«It was suppressed as a form of execution when the Empire converted to Christianity and the cross became sacred. Hence we have a very false idea of what it was. Forgot your story. It is probably the cruelest torment there is”, recalls Juan Eslava Galán, who dedicates an important section to this method of Roman execution in his book ‘A garrote vil’ (Arzalia Ediciones), where he travels through the centuries and of pain 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 died victim of the most savage and humiliating method of execution, traditionally reserved for slaves, that the Romans applied. However, as Tom Holland explains in his book ‘Dominion’ (Attic of books, 2020), the first Christians not only solved the dilemma, but managed to turn that supposed defeat into their main triumph. They managed to make only three hundred years later even the Emperor of Rome kneel before the cross, a word – “crux” – that until then caused disgust for what this method represented.
This form of punishment was supposedly created in Assyria around the 6th century BC. At least that’s how the Romans liked to say, who did not accept that such brutality could have been thought of in their territory. The practice was imitated by great Mediterranean powers, such as the Macedonia of Alexander the Great, who imported it some 200 years after its appearance in Near East.
In Ancient Rome there was no execution more atrocious than crucifixion and a cruder message towards those who challenged the established order. He guaranteed the condemned slave a long naked ordeal, with swollen chests and shoulders and with birds pecking at the meat at will. While those who were watching were warned that the Roman elites were not going to allow a slave to destroy their society, sustained by the servitude of this group that represented the majority of the population.
A message for those who challenged Rome
When Spartacus and his group of slaves were defeated after the Third Servile Warthe 6,000 captured adult prisoners were crucified at intervals throughout the appian way, from Rome to Capua, as a warning to other slaves ready to attack their masters. “Once we have in our servitude entire nations with their diverse cults, with their strange religions or without any religion at all, this scoundrel can only be dominated by fear,” Tacitus wrote.
The executioner’s sadistic wit was welcome. As Holland recounts in the brilliant preface to his book, the more terrible the image, the more effective the punishment. «He This one puts upside down those he wants to hang, that one impales them by the genitals; this other one I extend my arms in a yoke», narrates Cicero, another of the classical authors.
Painting by Antonello da Messina.
The Romans, the people who did the most to popularize it, could not apply it to citizens due to its humiliating nature. Instead, in the case of being sentenced to death, they were decapitated or the marrow was severed from the neck with a sword. executions in rome They were made in territories outside the walls where the smell of corpses was not close.
The bodies of the crucified, which were punished by carrion birds for days, were then thrown into mass graves and led, at least in Italy, by red-clad undertakers who rang bells and dragged the remains with hooks.
As proof of the contradictory mix between arrogance and disgust that this method of execution generated in the Romans, everything public that crucifixions were in their day was later silent in the texts. Only four ancient chronicles have survived detailing this method, and they all refer to the same culprit: a Jew named Jesus executed outside the walls of Jerusalem, in the golgothahe “Place of the Skull”.
The best documented crucifixion
These chronicles, written shortly after the death of Jesus, convicted of a capital offense against the established order, describe how after the sentence the prisoner was whipped by the soldiers and they mocked him by placing him a crown of thorns. Jesus of Nazareth was forced to carry his cross (most likely he only carried the horizontal beam of the cross) to the place where he would be executed. There they pierced his hands and feet with nails and raised him up on the cross. Once he died, they stuck a spear into his side to make sure that there was no breath left inside him.
«Forbidden as punishment decades before by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, crucifixion had become for the Roman people an emblem of triumph over sin and death»
The Romans were not the only ones who were horrified by the mere representation of these executions. “The mystery of the cross that summons us before God is something despicable and dishonorable,” Justin Martyr wrote only a century after 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 “around the year 400 the cross ceased to be seen as something shameful. Forbidden as a punishment decades before by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, crucifixion had become for the Roman people an emblem of triumph over sin and death». The crucifixion of Jesus began to be represented with the body of an athlete, as muscular as a Greek god, and with the serene expression of one who is convinced of his victory.
A properly Greco-Latin image that evolved through medieval artists towards a twisted, bloodied and dying Jesus. He no longer appeared serene but with a face contorted by suffering. More human, weaker. However, if in another time that image had evoked how atrocious this way of dying was, by medieval years it conveyed to people compassion and pity for the sacrifice that Jesus had made.