As spoken by the insightful author, Mark Twain,“Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.” These words are able to refer to many events and times in history. What Twain was directly referring to, is not known. However, not many events or regimes back up the validity of this quote more than the torture and execution practices in the ancient Roman Empire. This arrives at the very core of what Twain wrote these historic words about. The pain and suffering, unjustly put on man by their fellow kind shows the absolute cruelty man is able to possess. Only pure evil could put man through the process of his own death. Ancient Romans, however, were the masters of this technique.
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One of the things the Romans knew best, was pain, and the most treacherous ways to inflict it. A majority of the time the prisoners were torchered to the extreme before their execution. One of the most common forms of this was flogging. In fact, it was so common that legally, it must be done before every Roman execution. Only woman and those who had served in the military of senate were exempt (Edwards, 1). The details of a Roman flogging are extremely gruesome. The victim was often brought to serious or critical condition before the execution took place …show more content…
Once at the execution site, the prisoner was strapped to the cross either by nail or rope. Once on the cross the process of asphyxiation took over. With the arms stretched out, the chest muscles would contract on the lungs making it very difficult to get a breath (Stavrakakis, 1). The length of this entire process varied widely. According to Edwards “The length of survival generally ranged from three or four hours to three or four days and appears to have been inversely related to the severity of the scourging” (1). The pain the covered the body from head to toe and everywhere in between unimaginable, especially considering that is was brought on by a fellow human being. This goes to show how corrupt and sick humans are capable of being towards other
One of the things the Romans knew best, was pain, and the most treacherous ways to inflict it. A majority of the time the prisoners were torchered to the extreme before their execution. One of the most common forms of this was flogging. In fact, it was so common that legally, it must be done before every Roman execution. Only woman and those who had served in the military of senate were exempt (Edwards, 1). The details of a Roman flogging are extremely gruesome. The victim was often brought to serious or critical condition before the execution took place …show more content…
Once at the execution site, the prisoner was strapped to the cross either by nail or rope. Once on the cross the process of asphyxiation took over. With the arms stretched out, the chest muscles would contract on the lungs making it very difficult to get a breath (Stavrakakis, 1). The length of this entire process varied widely. According to Edwards “The length of survival generally ranged from three or four hours to three or four days and appears to have been inversely related to the severity of the scourging” (1). The pain the covered the body from head to toe and everywhere in between unimaginable, especially considering that is was brought on by a fellow human being. This goes to show how corrupt and sick humans are capable of being towards other