My father was a Roman!
A woman?
No, a Roman, sir.
Thtwike him, centuwion! Vewy woughly!
istm that if you don’t have a crosspiece, it can’t really be described as a cross. And affixing someone to it isn’t really crucifixion.
Etymologically speaking, it doesn’t seem that the Latin word crux originally had any sense of a shape in the form of two intersecting pieces; rather, it just meant something like “a stake or pole used as an instrument of torture and execution”. An ancient Roman cross could be a “crux simplex”; that is, just a simple upright pole. The English sense of “cross” as in an intersection of lines (like a crossroads) or a similar figure (like the letter X or the symbol +) seems to have developed later, under the influence of centuries of Christian conception of the cross used to execute Jesus as having had the shape of a Latin cross.
That was a pun???
Thanks!
When I was in high school — which seems now like it was about the time the Empire fell — I was doing research for a Latin class project and came across what purported to be an account written by a man who was leaving Rome shortly after Crassus crushed the Spartacus rebellion. Granted that it had no specific provenance, he described the process of mass execution like this:[ul]
[li]Every mile or so the soldiers would peel a group of prisoners off from the main body.[/li][li]Once the rest had gone on out of earshot, they’d start killing the prisoners in the group (this was probably done to prevent mass panic and attempts to overpower the guards).[/li][li]Each prisoner would be nailed to a cross that had been pre-built on site by a team of engineers (Henry Ford would approve). The crosses were positioned next to holes in the ground.[/li][li]After the prisoner was secured, the guards would lift the cross by ropes attached to the crossbar and let it drop into the hole. The impact wouldn’t do the victim any good, but that was probably regarded as a feature rather than a bug.[/li][li]If the hole was so big that the cross was seriously off-kilter, the guards would use wedges to straighten it. This had nothing to do with esthetics, it was probably done to ensure that the victim lasted as long as possible[/li][/ul]Apparently Crassus was quite proud of the fact that he was able to calculate the spacing of the crosses so that they reached from the battlefield to the gates of Rome.
(Incidentally, contrary to the way the crucifixion of Christ is depicted, it seems to have been a common practice to strip the victim naked. Just another touch of humiliation provided free gratis courtesy of SPQR.)
From the Ancient History Encyclopedia:
Mass crucifixion at intervals along a road was also depicted in Game of Thrones.