“It was suppressed as a form of execution when the empire converted to Christianity and the cross became sacred. So we have a very wrong idea of what it was. forgot your story It’s probably the most gruesome agony there is,” he recalls. Juan Eslava Galanwho devotes an important section to this Roman method of execution in his book “A garrote vil” (Arzalia Ediciones), where he embarks on a journey through the centuries and pain together with the anthropologist Isabel Castro Latorre.
The cross was the first theological problem faced by the group of followers of Jesus: to justify why the Messiah had fallen victim to the Romans’ most brutal and humiliating method of execution, traditionally reserved for slaves. Yes, as Tom Holland explains in his book ‘Dominion’ (Attic of Books, 2020), the early Christians not only solved the dilemma, but also managed to turn this apparent defeat into their greatest triumph. They managed to get even the Emperor of Rome to kneel before the cross just three hundred years later, a word – “crux” – which until then evoked disgust at what the method represented.
This form of punishment is said to have originated in Assyria around the 6th century BC. At least that is what the Romans claimed, who did not accept that such brutality could be thought of in their territory. The practice was imitated by major Mediterranean powers, such as Alexander the Great’s Macedonia, who imported it some 200 years after it appeared middle East.
In ancient Rome there was no execution more gruesome than crucifixion and a cruder message to those who challenged the established order. He guaranteed the doomed slave a long naked ordeal, with swollen breasts and shoulders, and with birds pecking at the flesh at will. While those watching were warned that the Roman elites would not allow a slave to destroy their society, aided by the servitude of this group representing the majority of the population.
A message for those who challenged Rome
When Spartacus and his group of slaves were defeated afterwards The Third Slave Warthe 6,000 captured adult prisoners were crucified throughout the Appian Way, from Rome to Capua, as a warning to other slaves ready to attack their masters. “As soon as we have whole nations in our bondage, with their various cults, with their strange religions, or with no religion at all, this villain can only be ruled by fear,” wrote Tacitus.
The hangman’s sadistic joke was welcome. As Holland points out in the brilliant foreword to his book, the more horrific the picture, the more effective the punishment. «He turns those he wants to hang upside down, to be impaled by the genitals; to this other I stretch out my arms in a yoke», says Cicero, another classic.
Painting by Antonello da Messina.
The Romans, the people who did most to popularize it, could not apply it to commoners due to its humiliating nature. Instead, if sentenced to death, they would be beheaded or the marrow severed from their necks with a sword. Executions in Rome They were made in areas outside the walls where the smell of corpses was not around.
The bodies of the crucified, who spent days being punished by carrion birds, were then thrown into mass graves and, in Italy at least, led by red-clad undertakers who rang bells and dragged the remains with hooks.
As evidence of the contradictory mixture of arrogance and disgust that this method of execution aroused in the Romans, the texts later withheld anything public that crucifixions were of their day. Only four ancient chronicles have survived that detail this method, and they all refer to the same perpetrator: a Jew named Jesus, who was executed outside the walls of Jerusalem the GolgothaHe “Location of the Skull”.
The best documented crucifixion
Written shortly after the death of Jesus, convicted of a death sentence contrary to the established order, these chronicles describe how, after the conviction, the prisoner was flogged by the soldiers, who mocked him by hiring him a crown of thorns. Jesus of Nazareth was forced to carry his cross (most likely carrying only the crossbeam of the cross) to the place where he was to be executed. There they pierced his hands and feet with nails and crucified him. As he died, they thrust a spear into his side to make sure there was no breath left in it.
“Forbidden as a punishment decades earlier by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, crucifixion had become for the Roman people a symbol of triumph over sin and death.”
Not only the Romans were appalled by the mere depiction of these executions. “The mystery of the cross that calls us before God is something despicable and dishonorable,” Justin Martyr wrote just a century later the death of Jesus Christ. It took many years for the illustration of Jesus’ death and the symbol of the cross itself to become an acceptable visual form for his followers.
Holland comments that “about the year 400 the cross ceased to be viewed as something shameful. Banned as a punishment decades earlier by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, crucifixion had become a practice for the Roman people an emblem of triumph over sin and death». The crucifixion of Jesus began to be depicted with the body of an athlete, as muscular as a Greek god, and with the serene expression of one confident in his victory.
An actually Graeco-Latin image that developed through medieval artists a twisted, bloodied and dying Jesus. He no longer seemed calm, but with a sad face. More human, weaker. However, if in another time this print had mentioned how cruel this way of dying was, it conveyed compassion and pity to the people of the Middle Ages for the sacrifice Jesus made.
