threatened by an external enemy.

And the idea seems to have been that burying alive these barbarian couples, Greek and Gallic, was in some way going to avert the gods' wrath toward Rome. And we think also of how Vestal versions who were caught being less than chaste were punished. They were also buried alive or they were shut up in an Esoterian chamber, not given food. That's not so much human sacrifices as it's kind of ritual killing, but it's kind of part of this same mindset.

The Romans often accuse political extremists of indulging in human sacrifice. So Catiline, you know, Cicero's great opponent who tries to overthrow the Republic, is said to have sacrificed a boy and then sworn an oath on his entrails to the dark gods. This is almost certainly made up by Cicero. But the idea is that, you know, this is something that's on the menu, basically, you know, for a Roman to do.

Even Augustus, for example, is said to have sacrificed 300 political opponents during the first round of civil wars to the spirit of Julius Caesar. That probably didn't actually happen, but it's again this way the Romans can think about this sort of thing happening. And there are a few places in the Roman Empire where human sacrifice is more or less tolerated still. The Romans clamped down on the Druids who are in Gaul and Germany and Britain, who did practice human sacrifice occasionally at least.

But in other parts of the empire, there are a few sanctuaries that do things like human sacrifice. So there's supposedly this area in Greece, Arcadia, central Greece. There's a very wild, mountainous region.

And there's an altar of ash on which supposedly a boy was sacrificed every several years. We don't know if it actually happened or not, but it continued, we think, under the Roman Empire. There's also various kind of scapegoating rituals where, you know, a person will be expelled from a city ritually and then kind of stoned to death. And so the Romans, right, they're not the Aztecs. They don't have these, you know, pyramids or temples where there's, you know, a constant stream of blood. But there is a good amount of this sort of thing happening all over the empire.

And the Romans are kind of uncomfortable about it in some ways. They don't like to bring attention to it, but it's still happening. Exactly. It's so fascinating. I mean, I think I watched hundreds and hundreds of hours of YouTube documentaries about the Roman Empire. It is fascinating.

Such a fascinating period of our history. And I'm sure we can get truly lost in the weeds talking about it. But I think we should try to, I personally should try to stare us over to the blood and the murder. Yes, to keep my dear listeners happy.

So you mentioned a few times Nero, and the classical definition of a serial killer is a person who murders three or more people with a significant cooling-off period between each kill. Now, let us thus consider Nero. The Greek spelling of his name is Neron Kaisar.

Translated into Hebrew, this gives the letters N-R-W-N-Q-S-R, whose Hebrew numerical equivalent is 50-200-650-100-60-200, which, of course, add up to 666. In other words, the ancient Christians viewed Nero as the devil himself. And Emperor Nero allegedly...

I emphasize that word, personally killed either by his own hand or by decree, many people. And his first confirmed kill was, I believe, his own mother, correct? Oh, yes. Mm-hmm.

Yes, it's a very strange story, actually. So Agrippina, his mother, there was sort of a weird power struggle between her and her son. And Nero apparently decided at some point he needed to get rid of her. So he arranged for this boat, this collapsing boat, to be built near Naples.

And so he knew his mother would sail across the Bay of Naples one evening. And as he had her take this collapsible boat, which if he pulled a few wooden pins would fall to pieces and sink. And so he decided he would try to drown her this way and make it look like an accident. And so he sends a few of his cronies out with his mother on this collapsing boat. They go out in the middle of the bay, they pull the pins, the thing sinks. But Agrippina swims to shore. She's a strong swimmer. So he's thwarted in this kind of bizarre scheme.

And so he just kind of throws caution to the winds and sends some assassins after her to kill her in her villa. And they do so. She sees them coming and tells them to stab them in her womb, which bore that terrible monster. She was a pretty tough old lady. And they did so. And supposedly, you know, he looks at the body and shows no remorse. You know, we don't know all of the details about this. This comes from historians hostile to Nero, but it almost certainly happened. He wouldn't make up this bizarre collapsing boat story if it didn't actually occur.

And right, he is her first, she is rather his first verified victim. And his second murder was that of his first wife, I think. Oh, yes. Well, Poppea, I guess. It would be sort of his mistress who became his second wife, I guess it would be. Her mistress who became his wife. And supposedly, again, we don't know if it's true, he kicked her, causing a miscarriage. She was pregnant, and then she bled to death.

You know, we don't know if this actually happened. Again, hostile historians kind of get in the way. But he showed a lot of remorse about this one. You know, he actually had her body embalmed and mummified, extremely unusual for a Roman. And so if he did actually cause her death, he had a lot of, felt a lot of sorrow about that. Right. There is a wonderful book written about Nero called Cuvadis by Henrik Sinkovic. Oh, yeah.

In it, Nero arranges a... Sorry, is it Nero? Nero? How would they have pronounced it? I just say Nero, kind of using standard English pronunciation. You know, it's... Yeah, Nero is more or less correct. I don't worry too much about that. Right. So let's just say Nero. Sure. Arranges a public feast for the masses after the burning of Rome. And as torches, he uses living Christians nailed to crosses.

They are covered in tar and set aflame. According to legend, this was quite the common fare for Nero, who enjoyed having Christians howling in pain on burning crosses as dinner party music on his estate. I have my own theories about this story, but I'm eager to know your thoughts on the alleged serial murderer Nero. Care to elaborate?

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Sure. So this episode of Christians being burned at a dinner actually did occur at least once. So after the Great Fire of Rome, which destroyed most of the city, Nero looked around for scapegoats, basically, to blame the disaster on, and seized upon the Christians, who were a small and, you know, relatively unknown sect, distrusted because of rumors that they, you know, visited the mass as a human sacrifice.

And so Nero, for at least one of his dinner parties, did indeed capture Christians, you know, bind them to crosses, either tied them or crucified them, and then lit them alight, actually burned them alive. We don't know if this happened more than once, but it does come from Tacitus, you know, a reputable source. So it actually did, and it did occur. And even to the Romans, you know, who regarded early Christians as criminals, or at least as being this strange and suspect cult.

This was beyond the pale. This really was a shocking thing. It was remembered as one of Nero's crimes. So it happened sort of in his palace. It wasn't kind of a public thing. It was at his dinner parties. But it actually did occur. It occurred at least once. And so it's a

if you're looking for evidence of Nero as being a serial killer, that's about as close as you can get, I think. You know, there's this kind of really sadistic thing that's done, apparently as a punishment, but it's really this kind of extravagant cruelty that's on display to his, you know, close associates. I see. It's very interesting because I have my own little conspiracy theory about Nero.

Because I have, of course, on the internet, you can find evidence for anything. I just have this view that all the horror stories about Nero, they bear a very, to a large degree, a similarity to atrocity propaganda. Nero was, as we know, an enemy of the Christians. He was a devout follower of the Roman pantheon.

And as such, the fledgling Jewish cult, known as Christians at the time, would have had ample reason to paint him as horrible as possible, especially after the Christians came to power and needed to cement their rule by telling the populace about how horrid their earlier pagan rulers had been. And I've read a bit.

Just to say this, that there are in fact some documentation to suggest that Nero was not as bad as later Christian rulers would make him out to be. For example, there are contemporary sources documenting that Nero did arrange a feast for the masses after the burning of Rome, not in celebration, but in order to help those affected by the inferno.

And further, he instituted a new and quite progressive building code for the areas of Rome worst affected by the fire, namely the slum areas. And finally, Nero's posthumous nefarious reputation seems to me to be exaggerated when we know that Nero was quite popular among the general Roman populace while he was alive. So what do you think about that?

Well, it's certainly true that Nero was demonized after his death. First by members of the Senate who were writing under his successors, people who replaced Julio Claudians, who had good reason to make Nero seem as bad as possible because, of course, Nero's been replaced by their patrons, and much later by the Christians, right?

So I would say that, yes, you're correct. After the fire, he really kind of came through to the people of Rome, feeding them, creating kind of tent encampments, it looks like, to house them. And eventually, rebuilding at least part of Rome in this very rational way with broad streets and building codes. So there were ways in which Nero was, if not a good emperor, at least a competent emperor.

And his crimes were mostly against the Roman elite. Even this terrible thing with the burning of the Christians, which did happen, we think almost certainly, can be viewed more as a matter of propaganda, that he was doing this almost, if not to reassure the people of Rome, to show that some terrible criminals were being brought to justice, if in a very extravagantly cruel way.

So Nero is certainly painted in the blackest colors later, after he dies. And actually, there is so much popular fervor for him after he dies. People of Rome love his entertainments, that a series of false Nero's, pretenders, three false Nero's, in fact, appear after his death and challenge his successors.

So there is certainly much more to Nero than just this idea of him being kind of a cartoonish villain. But we can't go too far in that. He was, at least in moments, cruel. And if you opposed him in some way, if you were one of his enemies, if you were a family member, for example, his mother, who got in his way, he would not hesitate to kill you. And so again,

A balanced view on Nero is probably the way to go. Cruel when he had to be, or when he felt like it. But, at least occasionally, did things that a moderate and just ruler would do. Right. The middle ground usually is the best ground. Ah, yes. One emperor that I do find compelling evidence of being a true villain is Commodus.

the main villain in the Hollywood epic filled with flaws, Gladiator. Can you tell us a bit about his crimes that you are aware of? Yes. So, Connors is an interesting character in all kinds of ways because he's known, notorious really, for an emperor who wants to be a gladiator. Gladiators, of course, are the lowest of the low in Roman society. They are slaves, they are convicts, they fight to the death for the people's amusement.

And for the pinnacle of Roman society, for the emperor himself to want to be on display in the arena as a gladiator is so shocking to Roman sensibilities that it colors our whole view of him.

Interestingly, so we have a couple of sources on Commodus, and probably the best one is this guy Herodian. He's writing after his death, Commodus' death. And he presents Commodus as not being exceptionally cruel, but as being easily led, as someone who's kind of just deluded into this fantasy that he can be emperor and kind of can play gladiator, and is lost more and more in this dream world.

Other portraits of Confidus, above all that in the Historia Augusta, kind of this half-fictional biography of Confidus, tend to be in much darker lights. So in the Historia Augusta, it's said that when he was a young child, he demanded that his father punish a slave who had irritated him in some slight way, and the slave thrown into a furnace and burned alive. And again, that might be totally false, but it actually occurred, it shows a much darker character.

So Commodus, in his later years especially, he reigned as emperor for 12 years. In his last few years as emperor, did turn rather vicious. So he executed one of his sisters early on for being involved in a plot against him. But after that, he turned more and more against the aristocracy of Rome. There's this wonderful anecdote by Cassius Dio, another historian, who actually witnessed Commodus' reign. He was a senator in Rome.

in which Kahn has decided to go out in the arena of the Colosseum and hunt ostriches with these special arrows that would decapitate the birds. And so Kahn is going out there with his arrow and quiver, shooting down ostriches left and right,

And he grabs an ostrich head and walks over to the senators where they sit, you know, in the first rows of the Colosseum, and gestures with the ostrich head toward them, kind of to say, cross me and you're next. This bizarre moment kind of shows how he viewed the senators as being very expendable. Again, he commits various crimes against the Senate of Rome, demands executions, becomes increasingly unhinged, really, in his last days, appearing in the Colosseum, killing massive numbers of animals,

renaming every month after himself, renaming Rome actually himself after himself. And so he seems to become, at least in the last few months of his reign, actually insane. How vicious he was before that is hard to say, but he certainly was not an ideal emperor. He named all the months after himself.

Yes, after his title. So he named one month the Unparalleled month, after the Unparalleled Emperor. And then several after, he named Rome itself after Commodus. Yeah, so he obviously had a pretty substantial ego towards the end there anyway. Truly. And did he kill any people in the arena? No, kind of interestingly. So he actually, whenever he fought a gladiator, he would fight only with blunted weapons, weapons that had their edge taken off.

either because he truly did not want to kill them or because he wanted to display his clemency and mercy as emperor.

you know, part of what he was doing in the arena, we think, is that he was trying to show, you know, emperors always used the gladiatorial games as a way of showing off how they felt about the people of Rome, how generous they were, how magnanimous they were. And so Commodus, by not killing anybody in the arena directly anyway, is showing that he is not cruel, that he is a considerate emperor. That he's just a coward, we don't know, he didn't want to face someone who had truly sharpened weapons.

But it was notable that he never fought any gladiator with a sharpened sword. So he killed thousands of animals, but never killed any people, as far as we know, in the arena. He did kill people outside the arena. There's this rather notorious story where he dressed up people who had diseased lower legs or feet as snake-footed giants. The giants in Greek mythology had these snake feet.

So he would dress them up like giants, and then he would dress up like Hercules himself, and then clothe these people to death in his gardens. Whether this actually happened, we don't know, but it probably actually did if it's repeated by our sources, or may well have. So that shows a much more vicious side of Commodus than his apparent clemency in the arena.

Wow. That was news to me. And that sounds really like a serial killer. I mean, that's a modus operandi if I ever heard of one. Fascinating. Fascinating. And the arena that we keep referring to, we are, of course, talking about the Flavian Theatre, are we not? Yes.

Yes, the Colosseum. Right. And I like these details to be inserted into my episodes. So for our listeners' pleasure, why is it called the Colosseum? Yes. So there's an enormous statue beside it, the Colossus of Nero, which was this 100-foot-high bronze statue commissioned by Nero. It looked like Nero.

After Nero's death, it's reshaped to look like the sun god Helios, but it's dragged next to the Colosseum. Actually, Hadrian gets a team of elephants to drag it over to the Colosseum and stands beside it for about 500 years.

The Colossus of Nero was pulled down at some point in the early Middle Ages, but its name gets transferred somehow to the arena beside it. So the Flavian Amphitheater is the actual name, the Amphitheatrum, is what it's called by the Romans. But the Colossus beside it, the name is transferred more or less casually by medieval chroniclers. And so by the Renaissance, it's being called the Colosseum. In the original Colosseum, there was no Colossus, there was this huge statue next to the arena. Kind of interesting, you know, a bit of medieval trivia.

Exactly. I think it's a very interesting little trivia, as you say. It's a tidbit of information. And of course, Flavian is because it was built by one of the emperors of the Flavian dynasty. Yes.

Yes, yes. So it's built by the Emperor Vespasian, who is the founder of the Flavian dynasty. And he's the guy who ultimately replaces Nero, actually. And so it's built by Vespasian, finished by his sons Titus and Domitian, who together are the Flavian dynasty. Exactly. Okay, so as I stated originally, I wanted to talk to you about serial killers in ancient Rome. But then I started to think...

You are an academic with history as your forte, no less. So I wanted to discuss with you

A broader theme regarding serial killers in history. As some of my astute listeners might have picked up on, I have told in earlier episodes how the term, and you mentioned this briefly earlier in our interview, that the term serial killer is quite new. A popular tale is that it was coined by the FBI in 1974 by Special Agent Robert Ressler.

It is true that the wrestler was the first professional to use the term in the English-speaking world, but he was not the first one to coin the term. That honor belongs to Ernst August Ferdinand Gennatt, a prominent German detective operating out of Berlin. I've actually talked about him in a previous episode, the one dedicated to Fritz Harman.

Gennad hunted down Harman, but also Peter Kürten, another German serial killer. Gennad wrote a paper entitled Die Düsseldorfer Sexualverbrechen, wherein he used the term Serienmörder, which directly translates as serial murderer, commonly simply translated as serial killer. The paper in question was published in 1930.

But, as my listeners know, serial killers have existed for a very, very long time before 1930. So, to bring you back into the conversation, Garrett, do you know what is the earliest known case of serial murder in the world, not just in ancient Rome? I mean, to be honest, I'm a classicist, so I don't have any detailed knowledge of things before. I mean, I would assume that...

You know, they've always been, they've always existed, these people, but with a need to kill. And obviously, in many cases, you know, it's been sublimated or transferred in some way by being a king or being a warrior. You have kind of a form in which you can kill people where it's socially acceptable.

I mean, what I'm trying to think, you know, so what's interesting is in the Greek myths, for example, which sometimes have some historical basis, you know, there are people who seem like serial killers. Often they're people like bandits who kill anybody who goes by. And actually were theories in the classical world. We call them euhemerism now. That the great, you know, the gods and heroes and other characters of Greek myth were based on historical figures.

This probably isn't true in many cases, but one wonders whether, you know, going back, you know, past someone like Achilles, who kills, you know, for all kinds of strange reasons, into Greek myth, whether some of these people really are based on, you know, prehistoric serial killers. You know, I don't know that they are. Maybe you can't prove anything like that. But there certainly are echoes, I think, of that sort of thing happening before our records begin.

Well, unsurprisingly, I have looked up the answer to this online. Oh, yeah. And according to the internet, and of course, we don't know if that's accurate, but according to the internet, the answer is that the earliest known serial killer in the world is either the Greek serial killer Procrustes. Oh, anyways, yeah.

Yes, a figure of myth, but quite odd. And the myth very much reads like a crime story. Or Liu Pengli in China. And the first Procrustes, he operated in the 5th century BC.

and the latter, Liu Pengli, in the second century before Christ, or BCE, if you want to be politically correct. And you are familiar with Procrustes?

Yes. So he's a figure from the myth of Theseus, actually. So Theseus is the mythical king of Athens. And actually, if Procrustes existed, he was long before the 5th century BC. So Theseus supposedly lived, by the Greeks stating, around 1300 or 1400 BC, back in the Bronze Age. So if what he did is any basis in fact, you know that it does, of course, Procrustes would have been long before 500 BC.

So Procrustes was an innkeeper, supposedly, who would, anyone who stayed at his inn would be caught to fit his iron bed. So if you were too short, he would stretch you out until you fit the bed and then kill you. If you were too tall, he would chop off pieces of you until you fit the bed and then kill you anyway. He'd throw you off a cliff. And so he's one of these kind of mythical bandits or kind of, you know, villains who inhabit all kinds of corners of myth.

So Theseus kind of clears out Athens of various monsters like him. There's another killer like Procrustes whose MO is to bind any travel refines to pine trees. They're bent back. And he releases the pine trees and the person is torn in half between them. And so one of the figures like Procrustes, or I think it's Sinus is the guy who bends the pine trees,

Whether these people are based in fact, of course, is impossible to say. But it might just be very vivid imagination. But if they did exist, they go back to the very beginnings of our understanding of Greece and Rome.

There you go, as my listeners now have evidence of. Don't trust everything you read online. So Procrustes, not the 5th century BC, but the, what is it, the 14th century BC? Yes, quite possibly. The S.C.C. is usually dated by later Greeks anyway. It's a very fascinating, fascinating tale. And it sounds so...

Very crime-like. Like this deranged guy, this sadist who has this bed that he uses as a murder instrument. It's so different than the classical Greek myths of heroes and monsters and that sort of thing. It has the very ring of crime in my mind. So that's why I brought him up. And of course Liu Pingli is not a figure of myth.

He is 2nd century BC and he was a prince, and one of the earliest serial killers attested by historical sources. And at the age of 29, he was arrogant and cruel and would go out on marauding expeditions with tens of slaves or young men who were in hiding from the law, murdering people and seizing their belongings for sheer sport.

Confirmed victims exceed 100, and these murders were known across the kingdom. People were afraid of leaving their homes at night due to Peng Li. Eventually, the son of one of his victims accused him to the emperor, and the official of the court requested that Liu Peng Li be executed.

However, the emperor could not bear to have his own nephew killed, and Liu Pengli was made a commoner and banished to the country of Xiangyong, now Zushan in the Hubei province. In 116 BC, his sovereignty was abolished, and his land was reclaimed by the emperor Jing. That was the Wikipedia entry regarding Liu Pengli.

You know, it's interesting hearing that story. So supposedly Nero, in his earlier days as emperor, would go out in the streets of Rome at night sometimes with a gang of his friends and a few praetorian guards and just beat up on people he met, you know, beat up random shopkeepers, passersby, and even kill them if he was recognized. Again, we don't know how much this is true or not, but there is, again, this kind of idea of a person in power going out and abusing it casually like this.

Yes. And I think it's important that, I mean, I have a sort of a light tone in parts of this interview, but on a serious note, I think it is important that we don't forget crime in ancient times.

We have a tendency, again here in the West, to focus a lot on the 20th century, the 19th century, and of course the 21st century. But human beings have existed for a long time, and crime is as old as humanity. And we shouldn't forget the suffering of people's past just because it was a long time ago.

So, regarding that, another topic that I find especially fascinating about serial killers from history are the ones who have been transferred into the realm of myth. I am personally convinced that serial killers, especially those from medieval and renaissance times,

are often cloaked in the guise of mythological figures. I am, of course, thinking about vampires, wizards, witches, and werewolves. Have you thought about this yourself in your studies, Garrett? And if so, how?

Well, it's an interesting question. So actually, another question in that book I mentioned, Naked Sitges, Fat Lighted Heirs, and War Elephants, is whether the Greeks and Romans believed in ghost monsters and or aliens. And they had a whole gallery of monsters kind of in folklore, ranging from, you know, vampires, werewolves, all kinds of things. And some of these stories do seem to reflect, at least faintly, things that could have happened at least. So vampires especially,

are almost always human in form. And often there's one actually, one of my latest videos is about vampires in Greek myth and folklore. And they reflect, you know, again, often the story is that it's some beautiful woman who approached a traveler or something and lure him back to her lair and then kill him for his blood. Werewolves likewise, you know, they attack people in the woods and then, you know, transform back into their human form later.

So, other than these reflections that actually happened, or, you know, kind of as a dim reflection of actual criminals in the ancient past, you know, it's hard to say. Obviously, they have roots in actual folklore. They actually believed in these things for reasons that had nothing to do with actual crimes. But they may well have been, actual crimes may well have been translated into the realm of folklore by kind of popular imagination.

So I don't have any good examples that I think might have been historical. So all the ones we know, we only know a few of them, frankly, and occur in pretty sensational literature that has no real bearing on historical reality.

But it is not at all impossible, or even unlikely, that that happened. And that's some of the things that we remember. That's one that comes to mind. So the ghost of Achilles was said to inhabit a small island in the Black Sea, off the coast of what's now Bulgaria. Why he ended up there, I don't know, but he had a little temple there.

And supposedly the ghost of Achilles hailed a ship captain who was passing by once and told him to bring a woman from Troy, or the Roman city that had grown up on the side of Troy, to that island. The captain obliges, he don't, you know, upset the ghost of Achilles. And he brings this woman to the island, not knowing what's going to happen to her. And the ghost immediately tears her to pieces.

And this is probably supposed to be just a reflection of how Achilles had this unquenchable hatred towards Troy and, you know, would have, you know, his ghost therefore would have killed any Trojan he could have encountered, I guess. But that kind of thing, this kind of story reflects perhaps actual killers in the distant past. You know, again, it's impossible to say which ones have any bearing in history or any basis in history, but there's no reason to discount that possibility.

Very interesting. And again, unsurprisingly, I have done a bit of research to prove my theory regarding vampires, wizards, witches, and werewolves. I do have a very real example of a real human being being elevated to a creature of myth. Herjabeth Bathory.

As my listeners know, I have a whole series on her. She murdered dozens upon dozens of young girls before being stopped by the Austria-Hungarian Emperor. But she was the main inspiration for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, and her crimes were and are still surrounded by myth and tales of vampiric activities.

The same goes for her relative Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian nobleman who fought the invading Turks so fiercely that his title of Dracula, meaning son of the dragon, is still synonymous with a vampire.

The same goes for Vlad the Impaler, as I said, and he fought the invading Turks, that his name became, or his title, Dracula, son of the dragon, is still synonymous with a vampire. Now, regarding werewolves, we have the actual case of the werewolf of Bedborg. His actual name was Peter Stumpf.

In 1589, he was tried and convicted of lycanthropy and witchcraft. And he was suspected of this because he was indeed an actual serial killer. He murdered 14 children and two pregnant women. And he ate them. That's what he did. And he was thought of as a werewolf.

So I think this is quite common in that era where we have this

all these dozens and hundreds of tales, we call them fairy tales, regarding werewolves and mythical creatures kidnapping children to the forest, kidnapping young virgins into the forest, and ravishing them and leaving them torn to pieces and so forth. And no one is to blame but the Full Moon.

But in reality, a very real grown man with a beard and long hair probably mauled and murdered those innocent girls in the forest. And probably was never caught because there were no actual police force to speak of.

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So, yes, we have talked about myths. We have talked about vampires. Again, your YouTube channel is fantastic. I watched the vampire one you told me about. Such an interesting story about this young man being lured by this vampire, this gorgeous woman vampire.

that creates this illusion for him. It's super interesting. And it's such a classical vampire tale. And it's 2,000 years old. I mean, fascinating. Truly fascinating.

On the tail end of this, you, as I understand, specialize in ancient history in Rome and Greece. If I can say so myself, my personal favorite, if I can call it that, ancient empire is the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian, the empires forged in and around Mesopotamia.

I've read and watched quite a bit about their history. But when it comes to crime in Mesopotamia, ancient Mesopotamia, I have very little knowledge. Have you any knowledge about that?

You know, unfortunately, I don't. You know, I wish I had some, you know, great anecdotes about, you know, the Acadians or something, but I don't know the sources very well. You know, one thing I can suggest, though, we don't know quite a bit about Egypt, mostly from the pre-Colonial periods. We have a lot of papyri, but even from before.

So there are crime cases from Pharaonic and then later Greek and Roman Egypt that are still preserved in papyri. I don't know of any great murder stories off the top of my head. I mean, there are a few kind of like inter-village feuds, for example, the end of the murderers, people who are like accosted by bandits, that sort of thing. No good serial killer style stories come to mind from Egypt anyway. But it's all I know, unfortunately. I don't really have any good basis for Mesopotamia.

Perfectly understandable. It's too good an opportunity not to ask. No worries. So we've talked, wow, over an hour and we've talked about my field of interest. And in fairness, I think I should give you the opportunity to tell my dear listeners about yours. I gather, as you have mentioned, you have a book out. And do you have any other projects my listeners should be aware of?

Yes, well thank you. So besides "Told in Stone," my YouTube channel, where I have a whole host of topics appear on my weekly videos, I have written a book that answers 36 frequently asked questions about the Greeks and Romans. And the title is "Naked Statues, Back Gladiators, and War Elephants: Meant to Catch the Eye." I'm actually working on a sequel right now to that book, so stay tuned.

But yes, if you're interested in history, and especially the overlooked sides of history, you might enjoy my channel, and I think you would enjoy my book as well. Excellent. And where can one purchase that book? Oh, it's on Amazon, every major bookseller, online, and many in person now as well, in both America and in Western Europe. Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me tonight, Garrett. It has been an absolute pleasure.

Likewise. Thank you very much for having me. Finally, I wish to thank you, dear listener, for listening. If you like this podcast, you can support it by donating on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast by leaving a review on Apple podcasts, facebook.com slash the SK podcast, or by posting on the subreddit, the SK podcast. Thank you. Good night. Good luck.