Read Online The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History by Daniel Diehl - Free Book Online Page A

the government at will. Under the Empire it became a dictum that a legionnaire should fear his officers more than the enemy.
    In Roman military life, as well as civilian life, the most common punishment was whipping. Whipping was certainly nothing new; the Romans adapted it, like so much else, from the Greeks, but in the process managed to raise the humble whip to a torture device of impressive versatility. For mild offences they used a simple, flat strap – painful, but not life threatening by any means. The next step up was a whip made from plaited strips of parchment designed to flay the flesh from a victim’s back. Then there was a multi-thonged whip, the plumbatae , with small lead balls on the ends of the thongs, and also a version of the cat-o-nine tails, known as the ungulae , that had either thorns or bits of sharp metal braided into the thongs; in a few strokes it could slice to the bone. Finally there was a bullwhip-like beast specifically intended to kill. Amazing how much can be done with a few pieces of leather and a little ingenuity.

     
On the right-hand side of this woodcut, we can see the application of the torture of the pulley (also known as Squassation) the weights attached to his ankles serving to further dislocate his shoulders. On the left side of the image, another man is having his armpits burned with a torch (despite the fact that the rendering appears somewhat more like a feather duster). And in the background a criminal is having his hand chopped off or broken. Note the clerk judiciously taking note of any utterance made by the victim on the pulley while the torturer asks demanding questions.
     
    The Romans were, if nothing else, an inventive people. Their engineers were the envy of the ancient world and many of the devices the engineer corps used to build roads and mount military sieges were equally adaptable to torture. Among these was the humble pulley. With pulleys, a man could be hoisted high into the air before being dropped suddenly to the ground. If he was particularly bad, he could be dropped onto a pile of sharp rocks again, and again, and again, until his flesh was ripped to shreds and his bones shattered. Alternatively, pulleys could be used to make an improvised rack on which a man’s limbs could be pulled from the sockets. Four simple pulleys, four small winches and some rope attached to a person’s limbs and a suspect could be torn limb from limb in a matter of minutes. All these devices, and more, were used by the Romans – not as a form of execution, but as a means to extract information from ‘suspects’ and even from potential witnesses. Under a string of increasingly paranoid Caesars, torture (and the state of fear that accompanies it) became a routine way of maintaining order in the empire. As devices once used for execution became tools for extracting information, new and more creative methods of execution had to be invented. Again, as they had always done, the Romans adapted, and improved upon, pre-existing techniques.
    One of the more nefarious devices adapted by the Romans was the wheel, mentioned earlier. Unlike the Greek wheel, the Roman version was more like a drum than a cart wheel. In the simplest version, the victim was simply strapped to the outer face, or rim, of the wheel and rolled downhill until they were crushed to death. An alternative version had the wheel mounted on an axle and suspended over a fire pit, allowing the condemned to be cranked around, again and again, slowly being burnt to death – not much different than being spit-roasted, but a lot slower. For a more direct approach, there was yet another version of the wheel where the outer surface of the rim was set with spikes and it was across these that the victim was tied. On the ground beneath the wheel was another bed of spikes. When the wheel was turned the poor wretch was literally ground to pieces.
    Possibly unique to the Romans was the sentence imposed on those who murdered their father.