Rome outlaws killing by hidden means with poison or sorcery

Latin speakers had a single word family for substances that acted in ways nobody could watch. Uenenum covered a potent herb, a magical influence and a poison, and out of it came a verb meaning to bewitch or to infect, a noun for the act itself, and uenefucus, a word for the person who did such things, used of men and of women. In the late republic the Roman state grew worried enough about those people to pass a law in 81 BCE against causing sudden or unexpected death by concealed means, whether the means were chemical or magical. The law treated the two as one offence. Sixteen centuries later, courts in Martinique and Suriname were still hearing cases in which nobody could say whether the accused had used a plant, a powder or a spell, and the statutes they used descended from this one. The vocabulary carried the ambiguity across two thousand years.