him, whipping him in all parts of his body until the blood ran, then sewing
him into a leather sack along with a snake, a dog, a cock with a sharpened
beak and claws, and/or an ape, before pushing him from the rock or into the
water. The dog and the cock represented the watchers of the household who
should have raised the alarm, the snake because it was believed to kill at the
same time as it gave life, and the ape to symbolise the lowest form of human
life to which the criminal belonged. This reflects the patriarchal nature of
Roman society, stemming from its tribal origins. Thepaterfamilias, or head of
the household, held absolute power over the other members of the family;
therefore killing one’s father was seen as equating to treason against the state,
because it demonstrated a spirit of rebellion and refusal to accept proper social
order.
The Roman army had its own laws and codes, and its own punishments,
much as modern armies have today. Polybius, in hisHistories,gives us many
details about these.^5 Roman generals had the power to order punishments and
executions independent of other state laws for‘military’crimes and for
‘unmanly acts’. Major military crimes such as desertion, treason or theft
would be subject to a court martial, followed by fines, flogging, or execution.
Soldiers guilty of deserting or betraying their comrades would be stoned or
beaten to death by their own units in front of the assembled troops. The
category of‘unmanly acts’included mutiny or cowardice; punishments ranged
from having rations cut, being given extra and unpopular duties, suffering a
beating, being reduced in rank, or execution. When a cohort of soldiers was
accused of such a crime, they were divided into groups of ten men who would
select by lot one of their number to be killed by the other nine; the remaining
nine soldiers of each group were further punished with being given inferior
rations and denied the protection of the fort at night, having to camp outside it.
There is some archaeological evidence for judicial executions in the Roman
period. Excavations in Cambridge unearthed three decapitated bodies, one of
which displayed evidence of sword cuts in the neck area delivered from
behind, and at Dunstable, eleven decapitated bodies were interpreted as
having been killed by sword blows from behind while the victims were in a
kneeling position. We must assume these were judicial executions.
Some headless bodies found in late Roman graves may have been mutilated
after execution, as part of the public degradation of their remains. Dr Katie
Tucker has undertaken a study of Roman decapitation burials; she has said that
‘the most convincing examples of decapitation as a mechanism of death are in
those individuals where there is evidence for slitting of the throat in association
with decapitation (presumably to release the blood, and why carry this out on a
CLASSICAL CRIMES