Timeline: 331 BC - 1440 AD
Given many factors, including class divisions, law enforcement, lack of popular press and unsympathetic authorities, you’re not going to find too many reports of serial killers in the time before Christ, although there probably were many more than we now know about. I suppose in some ways, what we would term murder today might not have seemed such a crime back then - slaves could be whipped or beaten to death completely within the law, wives could be abused, even killed, commoners could fall victims to high-class gentlemen looking for sport, and so on. So surely it went on, but was not reported. But some were, at least after the fact.
In every case we will be prefacing the account with the salient details, most of which are self-explanatory, but some may need clarification, so: “Type” refers back to the discussion on what drives killers, and how they are classified - lust/hunter/mission/visionary etc - while “Hunting ground(s)” tells where the killer operated, where he or she killed or stalked their victims. “Caught by” rather obviously refers to either the law enforcement authority or individual(s) who tracked them down and arrested them, or perhaps those who reported them and alerted the relevant authorities. In some cases this may not be a person but an organisation, though given the timeline we're dealing with here there may indeed have been mob justice involved, and in rare cases it may be that the killer turned themselves in.
Epithet is the name the killer either was known by or by which they wished to be known - Jack the Ripper, for instance, was known only as "The Whitechapel Murderer" until the receipt of the letter to Abberline which forever enshrined him as "Jack the Ripper". Some of these, of course, will have no epithets, popular nickname or media nickname, as the advertising and marketing infrastructure was not around so early to create such, and media was something completely unknown, to say nothing of the amount of people who could not even read. But where we have one, or even where one was later assigned by historians, they'll be noted here.
Killer: Unnamed, but part of what was known as The Poison Ring
Epithet: n/a
Type: Comfort (?)
Nationality: Roman
Hunting ground(s): Rome, Italy
Years active: 331 BC
Weapon(s) used: Poison
Signature (if any): n/a
Victims: Believed to be about 90
Survivors: Unsure
Caught by: The intervention of a serving woman
Fate: Died at their own hand
A weird one, this. Seems there were two patrician (noble family) women going around poisoning men. No idea why, but their deaths - about ninety of them before the women were stopped - were apparently believed to be the results of a plague. When the women were challenged that the potion they said was medicinal was poison, then both -
both! - seem to have said “Look! We’ll
show you it’s harmless!” and drank the bloody thing. Whereupon they died instantly. Can’t figure that one out. If they knew the potion was deadly, why drink it, especially since they weren’t forced or coerced to do so? In the wake of the discovery a whole cabal of poisoners was uncovered, who became known collectively as the “Poison Ring”. They were judged to be mad, which, given what the other two did, would seem a safe diagnosis.
As far as I can see, this Poison Ring is the earliest example of serial killing, and oddly enough, involved a whole lot of people. Serial killers are usually loners, trusting few people and eager to get their own hands dirty with the blood of their victims, so they seldom hand off the killings to anyone else. There have been instances of pairs of serial killers, but they are rare. A whole group? Almost unique.
Perhaps as unique as the next one we’re going to look at.
Killer: Emperor Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus “Caligula”
Epithet: n/a
Type: Lust
Nationality: Roman, duh!
Hunting ground(s): Rome, Italy
Years active: 37 - 41 AD
Weapon(s) used: Everything and anything
Signature (if any): He’s said to have enjoyed gagging his victims so that they were denied their last breath to cry out
Victims: Impossible to tell
Survivors: Same
Caught by: Praetorian Guard
Fate: Assassinated
Here we run up against one of my own personal criteria and see how it fails. You may remember in the introduction I stated that figures like Hitler, Pol Pot etc would not, for me, qualify as serial killers as they operated under state-sponsored murder. However, it must be said that this wasn’t necessarily murder at the behest of, or with the agreement of the state. This was murder ordered by, authorised by and indeed carried out by one man, the emperor, who believed himself a living god, and nobody could deny him. It was, in effect, tantamount to having a serial killer in charge of not only a country but an empire (although Caligula did confine his madness to the capital).
At any rate, Peter Vronsky in his excellent
Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers From the Stone Age to the Present, includes him as one of the first ever examples of a serial killer, almost a thousand years before the term was coined, and who am I to argue?
So, let the madness begin!
Who doesn’t know about Caligula? One of the most feared, hated and quite simply mad emperors of ancient Rome, Caligula came to power and initially seemed to be a good ruler, but then in around 37 AD he fell ill, and when he recovered he was never the same. One of the first things he did was to go to the senate, having heard that the senators had prayed to the gods to take them in his place, and demand they kept their promise now that he had been spared. So one by one, they all had to commit suicide. Whether you can count that as part of his victim tally or not I don’t know, but I imagine a serial killer who impels his victims to take their own lives can be blamed for their deaths, so I’d say yes. After all, if they had refused to do as the emperor asked, they surely would have been slain anyway, so they probably just took the easiest and essentially most honourable way out.
When he reinstated the treason trials so hated of his predecessor, Caligula went further, ordering the executioner to keep the condemned alive as long as possible, torturing them and also inviting, read, ordering, their family and friends to come and watch their suffering. He was said to have often quoted the phrase “I can do anything to anybody” and was also to have said at a banquet, laughing evilly, “I have only to give the word and all of your throats would be cut.”
We should keep in mind, as pretty much any historian has noted, that the only accounts we have of Caligula’s life - and therefore his depravities and his many murders - come from second-hand sources who lived a long time after his death. Many of these might be eager, or at least quick to paint him in the worst light possible, yet it seems likely that most of what has been reported is grounded in some sort of truth. I’ve been able to confirm that the story about him making his horse a consul is not true - some sources say it was a stab at another senator (I might as well make my horse a consul you’re so bad etc) and others say he thought about it, might have been going to do it, but inconveniently for him got killed before he could.
Anyway, with all that in mind, we have this account from Seneca the Younger (4 BC - 65 AD) in his essay
De Ira (“On Anger”):
Only recently Gaius Caesar slashed with the scourge and tortured . . . both Roman senators and knights, all in one day, and not to extract information but for amusement. He was so impatient of postponing his pleasure—a pleasure so great that his cruelty demanded it without delay—that he decapitated some of his victims by lamplight, as he was strolling with some ladies and senators on the terrace of his mother’s gardens . . . What was ever so unheard of as an execution by night? Though robberies are generally concealed by darkness, the more public punishments are, the more they offer as an admonition and warning. But here also I shall hear the answer, “That which surprises you so much is the daily habit of that beast; for this he lives, for this he loses sleep, for this he burns the midnight oil.” But surely you will find no other man who has commanded that the mouths of all those who were to be executed by his orders should be gagged by inserting a sponge, in order that they might not even have the power to utter a cry. What doomed man was ever before deprived of the breath with which to moan? . . . If no sponges were to be found, he ordered the garments of the poor wretches to be torn up, and their mouths to be stuffed with the strips. What cruelty is this?
What indeed? There are also reports that he slept with his own sister, Julia Drusilla, got her pregnant but then feared the child would overthrow him and so disembowelled her afterwards. Nice. He was certainly famous for his cruelty, and status was no bar to his perversions. Considering himself a living god, there was nobody who could stand against him, but he got his in the end when a party of Praetorian guards murdered him, Julius Caesar-like.