Poena cullei

Early Roman history is full of stories about the terrible fates that befell citizens who broke the law. When a certain Tarpeia let the enemy Sabines into Rome, she was crushed and thrown headlong from a precipice above the Roman forum. However, not all of the cruel and unusual punishments we associate with the Romans were carried out in practice or uniformly enforced, and some changed significantly over time.

Roman society was fundamentally hierarchical and patriarchal. This included not only those physically living under his roof, but the wider family of brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews as well. However, historians have debated whether the power may have been largely symbolic and little used in practice.

In order for the use of such power to be justified, the son had to have committed a crime against the state. When Aulus Fulvius was killed by his father for his involvement in the conspiracy of Catiline 63 BC , the head of the household was not prosecuted. This was because Catiline and his followers had committed treason by plotting to murder the consul Cicero and seize power for themselves.

One of the most pervasive misconceptions about Roman criminal justice concerns the penalty for parricide. This allegedly involved the criminal being sewn into a leather sack together with four animals — a snake, a monkey, a rooster, and a dog — then being thrown into a river. But was such a punishment ever actually carried out? Publicius Malleolus, who had killed his mother, was the first to be sewn into a sack and thrown into the sea.

There is no mention here of any animals in the sack, nor do they appear in contemporary evidence for legal procedure in the late Roman Republic. In 80 B. The animals are attested in a passage from the writings of the jurist Modestinus, who lived in the mid-third century A. This excerpt survives because it was later quoted in the Digest compiled at the behest of the emperor Justinian in the sixth century A.

The penalty of parricide, as prescribed by our ancestors, is that the culprit shall be beaten with rods stained with his blood, and then shall be sewed up in a sack with a dog, a rooster, a snake, and a monkey, and the bag cast into the depth of the sea, that is to say, if the sea is near at hand; otherwise, he shall be thrown to wild beasts, according to the constitution of the Deified Hadrian.

But the dog and the rooster do not appear until the third century A. So was anyone ever actually punished with all these creatures? Parricides were commonly punished in other ways such as being condemned to the beasts , which was very popular in the Roman world. In whatever form or frequency the punishment of the sack was actually practiced in late Republican Rome or early Imperial Rome, the historian Suetonius , in his biography of Octavian, that is Emperor Augustus r.

Furthermore, he administered justice not only with the utmost care but also with compassion as is illustrated in the case of a defendant clearly guilty of parricide; to keep him from being sewn into the sack only those who confessed suffered this punishment Augustus reportedly asked, "Surely you did not kill your father? Quite the opposite mentality seems to have been the case with Emperor Claudius r. The Emperor Claudius sewed more men into the culleus in five years than history says were sewn up in all previous centuries.

We saw more cullei than crucifixions. It is also with a writer like Seneca that serpents are mentioned in context with the punishment;. The postponement of my punishment was unpleasant: waiting for it seem worse than suffering it. I kept imagining the culleus , the snake, the deep. The rather later satirist Juvenal born, probably, in the 50s AD also provides evidence for the monkey , he even pities the monkey, at one point, as an innocent sufferer.

In one play, Juvenal suggests that for Nero, being put in merely one sack is not good enough. But you deserve the sack! It is within the law collection Digest In Olivia Robinsons translation, it reads:. According to the custom of our ancestors, the punishment instituted for parricide was as follows; A parricide is flogged with blood-colored rods, then sewn up in a sack with a dog, a dunghill cock, a viper, and a monkey; then the sack is thrown into the depths of the sea.

This is the procedure if the sea is close at hand; otherwise, he is thrown to the beasts, according to the constitution of the deified Hadrian. Thus, it is seen in the time of Emperor Hadrian r. Furthermore, a rescript from Hadrian is preserved in the 4th-century CE grammarian Dositheus Magister that contains the information that the cart with the sack and its live contents was driven by black oxen.

In the time of the late 3rd-century CE jurist Paulus , he said that the poena cullei had fallen out of use, and that parricides were either burnt alive or thrown to the beasts instead. However, although Paulus regards the punishment of poena cullei as obsolete in his day, the church father Eusebius , in his "Martyrs of Palestine" notes a case of a Christian man Ulpianus in Tyre who was "cruelly scourged" and then placed in a raw ox-hide, together with a dog and a venomous serpent and cast in the sea.

On account of Paulus' comment, several scholars think [31] the punishment of poena cuelli fell out of use in the 3rd century CE, but the punishment was revived, and made broader by including fathers who killed their children as liable to the punishment by Emperor Constantine in a rescript from CE. This rescript was retained in the 6th-century Codex Justinianus and reads as follows:.

Whoever, secretly or openly, shall hasten the death of a parent, or son or other near relative, whose murder is accounted as parricide, will suffer the penalty of parricide. He will not be punished by the sword, by fire or by some other ordinary form of execution, but he will be sewn up in a sack and, in this dismal prison, have serpents as his companions.

Depending on the nature of the locality, he shall be thrown into the neighboring sea or into the river, so that even while living he may be deprived of the enjoyment of the elements, the air being denied him while living and interment in the earth when dead. Given November 16 The Corpus Juris Civilis , the name for the massive body of law promulgated by Emperor Justinian from the s AD and onwards, consists of two historical collections of laws and their interpretation the Digest , opinions of the pre-eminent lawyers from the past, and the Codex Justinianus , a collection of edicts and rescripts by earlier emperors , along with Justinian's prefatory introduction text for students of Law, Institutes , plus the Novels , Justinian's own, later edicts.

That the earlier collections were meant to be sources for the actual, current practice of law , rather than just being of historical interest, can be seen, for example, from the inclusion, and modification of Modestinus' famous description of poena cullei Digest A novel penalty has been devised for a most odious crime by another statute, called the lex Pompeia on parricide, which provides that any person who by secret machination or open act shall hasten the death of his parent, or child, or other relation whose murder amounts in law to parricide, or who shall be an instigator or accomplice of such crime, although a stranger, shall suffer the penalty of parricide.

This is not execution by the sword or by fire, or any ordinary form of punishment, but the criminal is sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape, and in this dismal prison is thrown into the sea or a river, according to the nature of the locality, in order that even before death he may begin to be deprived of the enjoyment of the elements, the air being denied him while alive, and interment in the earth when dead. Those who kill persons related to them by kinship or affinity, but whose murder is not parricide, will suffer the penalties of the lex Cornelia on assassination.

It is seen that Justinian regards this as a novel enactment of an old law, and that he includes not only the symbolic interpretations of the punishment as found in for example Cicero, but also Constantine's extension of the penalty to fathers who murder their own children. In Justinian, relative to Constantine, we see the inclusion in the sack of the dog, cock and monkey, not just the serpent s in Constantine. Some modern historians, such as O.

Robinson, suspects that the precise wording of the text in the Institutes 4. The poena cullei was eliminated as the punishment for parricides within the Byzantine Empire in the law code Basilika , promulgated more than years after the times of Justinian, around AD. As Margaret Trenchard-Smith notes, however, in her essay "Insanity, Exculpation and Disempowerment", that "this does not necessarily denote a softening of attitude. According to the Synopsis Basilicorum an abridged edition of Basilika , parricides are to be cast into the flames.

The penalty of the sack, with the animals included, experienced a revival in parts of late medieval, and early modern Germany particularly in Saxony. Some differences evolved within the German ritual, relative to the original Roman ritual, though. Apparently, the rooster was not included, and the serpent might be replaced with a painting of a serpent on a piece of paper and the monkey could be replaced with a cat. Furthermore, the cat and the dog were sometimes physically separated from the person, and the sack itself with its two partitions was made of linen , rather than of leather.

The difference between using linen , rather than leather is that linen soaks easily, and the inhabitants will drown, whereas a watertight leather sack will effect death by suffocation due to lack of air or death by a drawn-out drowning process, relative to a comparatively quick one , rather than death by drowning.

In a case from Dresden , the intention was to suffocate the culprit who had killed his mother , rather than drown him. With him into the leather sack was a cat and a dog, and the sack was made airtight by coating it with pitch. However, the sack chosen was too small, and had been overstretched, so as the sack hit the waters after being thrown from the bridge, it ripped open.

The cat and the dog managed to swim away and survive, while the criminal presumably bound "got his punishment rather earlier than had been the intention", that is, death by drowning instead. The last case where this punishment is, by some, alleged to have been meted out in , somewhere in Saxony. In at least one case in Zittau , a non-venomous colubrid snake was used. The Zittau ritual was to put the victims in a black sack, and keep it under water for no less than six hours.

In the meantime, the choir boys in town had the duty to sing the Psalm composed by Martin Luther , " Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir " From deep affliction I cry out to you. Byzantium sent an embassy to China's Song dynasty , arriving in November , during the reign of Emperor Shenzong of Song r. It also described forms of punishment in Byzantine law, such as caning, as well as the capital punishment of being stuffed into a "feather bag" and thrown into the sea.

In his novel Roman Blood , Steven Saylor renders a fictionalized, yet informed, rendition of how the Roman punishment poena cullei might occur. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Roman execution method. Further information: Sino-Roman relations. Robinson , footnote 91, p. Scott translates "virgis sanguinis" as "rods stained with his own blood", see Translation of Digest A more modern historian, Connie Scarborough, notes that at the times of Paulus, parricides were generally burnt, and that the particular punishment of poena cullei was certainly obsolete at the tom of Constantine's accession.

Scarborough, Classen, Scarborough , p. Neubauer ISBN Jerome S. Arkenberg ed. Fordham University. Retrieved Roman Blood. Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories. Pan Macmillan. Auler, Jost Dormagen: archeotopos Buchverlag.

Bradley, Mark Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archiv des Criminalrechts. Halle: Hemmerde und Schwetschke. Caplan, Harry tr. Herennium de ratione dicendi Rhetorica ad Herennium. London, Cambridge;Mass. Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Watson, J. Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Yonge, C. The orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero. London: Henry G.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus; Spelman, Edward tr. The Roman antiquities of Dionysius Halicarnassensis, Volume 2. Elliott, Neil; Reasoner, Mark Documents and Images for the Study of Paul. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Eusebius of Caesarea; Cureton, William London, Paris: Williams and Norgate, C. Francese, Christopher Ancient Rome in So Many Words. Gaughan, Judy E. Grimm, Jacob Deutsche Rechtsalterthuemer. Juvenal, Decimus Junius; Gifford, William tr. Austin The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis.

London: Nuttall, self-published. Kahn, Arthur D. Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse. Kyle, Donald C. Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome. Oxford: Routledge. Lintott, Andrew W. Violence in Republican Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Livy; Baker, George tr. The History of Rome, volume 6.

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Throughout history Man has shown extraordinary imagination in inventing penalties and sentences for crimes committed by fellow man. The Romans in particular had an almost theatrical quality in the way these punishments were dolled out. The German philosopher Erich Fromm said that we are "the only animal that enjoys doing evil to its own kind without any rational biological or social benefit".

But sometimes there was, and still is, a moral pretext: the defense of society. In this sense, patricide was considered a particularly infamous crime in ancient Rome and earlier in Greece, as evidenced by the myth of Oedipus or the harshness with which Solon treated it , where the character of Tulia the Less was a figure of unfortunate memory.

As almost everything in the monarchical stage, history and legend intertwine and there remains a mixed narrative of how the youngest daughter of the sixth king, Servius Tullius, not only participated in the conspiracy to assassinate her father and get her second husband, the future Tarquinius the Superb, to ascend the throne, but also desecrated his corpse by driving over it with a chariot.

It must be understood that the Roman family was the basic cell of society; it was a vast institution that grouped the members of the family, but also those adopted and even servants, and was under the absolute authority of the pater familias , whose patria potestas allowed him to dispose of the lives of all those dependent on him. Therefore, to kill him was revealed as an atrocious act in the personal but also in the social sphere and the state had to act accordingly.

The Lex duodecim tabularum Law of the XII of Tables defined parricide as the voluntary homicide of parents by their children. But this legislative corpus was made in the middle of the 5th century B. And the Lex Pompeia de parricidiis , established by Pompey in 55 B. Those who fell outside these categories were governed by the general Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis , which remained almost unchanged since the XII Tables and punished murder with banishment.

Likewise, according to Herennius Modestinus a Roman jurist of the 3rd century A. Once the crime has been clarified, how does the corresponding punishment arise? It is possible that the origins of the poena cullei date back to the monarchic period. During the reign of Tarquinius the Superb, one of the duumviri sacrorum priests Marcus Atilius, appointed to guard the Sibylline Books, revealed some of their secrets.

This was a sacrilege because these books were an anthology of prophecies dictated by the Sibyl of Cumae and were consulted every time Rome faced a difficult situation to seek possible solutions, so they were forbidden to the public.

Consequently, Atilius was condemned to be thrown into the sea inside a sewn sack. Now, what does that have to do with patricide? Nothing really, unless we believe Dionysius of Halicarnassus, according to whom Atilius was also condemned for parricide. Other authors are of the opinion that he simply took advantage later of that form of execution because his extravagant character went well to exemplify.

Plutarch places the date after the Second Punic War and gives the name of Lucius Hostius as the first documented parricide of Rome, although he does not explain how he was executed; before, the death of a father at the hands of his son would be considered a homicide more, generically.

When it began to give differential category to that type of crime, it would have resorted to the atavistic method of delivering the culprit to the family of the deceased; but being the same, it became necessary to also devise a different punishment. This must have begun towards the end of the third century B. They even believe to see in certain passages of Plautus, at the beginning of the following century, humorous references to the introduction of the poena cullei.

Of course, Marcus Attilius was not the only one to go down in history dying in such an ignominious way. Plutarch also describes the case of a certain Gaius Vilius, who was condemned for having supported the reforms of the Gracchi and who was executed by being locked inside a vase with snakes inside. A variant that preceded by a few decades the one that Titus Livius is considered to be the first to be executed for parricide in the way that would last from then on: Publicius Maleolus, who, having been found guilty of murdering his mother around B.

The case of Maleolus is described by various sources and none of them mentions that animals were also introduced with the prisoner, which confirms the current belief that this was a later addition of the first imperial stage. The description that can be read in the Rhetorica ad Herennium Rhetoric to Herennius, an anonymous philosophical treatise dated approximately 90 B. However, Cicero to whom the Rhetoric to Herennius was erroneously attributed for a long time objects in his De inventione that the head bag was made of simple leather, perhaps a wineskin.

Cicero speaks several times of poena cullei in his writings. For example, in the vibrant speech with which he defended Sextus Roscius against the accusation of murdering his father in reality it was a personal vendetta in which Roscius himself almost died after his father , Cicero criticized the system of execution, and incidentally, obtained the acquittal of his client. Suetonius says that it was Augustus who formally authorized the poena cullei , although in practice it was already applied, as we saw, and since then it became habitual; so much so that, according to Seneca, in the time of Claudius they saw "more sacks than crosses", from which it would be necessary to deduce that the parricides proliferated.

That parricide had become more frequent than desirable has its icing on the cake in the death of Agrippina at the hands of her son Nero. Suetonius attributes to the emperor the death of her young lover, Aulus Plautius, suspecting that she wanted to replace him on the throne; later, he adds, he did the same to her under the influence of his wife, Poppaea Sabina, fulfilling an ancient prophecy that foretold that he would be emperor but would kill his mother, to which she would have replied "Occidat, dum imperet!

Regardless of whether these facts are true or not, as also happens with the life of the reviled Caligula Suetonius, one of the main sources for both, belonged to the senatorial class and in that period the Senate struggled not to lose its power before the growing imperial authority , and returning to what concerns us, Juvenal wrote that Nero deserved more punishment than to end up in a sack.

Something that Suetonius endorses again when he narrates how, after the emperor's suicide, a statue of him appeared partially covered with a culleum and accompanied by a writing that read "I did what I could. It is seen that Justinian regards this as a novel enactment of an old law, and that he includes not only the symbolic interpretations of the punishment as found in for example Cicero, but also Constantine's extension of the penalty to fathers who murder their own children.

In Justinian, relative to Constantine, we see the inclusion in the sack of the dog, cock and monkey, not just the serpent s in Constantine. Some modern historians, such as O. Robinson, suspects that the precise wording of the text in the Institutes 4. The poena cullei was eliminated as the punishment for parricides within the Byzantine Empire in the law code Basilika , promulgated more than years after the times of Justinian, around AD.

As Margaret Trenchard-Smith notes, however, in her essay "Insanity, Exculpation and Disempowerment", that "this does not necessarily denote a softening of attitude. According to the Synopsis Basilicorum an abridged edition of Basilika , parricides are to be cast into the flames. The penalty of the sack, with the animals included, experienced a revival in parts of late medieval, and early modern Germany particularly in Saxony.

Some differences evolved within the German ritual, relative to the original Roman ritual, though. Apparently, the rooster was not included, and the serpent might be replaced with a painting of a serpent on a piece of paper and the monkey could be replaced with a cat. Furthermore, the cat and the dog were sometimes physically separated from the person, and the sack itself with its two partitions was made of linen , rather than of leather.

The difference between using linen , rather than leather is that linen soaks easily, and the inhabitants will drown, whereas a watertight leather sack will effect death by suffocation due to lack of air or death by a drawn-out drowning process, relative to a comparatively quick one , rather than death by drowning.

In a case from Dresden , the intention was to suffocate the culprit who had killed his mother , rather than drown him. With him into the leather sack was a cat and a dog, and the sack was made airtight by coating it with pitch. However, the sack chosen was too small, and had been overstretched, so as the sack hit the waters after being thrown from the bridge, it ripped open. The cat and the dog managed to swim away and survive, while the criminal presumably bound "got his punishment rather earlier than had been the intention", that is, death by drowning instead.

The last case where this punishment is, by some, alleged to have been meted out in , somewhere in Saxony. In at least one case in Zittau , a non-venomous colubrid snake was used. The Zittau ritual was to put the victims in a black sack, and keep it under water for no less than six hours.

In the meantime, the choir boys in town had the duty to sing the Psalm composed by Martin Luther , " Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir " From deep affliction I cry out to you. Byzantium sent an embassy to China's Song dynasty , arriving in November , during the reign of Emperor Shenzong of Song r. It also described forms of punishment in Byzantine law, such as caning, as well as the capital punishment of being stuffed into a "feather bag" and thrown into the sea.

In his novel Roman Blood , Steven Saylor renders a fictionalized, yet informed, rendition of how the Roman punishment poena cullei might occur. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Roman execution method. Further information: Sino-Roman relations.

Robinson , footnote 91, p. Scott translates "virgis sanguinis" as "rods stained with his own blood", see Translation of Digest A more modern historian, Connie Scarborough, notes that at the times of Paulus, parricides were generally burnt, and that the particular punishment of poena cullei was certainly obsolete at the tom of Constantine's accession. Scarborough, Classen, Scarborough , p. Neubauer ISBN Jerome S. Arkenberg ed. Fordham University. Retrieved Roman Blood. Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories.

Pan Macmillan. Auler, Jost Dormagen: archeotopos Buchverlag. Bradley, Mark Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archiv des Criminalrechts. Halle: Hemmerde und Schwetschke. Caplan, Harry tr. Herennium de ratione dicendi Rhetorica ad Herennium. London, Cambridge;Mass. Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Watson, J. Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Yonge, C. The orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero. London: Henry G. Dionysius of Halicarnassus; Spelman, Edward tr. The Roman antiquities of Dionysius Halicarnassensis, Volume 2.

Elliott, Neil; Reasoner, Mark Documents and Images for the Study of Paul. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Eusebius of Caesarea; Cureton, William London, Paris: Williams and Norgate, C. Francese, Christopher Ancient Rome in So Many Words. Gaughan, Judy E. Grimm, Jacob Deutsche Rechtsalterthuemer.

Juvenal, Decimus Junius; Gifford, William tr. Austin The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis. London: Nuttall, self-published. Kahn, Arthur D. Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse. Kyle, Donald C. Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome. Oxford: Routledge. Lintott, Andrew W. Violence in Republican Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Livy; Baker, George tr. The History of Rome, volume 6.

London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell jun. Long, George Tullii Ciceronis Orationes, Volume 2. London: Whittaker and Company, G. Mommsen, Theodor Retrieved 13 March Pescheck, Christian A. Handbuch der Geschichte von Zittau, Volume 2. Zittau: in Commission der J. Plutarch; Dryden, John tr. Plutarch's Lives of Illustrious Men, Volume 1. Wildside Press LLC. Plutarch; Stadter, Philip A. Radin, Max The Journal of Roman Studies. Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. ISSN JSTOR Robinson, O.

Saylor, Steven Scarborough, Connie; Classen, Albrecht ed. Berlin,Boston: Walter de Gruyter. The Caesars. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Trenchard-Smith, Margaret; Turner, Wendy ed. Madness in Medieval Law and Custom. Indianapolis,IN: Hackett Publishing.

Varner, Eric R.