Lawbreaking in Ancient Rome: The Public Spectacles of Gruesome Deaths

To different faults, different death penalties: Ancient Rome has this kind of punishment

The death penalty in ancient Rome has been tied to its laws since the founding of the city, and the Romans set a clear line between dying as a citizen and dying as a foreigner.

Basically, the death penalty in ancient Rome is applied when someone wants to subvert the order of society and the state: for example, a crime such as patricide was not viewed badly as “murder of an affection,” but because it disrupts the natural hierarchy of the family.

Already in the laws of the XII Tables, enacted after the establishment of the Republic in the 6th century B.C., this fact is emphasized, and throughout Roman history the citizens of Urbe enjoyed unique rights even in relation to the manner of death. Similar to munera, the Latin word for spectacular events, at first the death penalty was linked to ritual and mythical aspects of the city. For example, at least until at least the first century CE, throwing from the Tarpeian cliff was the sentence for traitors and false witnesses while burial alive pertained to vestals who violated their vow of chastity. In contrast, the aforementioned patricide was punished with the poena cullei, which consisted of “dehumanizing” the condemned person by dressing him up as an animal, whipping him and putting him in a sack with animals such as dogs, roosters, vipers and (rarely) monkeys before letting him roll down the top of a slope.

Crucifixion was reserved for criminals of the worst kind: notorious was the very long line of slaves who died in this way following Spartacus' revolt (73 - 71 B.C.), which was meant to serve as a warning for possible and future rebellions.

In the imperial period, just prior to the construction of the Colosseum, we know that Nero hosted a series of public executions in his gardens, and this time with some intent of spectacle. In this case, Tacitus recounts, the emperor needed to counter the thesis that he was the one who had set the famous fire in Rome in 64 A.D., thus blaming the Christians. Those condemned to Nero's villa were either “covered with animal skins and made to be mauled by dogs” or “crucified or burned alive.”

Something similar happened with the venationes, the gladiatorial hunts of ferocious beasts, instigated by General Pompey in 55 B.C., when the public felt pity for some elephants, which seemed to beg for mercy, but even the Christians “aroused compassion...because they were sacrificed to satisfy the cruelty of one man and not for respect and the common good...” .

The spectacle of death penalty in the Colosseum in Ancient Rome

With the construction of the Colosseum these tortures were no longer only organized along with the games, but very often also made spectacular. Those sentenced to death, guilty of serious crimes against the state, were called noxii.

Executions at the Colosseum took place at about lunchtime, after the venationes, the animal hunts, and before the munera, the gladiator combats: the main methods of executing the unfortunate were damnatio ad feras, crucifixion, and vivi crematio.

Damnatio ad feras was perhaps the most horrific death even to the public eye, and Martial tells us so: “ [...]so offered the entrails to a bear from Caledonia Laureulus hanging from a real cross. His limbs lived torn and dripping with blood, but in his whole body there was no longer a body.”  Martial speaks of Laureolus, a criminal condemned to damnatio ad feras for having “cut the throat of his father” and “of his master” and “stripped in his madness the temples of secret gold” and “had pitched the hideous torch to you, Rome,” i.e., to make himself want for nothing, he had set a fire. Still on the damnatio ad bestias, Petronius: “Today they will also let into the arena that slave who was Glycone's trusted treasurer! What a figure!... Glycone caught him making love to his wife and for that he immediately had him condemned to die killed by the beasts...I am sure the audience will be divided between those who cheer for the lover and those who, like the jealous husband, want him dead in a horrible way!”

Preferred to damnatio ad bestias was the vivi crematio, and its condemned were called pyrricharii: these were condemned men dressed in sumptuous robes soaked in flammable liquid and later chased by attendants with flashlights into an arena filled with verdant plants; one can imagine the result. A cheap variant of this form of torture was the simpler stake burning.

To discover where and when these capital punishments took place in the Colosseum, you can rely on our Guided Audio Tour Colosseum

The Crucifixion: Ancient Rome's Most Cruel Penalty

Finally, crucifixion, which did not take place in the Colosseum, was excluded from the ludi because of the excessive duration of the punishment: defined by Cicero as “crudelissimum taeterrimumque supplicium”” or ‘the cruelest and bleakest torture,’ crucifixion without intervention by attendants could last a few hours as well as a few days. To be mean, it was possible to add a wooden “step” for the feet called a pegma, which by giving support to the condemned man would lengthen the time of his punishment; on the contrary, to do a “favor” and speed up the punishment, the condemned man's legs were broken.

Public executions in ancient Rome were thus used with a twofold purpose: on the one hand to satisfy the thirst for justice against criminals, and on the other hand to send messages to all other miscreants to discourage their misdeeds.

Although some personalities were distancing themselves from this kind of violence, at least from making a show of it, these executions give us a view on the value of life and the person in ancient Rome, far from the idea of universal equality and indeed linked first and foremost to membership in Roman citizenship, as well as to the social hierarchy within the society of the time.