The modern practice of forensic science is generally agreed to date back to at least the early 19th century in Europe, but ancient Roman history contains examples of three seemingly modern techniques that were used to solve crimes centuries before that. Shockingly, some of our modern techniques are not based in accepted science and are not significantly different than the Romans’.
Enlightenment era practices in the Age of Reason led to the creation of modern forensic science, with methods in toxicology, fingerprint analysis, and ballistics coming into vogue. High-profile cases like Jack the Ripper in England and the Parker-Webster murder case in the U.S. employed new forensic techniques in the second half of the 19th century. This was also the time period in which the term forensics became widely used, related to the Latin word forum, as the Romans would present legal charges in the public square.
While the ancient Romans did not have a specific term for forensic science, nor a full understanding of techniques of criminal investigation as science, there are historical examples of their using bloodstain pattern analysis, footprints and drag marks, and dental markers in figuring out whodunnit.
A bloody handprint looms large in an instructional legal case written up by the Roman jurist Quintilian or one of his students in the early 2nd century AD. The case is titled “Paries Palmatus” or “The Wall of Handprints” and involves a blind son accused of stabbing his father in his sleep in order to obtain his inheritance. Purportedly, the blind man took his sword from his room, walked across the house in the dead of night, entered his father and stepmother’s bedroom, and stabbed his father once, killing him instantly and not waking up his stepmother, who found her husband dead in bed when she awoke. A trail of bloody handprints led from the parents’ room back to the blind son’s room, and his blood-covered sword was found as well.
Quintilian’s proposed defense, however, is that the stepmother did it, upset because she would lose out on the father’s fortune to his blind son — so she framed the blind man using his own father’s blood:
It was the stepmother, yes, the stepmother who set this up with her sure sight; it was she, with her right hand, who brought that poor blood there and made the imprint of [her] hand [on the wall] intermittently! The wall bears the imprints of one palm, has them at intervals, with a certain empty space in the middle, and everywhere the palm-print is intact; a blind man, on the other hand, would have dragged his hands [along the wall].
(Pseudo-Quintilian, Declamationes Maiores, 1.11-12; translation mine)
Modern bloodstain pattern analysis in forensic science dates to the end of the 19th century. In 1895, Dr. Eduard Piotrowski of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Poland published paper on the shape and direction of bloodstains following head wounds. While scientifically performed, Piotrowski’s experiments were not exactly ethical, having been done on live rabbits. But what Quintilian is describing is now called a “transfer stain” that results from an object or body part coming into contact with fresh blood and then leaving a print elsewhere.
Quintilian goes on in his case example, explaining how the stepmother’s grasp on the hilt of the sword prevented her palm from getting blood on it, and thus the handprints along the wall – with an empty space in the middle – suggest the person who killed the father was also the one creating the prints. This is an example of interpretation of a bloodstain pattern that we can imagine being proposed in court today.
Roughly, then, in spite of the lack of modern understanding of the properties and classification of blood, the Romans appear to have been reasonably skilled at bloodstain pattern analysis and reconstruction.
In another spouse-killing story, drag marks helped convince the Roman emperor Tiberius of murder most foul. In his Annals, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote in the 2nd century AD that:
… Plautius Silvanus, the prætor, for unknown reasons, threw his wife Apronia out of a window. When summoned before the emperor by Lucius Apronius, his father-in-law, he replied incoherently, representing that he was in a sound sleep and consequently knew nothing, and that his wife had chosen to destroy herself. Without a moment’s delay Tiberius went to the house and inspected the chamber, where were seen the marks of her struggling and of her forcible ejection. He reported this to the Senate, and as soon as judges had been appointed, Urgulania, the grandmother of Silvanus, sent her grandson a dagger. This was thought equivalent to a hint from the emperor, because of the known intimacy between Augusta and Urgulania. The accused tried the steel in vain, and then allowed his veins to be opened. Shortly afterwards Numantina, his former wife, was charged with having caused her husband’s insanity by magical incantations and potions, but she was acquitted.
(Tacitus, Annales, 4.22; translation by Church & Brodribb 1876)
While not as cut-and-dried an example of forensics as the Wall of Handprints, the story related by Tacitus includes an element of forensic pattern matching or pattern recognition that is sometimes used today — for example, comparisons of footprints, fibers, bite marks, and tire tracks in a homicide case are done by pattern matching.
Pattern matching, although still used, is quite problematic. There are few standards for what constitutes a good match for many techniques, and juries are often swayed by CSI-sounding methods like fiber and hair analysis. In fact, the Innocence Project estimates that about 45% of wrongful convictions in the U.S. are due to shady forensic science, much of it involving pattern matching, and the FBI in 2015 admitted that over-estimation of the reliability of hair analysis generally favored the prosecution.
The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology released a report in 2016 calling for more research into forensic science techniques to assess their reliability and validity, particularly in the realm of pattern matching. However, the National Commission on Forensic Science, which was established in 2013 and took on the task of assessing these methods, was shuttered in April of 2017 at the behest of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
A final tale of ancient forensics more directly concerns the imperial family and one Lollia Paulina, a wealthy, beautiful woman who was Caligula’s third wife for a short time. After Caligula’s death, the new emperor Claudius began to court Paulina but was also interested in Agrippina, who was his niece and Caligula’s younger sister.
Agrippina was not interested in having Lollia Paulina hanging around, even though she eventually married Claudius and became empress. So she did what many ancient Romans did to eliminate people they didn’t like: she accused Paulina of witchcraft.
Paulina got no trial — her property was taken away, she was exiled from Italy, and was forced to commit suicide. Of course, Agrippina couldn’t leave it at that, not knowing for sure whether or not Paulina was gone for good. Historian Cassius Dio wrote in the early 3rd century AD:
Indeed, [Agrippina] even destroyed some of the foremost women out of jealousy; thus she slew Lollia Paulina because she had been the wife of Gaius [Caligula] and had cherished some hope of becoming Claudius’ wife. As [Agrippina] did not recognize the woman’s head when it was brought to her, she opened the mouth with her own hand and inspected the teeth, which had certain peculiarities.
(Cassius Dio, Historia Romana, Book LX, 32.4; translation by Earnest Cary 1914)
Bite mark analysis is another issue-plagued forensic technique, explained thoroughly by Radley Balko and others, that has been recently and widely discredited. But forensic odontology or forensic dentistry has firmer scientific grounds to stand on.
Dental evidence can reveal age-at-death as well as post-mortem x-rays that can be compared to known x-rays taken during life, if the goal is to figure out the identity of an unknown skull or jaw. Each person’s dental pattern is fairly unique, and when we add cavities, root canals, crowns, and other dental appliances to the mix, forensic odontology can be an inexpensive and very reliable method of identifying the deceased.
The ancient Romans did have dentistry, although not as sophisticated as our own — it largely involved extractions, but there is a bit of evidence for appliances to hold in false teeth. We can’t know whether Agrippina thoroughly examined the teeth of the head brought to her, nor whether Paulina had uniquely identifying dental features. But the similarity seems to have mollified Agrippina, who may not have had anyone else murdered for a full five years after that.
The ancient forensic techniques of bloodstain analysis, pattern recognition, and odontology may date back two millennia, but that doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily improved in reliability and accuracy over the years. Pattern recognition covers a vast array of techniques, including bite marks, fibers and hair, and footprints and tire marks, but is now considered highly problematic and liable to wrongfully convict someone. Bloodstains and odontology, on the other hand, have benefitted from a more scientific approach dating back to the Enlightenment.
But forensic techniques are not foolproof — research like this into their Roman origins may not be useful for more than a history lesson, but research into modern forensic science should be one of the U.S. government’s imperatives as it weighs in on literal situations of life or death . Forensic scientists are doing amazing work negotiating the space between science and the law, but they need more funding to help bring our judicial system into the 21st century.
Special thanks to classics professors Christopher Polt and James O’Hara for helping me track down the pseudo-Quintilian text. Any Latin translation errors, though, are my own.
