Ancient Rome began as a small town straddling a couple of hills next to the Tiber. She needed few crime-fighting resources, and the individual citizen bore the burden of reporting crime and pursuing those who broke the law. But Rome grew, and by the time of Julius Caesar, public violence was a major issue. Responsibility for public order and the lawcourts lay in a combination of elected officials, the aediles and praetors, who had limited resources, many other responsibilities, and little interest. They knew they would be in office for just a year and their goal was to ensure that they would be elected to the next office up the ladder. Many aediles and praetors were far more concerned about putting on extravagant shows than pursuing the wicked – after all, thousands of voters went to a day at the chariot races. How many people would vote for you because you caught a murderer?

In the last century BCE, as the Roman Republic fell, there was a surge in political violence with leading men routinely using gangs to instigate rioting. Caesar himself was assassinated by a large number of his peers in a meeting of the Senate. The conspirators were charged and condemned in their absence, but this form of justice was not enough to stop yet another round of civil strife.

Public order was overhauled in the time of the Emperors, with three bodies set up – the Praetorian Guard to guard the Emperor himself, the Urban Cohort to guard the city and the Watch to fight fires. But investigating day-to-day crime? Prosecuting offenders? That was still usually left to a determined individual with money enough to conduct a prosecution.

It is little wonder then that the cases we hear about are conducted by the upper classes. It was expected that young men looking to climb the ladder of offices would conduct prosecutions to hone their speaking skills and get their names known, but they did not take on many cases in which the lower classes featured. They were interested in scandal, crimes involving large amounts of money and the deeds of politically-important men.

When a writer embarks on a Roman mystery series then, the first problem is how to get the main character into the world of mystery-solving at all. A little research shows that our sources give us most information about the upper classes, and in particular, upper class men. Fortunately, modern research is uncovering interesting material on other groups such as slaves, freedmen and freedwomen, and I suspect that historical fiction as a whole will pounce on this with alacrity. But in crime fiction the detective must realistically have the means to support a career of sleuthing, either as a Golden Age aristocratic amateur, or as a paid officer of the law.  Reluctantly, I still feel it is unlikely that the average inhabitant of the poverty-stricken Subura district had the income needed to solve interesting murders.

For me, Ovid was an ideal candidate for a detective. He had been born into a wealthy family and was a budding poet: he would therefore be following in a noble tradition of fictional detectives who write. Sherlock himself wrote monographs, admittedly on the business of detection, but Adam Dalgliesh is a poet, Richard Sheridan in the new series by R. M. Cullen is a playwright, and real-life mystery writer Josephine Tey stars in Nicola Upson’s excellent series. All I had to do was work out how a fictional Ovid could realistically get into the business of solving mysteries – and here I had a stroke of luck, although Ovid’s brother might not regard it as such.

The real Ovid was on the island of Rhodes finishing his education when he received the devastating news that his elder brother had died.  Ovid and his sibling had been close: they were born exactly a year apart, and Ovid wrote in an autobiographical poem written towards the end of his life that he lost half of himself. Crucially for me, it also meant that the family hopes of advancement now rested on him alone, and he was summoned back to Rome to be trained for the career expected of the only son of a wealthy family. There was a well-trodden path of low level jobs traditionally given to young ambitious men, and Ovid himself tells us he served as one of the Tresviri (“Board of Three”).

Despite a degree and 25 years teaching Classics, I knew nothing about this board of three, and soon it transpired that almost everyone else was in the same boat. But I gleaned from the extremely meagre evidence, that there were two possibilities: firstly there were the Tresviri Monetales, who worked in the mint, and I rejected them – my apologies to all numismatists. Secondly there were the Tresviri Capitales. As usual with anything written about Ancient Rome, I must start by saying that we don’t have much evidence for these officials, but they were connected to the legal system and seem to have been responsible for prisons and executions. It is suggested by a couple of modern scholars that they also supervised a limited form of night patrols, and this was just what I needed.

I made Ovid one of these and called his post “Commissioner for Prisons and Executions”. Of course this was probably not the sort of job that Ovid would have embraced with enthusiasm: after all, a decent Latin love poet should be spending his nights otherwise, to gain material for his poetry. But it did give him a year in which he could have found out how several rather grim aspects of the Roman law worked. Rome had one prison at the time, the Tullianum, which was primarily used to hold prisoners before their executions. There were far fewer executions than Hollywood would have us believe, because at the time of Ovid, criminals on capital charges were usually given the option of going into exile. Despite the long list of barbaric punishments technically allowed in Roman law, most executions were by garrotting, swift and private. I can’t see Ovid enjoying this aspect of the job.

Ovid’s political career ended soon after this year as one of the Tresviri. We don’t know how he persuaded his family to let him just write poetry, but they seem to have accepted that he was never going to go down the traditional career path. He next appears as a successful poet, charming Roman society with love poems (Amores), poems of mythology (Metamorphoses) and the racy Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) among many other works.

In my version of Ovid and his world, though, he had that crucial experience patrolling the city at night. I experimented by writing a short story in which a young Ovid encounters his first murder: “His first corpse nearly fell on top of him: Ovid dined out on that for the rest of his life.”

And thus, my poetic Roman detective was born.

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To discover more detectives living in ancient Rome, I recommend the website: The Detective and the Toga.