The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

by Mark P. Donnelly

  If ancient Judaic heroes like King David, King Saul, Gideon and Joshuah were warriors of great renown, the greatest warrior clan ever assembled by the Hebrews was undoubtedly the Maccabees. Between 165 and 63 BC the Maccabees attempted to re-establish the Kingdom of Judea by revolting against one of the most nefarious states of the Old Testament era, the Assyrians. To give you an idea of how fierce and barbaric a people the Assyrians were, consider that only a few centuries earlier, under the rule of Ashurbanipal (reigned 669–627 BC) the Assyrian army flayed captured enemy soldiers alive, and marked its trail of conquest with pyramids of decomposing human heads. Cities conquered by Ashurbanipal were subject to having their children burned alive and the (presumably few) surviving adults being blinded, flayed alive, impaled or having their hands, feet, ears and/or noses hacked off. Five centuries later, by the time of the Maccabeean uprising, the Assyrians were a bit more civilised but no more tolerant.

  The Jews hated the Assyrians because they were a constant threat; the Assyrians hated the Jews because they stubbornly refused to be subjugated even in defeat. Finally, the Assyrian king, Antiochus Epiphanies, had had enough. He sacked Jerusalem, erected a statue of Jupiter in the inner sanctum of Solomon’s temple, turned the rest of the building into a brothel and ordered anyone observing the Sabbath to be burned alive. Instead of accepting their defeat, the Jews revolted; raising a rebel army under Judas Maccabaeus. These were the Maccabees.

  This method of torture and execution took many forms. Sometimes the victims were staked out on the ground and a large wheel would be used to smash each of their limbs and joints including the hips and shoulders. In other cases, the victim was tied upon a wheel and the executioner would use bars, clubs or hammers to accomplish the same result. The idea was to break all of the bones in the body without breaking the skin or causing lethal injury. In either case, the shattered limbs of the victim were usually ‘laced’ through the spokes of the wheel and then mounted on a pole and displayed to the populace, where they would slowly and agonizingly die of hunger, thirst and exposure (and presumably, internal bleeding).

  Antiochus took exception to all this; after all, all he wanted was for the Jews to become docile slaves like the rest of his vanquished empire. It seemed obvious to Antiochus that what the Jews needed were a few graphic examples of just how powerful their new king was, and how silly their own beliefs were. Particularly galling to Antiochus was the Jewish dietary law which forbade the eating of pork. In one instance, a boy who refused to eat pork was tied to a wheel where his joints were dislocated, his bones broken and his flesh torn with red-hot pincers. A bed of coals that had been built beneath the wheel, to increase the boy’s pain, was extinguished by the boy’s own, flowing blood. On another occasion, seven brothers and their aged mother were hauled before Antiochus for the same offence. The king assured them that their God would understand if they ate pork under duress and forgive for the sin, pointing out that if they refused to eat, they would all be horribly executed in front of their mother. Neither the lads, nor their mother, were having any of it. After the eldest boy had been broken on the wheel and his limbs had been cut off, the king said he would reprieve the remaining six boys if they would share a succulent pork dinner with him. Again they refused. The second youth had his limbs severed and his still-living trunk cooked in a gigantic frying pan. The third brother was skinned alive and disembowelled, the fourth had his tongue ripped out before being roasted alive on a spit and the fifth was burned at the stake. When the sixth was tossed into a cauldron of boiling water, the youngest simply threw himself into the cauldron to die with his brother. Frustrated, Antiochus accused the mother of forcing her sons to their deaths by not permitting them to transgress against their religion, and sentenced her to be burnt alive. By 63 BC the Maccabeean revolt had collapsed and the Jews remained stateless, but the power of the Assyrians was also waning. A new, more advanced civilization had taken centre stage in the world, and with them they brought new and more advanced forms of torture.

  The Classical Greeks were a civilised people. Well, they certainly believed they were, and we generally accept it as fact. As early as 1179 BC there were Greek laws prohibiting murder but, in a typically enlightened way, a death sentence could only be passed by an officially sanctioned court of law. This would seem to have been a good start, but unfortunately things went rapidly downhill from there. In the decades around 700 BC the Tyrant Draco (Tyrant then being an official title as was Dictator) decided that if a little capital punishment was good then a lot of it would be all that much better. Thus he declared that administering the law would become vastly easier if there was only one punishment for all crimes – death. Everything from stealing a loaf of bread to murder was punished by death. When asked why he imposed such a law, Draco quipped: ‘The poor deserve to die and I can think of no greater punishment to inflict upon the rich’. Draco – which, interestingly, translates as ‘serpent’ – may not have lasted long, but his name is still attached to harsh laws, or measures, in the term ‘draconian’.

  Most readers will be familiar with this device. Far more than being a simple mode of imprisonment, it served to trap the victim’s head and hands in a position where they could not protect or defend themselves against assaults, thrown objects or molestations by the jeering populace of the city.

  The Greeks, in general, seemed to have had a difficult time striking a happy medium in their judicial system. Three and a half centuries after Draco, the Athenian lawgiver Charondas came up with a slate of laws known as the Thurian Code. We are not here to take issue with the code itself – which was the basic ‘eye for an eye’ approach to juris prudence common among early societies – but rather with how it was administered. In order to prevent any ambitious reformers from arbitrarily altering his new laws, Charondas decreed that anyone proposing a change to the code would be forced to wear a noose around his neck until the matter was fully debated among the assembly of lawgivers. Should the change be rejected, the man was to be immediately strangled with the noose already so conveniently in place. It is hardly surprising that while Charondas remained in power only three such changes were proposed. Worth mentioning is the fact that even the hard-nosed Charondas was completely dedicated to adhering to his laws. When he inadvertently appeared at a public assembly wearing a sword (an act outlawed by the Thurian Code) he drew the offending blade and plunged it into his own heart.

  In their more enlightened moments, the Greeks introduced some of the first punishments designed to cause no physical harm to the convicted. Among these was the pillory, a device still in common use at the end of the eighteenth century, in which the condemned had their head and arms locked into a wooden frame mounted on a pole. It was an uncomfortable thing, no doubt, and made all the more so by the fact that the malefactor was displayed in a public place and subjected to the taunts and harangues of passers-by, but there was no long-term damage to their body (at least not any inflicted by the pillory itself). The most common offence which led to the pillory was public drunkenness. Curiously, when an individual committed a crime while drunk they were charged and tried twice – once for being drunk and a second time for the associated crime. Evidently the Greek legal system did not necessarily agree with Aristotle when he said: ‘In vino veritas’ – ‘In wine there is truth’.

  Here we witness an unfortunate victim being stuffed within the brazen bull and a great fire being lit beneath. This would of course function much like a cast bronze oven and would quickly become unbearably hot to touch. The howls and screams of the roasting culprit would be heard to issue forth from the mouth of the bull like snorts and grunts, much to the amusement of the torturers and assembled court.

  Not all Greek tortures were designed as punishment and the use of torture to extract confessions may well have originated in Classical Greece. To this end they employed both the rack and a version of the wheel. In Greek wheel torture, the victim was simply tied to a cart wheel and spun around until they offered up the required information. M
ore severe ‘turns’ on the wheel could, and often did, lead to death, probably through asphyxiation, choking on one’s own vomit, cerebral haemorrhage or heart attack. Surprisingly, even such ‘enlightened’ Greek philosophers as Aristotle and Demosthenes were fully in favour of torture as a means of obtaining information. Aristotle wrote that he approved of such methods because they provided: ‘a sort of evidence that appears to carry with it absolute credibility’. Evidently he failed to consider the fact that almost anyone will confess to anything if subjected to enough pain. One wonders what Aristotle might have thought of that ingenious Greek device known as the ‘Brazen Bull’?

  The Brazen Bull was supposedly invented by a man named Perillus in an attempt to curry favour with the dictator Phalaris of Agigentum. The device was no more than a hollow, life-sized bronze figure of a bull with a door in one side and holes at its nostrils and mouth. In application, a person convicted of a capital crime was stuffed into the bull, through the door in its side, and a blazing fire was then lit beneath the statue. As the bronze heated to red-hot, the victim’s screams echoed from its nostrils and mouth, much like the cries of a maddened bull. While he seems to have been delighted with the device itself, Phalaris had no time for fawning sycophants and promptly condemned Perillus, its inventor, to be its first victim. Evidently Phalaris’ subjects had no more time for their dictator than he had for Perillus. After enduring all they could of his tyrannies, in the year 563 BC, the mob stuffed the dictator himself into the Brazen Bull.

  Classical Greece had no coherent political system. Rather, it was a collection of culturally diverse and geographically scattered city states; some of which, like Athens, were a bit more civilised than others (such as Agigentum over which Phalaris ruled). The more remote and less civilised of these city states seemed to invent impossibly creative tortures. According to Greek historian Lucian, on one occasion a young woman was sewn inside the carcass of a freshly slaughtered donkey with only her head remaining exposed. As the Mediterranean sun beat down on the victim, the carcass shrank and began to rot. In addition to the tortures of hunger, thirst and exposure, as the carcass decomposed it attracted worms and insects which attacked the flesh of the victim as well as the carcass of the animal. How long the victim survived is not related. Another similarly grim torture comes from the pen of Aristophanes. In this account, the condemned was locked in a pillory and smeared with milk and honey as an enticement to insects. If he managed to survive hunger, thirst, exposure and insect attacks for twenty days, he was released. That is to say, he was released in order to be hauled to a cliff and thrown to his death.

  This is an example of a branding iron of the type which would have been used on Spartan males found guilty of being dedicated ‘bachelors’.

  Among the more hardy and individualistic of the Ancient Greeks were the Spartans. Tough, bold and decidedly war-like, the Spartans had no time for the soft-living ways of people like the Athenians. If a Spartan man became overly fat, he was publicly whipped; if he remained unmarried for too long (and thereby suspected of preferring men to women) he was publicly branded with a hot iron. The Tyrant Nabis, who ruled Sparta from 205–194 BC, invented a very personal, and personally amusing, means of torturing those who annoyed him. It seems that Nabis commissioned an iron statue in the shape of his wife, Apega. This statue was built so its arms would open on hinges, the inner face of the arms and chest being set with numerous, long, sharp spikes. When Nabis personally questioned an accused malefactor and did not like the answers he got, he is said to have quipped: ‘If I have not talent enough to prevail upon you, perhaps my good wife Apega may persuade you’. One fatal embrace from the iron Apega may have ended the interrogation, but Nabis enjoyed his little jokes.

  The Greeks, like the Babylonians and Assyrians before them, eventually went into decline, to be replaced by a newer and more efficient culture; in this particular case, it was the Romans who became the dominant power in the area. Roman civilisation, and its associated views on torture, must be divided into two distinct categories; the first being the Roman Republic and the second the Roman Empire (the periods before, and after, Julius Caesar).

  While we do not have an actual depiction of Apega, this image of the Iron Maiden of Nuremburg should serve to illustrate the dangerous result of her cold embrace. There were various versions of this device. Some of which were designed to be lethal, and some were merely intended to be injurious.

  Early Romans, like the Greeks whose culture they co-opted, tried to construct a relatively ecumenical society. As early as the fifth century BC, Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome, distinguished civil crimes from criminal offences. Under this new, more enlightened approach to justice, capital punishment and the horrible pain that so often accompanied it, were reserved for offences such as murder, treason, arson, perjury and temple virgins who engaged in sex. In some cases, such as arson, the punishment remained ‘an eye for an eye’ – arsonists being burnt to death. Perjurers were thrown from a cliff and non-virgin virgins were buried alive. Even serious civil crimes, such as physical assault or robbery, were usually punishable only by heavy fines, although theft of a farmer’s crops was occasionally punishable by hanging. Exempt from all forms of torture were priests, children under fourteen years of age and pregnant women. Throughout this period – that is to say, during the days of the Roman Republic – justice was relatively even-handed and free citizens of Rome had no more fear of random acts of judicial violence than most of us do today. All that changed around 50 BC.

  Julius Caesar was no saint, but as he only held power for about six months, he had little opportunity to change things for better or worse. What he did do, however, was pave the way for a string of emperors who were, to say the very least, less than pleasant people. Immediately after Caesar’s assassination, power fell into the hands of three men: Mark Anthony, Octavius Caesar and Marcus Lepidus. Partly due to the fact that this was a time of civil war, and partly due to their natures, none of these men trusted anyone, including each other. For the first time in Roman history it became a crime to speak out against the government. When the philosopher Cicero denounced Mark Anthony, he was summarily arrested, tried and executed. Not a good start for the new Roman Empire and things swiftly went from bad to worse. As with almost all dictatorships, the Roman Empire was governed by men who doubted their ability to retain power and feared anyone and everyone who might conceivably snatch that power away from them. The only way for such men to maintain power is to establish a climate of terror: all plots, both real and imagined, must be uncovered and examples must be made of any suspected conspirators. And as we discussed in the first chapter, it is precisely within this paranoid climate of fear and suspicion that tortures proliferate.

  In this scene we are shown a man who is being flogged by two other men using what appear to be knotted ropes or perhaps chains with weights. To their right a victim is having molten lead dripped onto the skin of his back while in the background we see a man being lowered into a hole for some unknown reason and another man is on fire and being beaten with a club.

  The first group to come under the harsh boot of Imperial tyranny was the Roman army. Not surprising, really, it was Julius Caesar’s legions which had overthrown the old Republic and it simply would not do to have soldiers thinking they could change 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.