What soldiers do on the battlefield or boxers do in the ring would be treated as criminal acts if carried out in an everyday setting. Perpetrators of violence in the classical world knew this and chose their venues and targets with care: killing Julius Caesar at a meeting of the Senate was deliberate. That location asserted Senatorial superiority over a perceived tyrant, and so proclaimed the pure republican principles of the assassins.

The contributors to The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World take on a task not yet addressed in classical scholarship: they examine...