Poisoning Cases in Ancient Rome and in Hungary

Abstract

In this paper I show two very similar mass-poisoning cases. The first law-case took place in the ancient Rome in the year of 331 B.C., where the accused women tried to defend themselves by quoting the legal difference between good poison (=medicine) and bad poison (=poison). The other case was the “arsenic murder-case in the Tiszazug region” from the 1930’s, where women from the countryside used arsenic poison, exploited from flypapers. In both cases, the major part of the victims were men, they came from the family or kinship of these women.