In HBO’s series “Rome” last night we had a situation where someone was put on trial and was then convicted of murder (homicide). They were then apparently sentenced to death. While I was expecting the convicted to be crucified or hung they instead put them in an arena where they faced gladiators (or perhaps trained assasins?).
Did that really happen in Roman times? What would happen if the convict happen to beat all challengers? Would they then be set free?
I realize this show is pure fiction but I assume it is loosely based on what really happened at the time. Any Roman scholars out there?
Only as part of O-level Latin. But from what I studied at school, yes some gladiators were convicted criminals. And gladiators could eventually win their freedom if they survived long enough.
Other criminals might be thrown to the animals, crucified, or chained to an oar in a trireme.
Vestal Virgins who disqualified themselves would be buried alive.
And Parricide, the murder of one’s father, was especially harshly dealt with, although the full details escape me. Part of it involved being sewn up in a sack with wild animals.
Thanks everyone. I didn’t realize how something like how to execute a criminal might vary or change over time, or even during the same time. The Romans were apparently quite creative in their ways to kill people…
The person of a Vestal virgin was sacred, it would be an extreme insult to the goddess if someone were to harm her. So the practical Romans would give the ex-virgin a loaf of bread and a jar of olive oil and put her in a cell and seal up the cell. And so no one would harm the sacred person of the virgin.
Slaves or foreigners, actually. Roman citizens were usually exempt from the nastier punishments.
In fact, while the laws on the books (the Twelve Tables) were generally pretty harsh, capital punishment was rarely used during the Republican Era – at least against citizens, especially those of distinguished families.
Recall that the fasces, the symbol of consular power, was a bundle of rods tied with crimson cords – as long as the consul was present within the pomerium (city limits). The rods symbolized the consul’s power to chastise. Outside of the pomerium, an axe was inserted into the fasces, which indicated that the consul now had the power to execute Roman citizens. This was meant to include such cases as times of war, when those guilty of cowardace could be put to the sword without trial.
Inside the pomerium, capital punishment seems to have been pretty rare, at least as far as citizens went. If you were a non-citizen accused of a crime…well, you had a really big problem on your hands, especially if you didn’t have a lot of cash to buy your way out of it.
Mind you, we’re talking about the Republican era here. The dawning of the Imperial Age ushered in a whole new ball game.
Another mode of execution was on the stage. If you had a play which called for a character getting killed, you’d just use a convicted felon as a sort of stunt double for that scene.
Roman citizens were indeed spared the worst forms of punishment. When St. Peter was sentenced to death, he was crucified (though upside-down, at his request, since he didn’t think he deserved the honor of dying in the same manner as Jesus). But St. Paul was a Roman citizen, so when his turn came, he was just beheadded (which was considered the most humane of the Roman execution methods, and compared with some of the other things they came up with, it probably was).
And the version I had heard of the punishment of a Vestal former-Virgin had the lass burried up to her neck in the ground, with food and water given regularly. Death, when it eventually came, was from septic diseases, due to not having any place for waste to go.
The lovers of Vestal Virgins were also buried alive, I believe. The traditional punishment for parricides (according to Cicero) was to bind them up in a sack and throw them into the water. I believe Livy adds the bit about the sack also containing a snake, a rooster and monkey.
The Tarpeian rock is my absolute favourite method.
Other than that… in Republican times, exile was usually the favoured punishment for even the worst of crimes (if you were a citizen, of course).
Harry Turtledove, historian and prolific alternate history writer, mentions the “snuff play” execution method in one of his books set in Roman times—however, he might have been mistaken, or the character who mentioned it, who lived in a Roman frontier town pretty far from Rome itself, might have just been repeating a Roman urban legend.
No, the severity of the crime dictated which tier of seats the criminal occupied. For a minor crime he got the top row, where he only had the occasional seagull to worry about. Major crimes, he got the bottom row, where it wasn’t quite so pleasant. And things could always get worse. “There’s such things as quinqueremes, boy. You wouldn’t like that at all.” :eek:
Perhaps my attempt at humor was misunderstood.
I meant for a very severe crime, would the criminal be fastened to the part of the oar that was outside of the entre ship? (Heck, as everyone has been saying, the Romans thought of creative ways of capital punishment).
A speculation I’ve seen is that what the word really meant was “bandits”: In other words, the two “thieves”/“robbers” were anti-Roman Jewish guerrillas, but the authorities didn’t want to give them any political legitimacy and so dismissively referred to them as the equivalent of “bandits” (see this editorial from Pravda about the Chechen “freedom fighters”/rebels/insurgents/terrorists/bandits).
Nah, I don’t think so, but not for any reasons of mercy to the condemned. The Romans would not have let anything interfere with the efficiency of their military.
And my cite for the stage executions is high school Latin class, as well, plus off-hand mentions many other places, which I agree doesn’t exactly cut it around here. If I can’t dig up anything better, feel free to disregard that part.
would be buried alive.
