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| Pollice Verso by Jean-Léon Gérôme |
1. The Romans executed all slaves if one of them killed the master.
If a slave killed his own master, all the
slaves of the deceased that lived in his house were put to death, to make an
example, regardless of their age, their sex or their (lack of) involvement in
the crime. Even the slaves that would have been freed in the master’s will
shared the same fate.
When, during the reign of Nero, Rome’s prefect Pedanius Secundus was killed by one of his slaves (either for not allowing that
slave to buy his freedom or for sleeping with the boy the slave loved), the
people of Rome was close to revolt to prevent the massacre of so many innocent
lives – because the prefect had 400 slaves – and besieged the Senate house.
Even in the Senate there were voices that pleaded for putting an end to the
cruel old custom, but the majority approved it – they were all masters of
slaves and were easy to convince that the injustice was “compensated… by the
advantage of the community”! The crowd, armed with stones and firebrands, gathered
along the road to stop the execution by force, but Nero put detachments of
soldiers to guard the road by which the 400 slaves were marched to their
execution place.
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| Slave Market in Ancient Rome by Jean-Léon Gérôme |
2. The Romans interrogated slaves by torture – even as witnesses
A slave’s testimony was accepted only if it was
obtained under torture. The usual method was flogging with whips or rods. Slaves
were tortured not only when they were themselves suspects of a crime, but even
if they just happened to (or were supposed to) witness one and were clearly
guiltless. Of course, the system was exploited by those who wanted to falsely
accuse someone, hoping that, under torture, slaves could be made to “confess”
anything, especially if it didn’t incriminate them, but someone else.
It didn’t always work. For example, Emperor
Nero, wanting to divorce his first wife Octavia (to marry his mistress), tried
to invent her a love affair to have a pretext to repudiate her. So he put her
slave maids to torture. But in spite of all torments, most slaves refused to bear false witness against their innocent mistress. Their courage didn’t save
Octavia – Nero repudiated and killed her anyway.
Another case is told by Cicero: a widow, Sassia, wanted to accuse her estranged son for the death of her husband. So she
started an investigation: at her orders and in the presence of some honorable
friends of the deceased as witnesses, 3 slaves were tortured, one of them being
a slave-apothecary alleged to having prepared the poison. At the end of the
second day, when even the torturer felt worn out, but Sassia, furious, insisted
to continue, one of those honorable witnesses finally observed that “the object
was not to find out the truth, but to compel them to give some false evidence”
and so ended the interrogation.
3. The Romans sewed parricides in sacks with serpents and drowned them
The Romans considered that for parricides, who
killed their own parents, the usual punishment for murder was not enough; they
invented a punishment as unusual and horrible as the crime itself: “poena
cullei”. The parricide was sewn in a sack made from a hide and thrown in the
sea or a river to drown. Maybe to make the experience even more horrible, or
maybe for religious reasons, some animals where put in the sack with the
parricides: usually serpents (especially vipers), but sometimes also monkeys,
dogs and roosters.
The first known parricide put in a sack was
Publicius Malleolus, who killed his mother, around 100 BC, but there are
earlier allusions to that punishment in some theater plays. During the Empire,
the cruel punishment was applied or not, depending of the mercy of the emperor:
Augustus avoided to put a parricide in sack, but Claudius not only ordered such executions, but was always present at them; Hadrian used to replace them with throwing to the
beasts in the arena, but future saint Constantine the Great promoted them and insisted on the use of serpents.
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| Jean-Léon Gérôme - The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer |
4. The Romans used criminals sentenced to death in fatal mythological reenactment spectacles
At midday, between the beasts shows in the morning and the gladiator fights in the afternoon, most respectable citizens went home to take lunch; only the most bloodthirsty spectators staid, for the “ludi meridiani”, the most gruesome part of the spectacles: reenactments of violent scenes from the Greco-Roman mythology, using criminals condemned to death – from murderers to arsonists to deserters to innocent Christians – as casting for these macabre plays.
They were disguised according to the role: “Icarus” with wings that didn’t help him stay in the air, fell immediately, spattering the spectators and emperor Nero himself with his blood; “Hercules” in the poisoned tunic of Nessus, actually a burning “tunica molesta” imbibed with pitch (for this role, it was used an arsonist); “Pasiphae” (mother of the Minotaur), inside a wooden heifer, was mounted by a bull (at least that’s what the spectators thought). Sometimes the adaptations were less faithful: “Prometheus” was chained on a cross and had his entrails devoured by a bear, not by a vulture; “Orpheus”, with his lyre, didn’t succeed to tame the beasts – a bear attacked him and killed him; these two happened at the inauguration of the Colosseum, when Emperor Titus.
5. The Romans buried alive the Vestals who broke their chastity vows
The Vestals were offered to Vesta by their families – the noblest families of Rome - as little girls, between 6 and 10. They had to serve for 30 years in the Temple of Vesta, keeping the eternal fire burning. It was believed that the fate of Rome depended on that fire, which in turn depended on the purity of the Vestals. After the 30 years of service, they had the right to return to the world and marry, but that rarely happened – it was late, they were 36-40 years old; usually they remained Vestals until death.
But before that term, a Vestal had to stay chaste; if she lost her virginity, she had to pay with her life. But, as the body of a Vestal was considered sacred, her blood couldn’t be spilled in a usual execution. So, with a funeral cortege, she was taken to the gate of the city, where an underground cell awaited her, containing only a bed, a little food (bread, milk and water), and a lamp with oil. That cell was the tomb she had to enter alive; after she descended into it, it was covered with earth.
6. The Greeks and Romans exposed their unwanted newborns
In ancient times, when contraception was
inefficient and abortion was risky, “expositio” (abandonment) was the usual method of family planning. It was as legal and acceptable as abortion is today
and practiced for the same reasons: unwed mother, too poor parents, too many
children, born disabled or a girl instead of the expected boy.
The exposed baby had a chance to survive, if
and only if somebody else wanted it - there were no orphanages, the state
didn’t take care of the abandoned children. If it had luck, it could be found
and adopted by a childless family; if it was very unlucky, it could be eaten by
animals; but the most common occurrence was to be taken by a slave dealer and
raised for slavery, sometimes for prostitution (even the boys, in ancient
Greco-Roman world). Depending on how much the parents cared for its survival,
it could be abandoned on a hill or at the roadside, naked or clothed,
frequently with some trinkets that could serve for later recognition if it
survived, or as burial goods if it died unwanted.
The father decided if a newborn was kept or not
– if the mother wasn’t married, her father or closest male relative. After
Augustus exiled his granddaughter Julia for adultery, she gave birth to a boy.
Augustus not only decided to expose the baby, his great-grandson, but
specifically forbade anyone to take it and raise it.
7. Among some Thracians, the most beloved wife of a deceased man was killed and buried with him
The Thracians were polygamous – according to
Menander, they frequently had ten wives, sometimes even twelve. The wives had
to be bought from their parents, so their number depended on the wealth of the
man. The Thracians were divided in many tribes, some having their particular customs.
Among the Thracian tribe who lived above
Crestonia, according to Herodotus, when a man died, one of his wives, the most
beloved, had to be buried with him, probably to be together in the afterlife. There
was intense competition among the wives of the deceased – but not to escape
that fate, on the contrary: each tried to prove that she was the most beloved. When
one of them was chosen, the other wives were disappointed and humiliated. The
chosen one, after being praised by both men and women, had her throat cut by
her closest male relative over the tomb and was buried with her husband.
8. The Getae sent messengers to their god by throwing them on spears
The Getae, who lived near the Danube, were the
bravest of all Thracians, because they believed they were immortal. They
thought that when they die, they would go to their god Zalmoxis, where they
would enjoy all things good, so they weren’t afraid of death.
Once every 5 years, they chose by lot a man to be sent as messenger to Zalmoxis. After they told him the message to give to
the god, they took him by hands and feet and threw him in the air, to fall into
3 spears. If by chance he survived the injuries, they thought that Zalmoxis
rejected the messenger, finding him unworthy – that was a great shame for the
survivor and his family – and another man had to be chosen and thrown into
spears.
9. Young Spartans killed peasant Helots who worked to feed them
The Spartan men were all warriors, they never
worked in the crafts or in the fields. For that, they had the Helots, the subjugated
peasant population, a kind of serfs, who lived in the countryside and worked
the fields for Sparta. The Helots outnumbered the Spartans many times, so the
Spartans found a way to keep Helots subdued, in terror, and also give young
Spartans, at the end of their military training, the experience of real killing
– “krypteia”:
The most promising young Spartans were sent
into the countryside in small groups, armed with daggers. There, according to Plutarch, during daytime they walked by stealth, hiding among the vegetation,
on “the fields where Helots were working and slew the sturdiest and best of
them”; during the night, they killed any Helot they saw, without choosing.
Before sending them, the rulers of Sparta formally declared war to the Helots,
so that all those killings were legal.
10. Carthaginians sacrificed children to their god
There was in Carthage a bronze statue of a god,
with his hands extended over a bronze brazier. In his hands the Carthaginians
put the sacrificed children, the noblest of their sons, who were engulfed by
the flames of the brazier. Many Greek and Roman authors described the
abominable custom; they assimilated the Carthaginian god with Cronos, who ate
his own children, but the Carthaginians called him Baal Hammon (descending from
the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians were related to the Canaanites).
According to Diodorus of Sicily, many noble
families that didn’t want their children to die, but didn’t dare to defy the
old sacred custom, secretly bought slave children and sent them to death
instead of their own. When the city was sieged by Agathocles of Syracuse, some
thought it was a punishment sent by Baal for being cheated, and after an
investigation that proved the cheatings, they sacrificed 200 noble children;
besides, 300 youths who thought they have escaped by substitution, offered
themselves voluntarily to sacrifice, to appease the god and save the city.
For a while, the modern historians doubted all
that, many thought these were just calumnies – but few maintained this opinion
after “tophets” full of cremated remains of babies, most of them only a few weeks old, were discovered at Carthage and at other Phoenician colonies in Sicily, Sardinia and Malta, together with "animal remains [...] found in the same sites treated in exactly the same way",
Sources:
Illustrations: paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) - via Wikimedia Commons
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