Top ten Roman Atrocities?

[caesar novus]

1) ?

2) Claudius Naumachia where 19,000 POWs fight and die. http://www.the-colosseum.net/games/navmachiae.htm

3) ?

4) ?

5) ?

6) ?

7) ?

8) ?

9) Commodus slaying groups of cripples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodus#Commodus_the_gladiator

10) ?

 

Your version? I started by focusing on over the top, gratuitious depravity even by primitive day standards. Just put yourself in the victims place, when they are about to make a show of pouring liquid lead down your throat or something you could never have dreamed of in your experience. It seems a bit less bad to be torched as a Christian if they had already given you a chance to simply show respect for pagan totems (not even to believe in them or disbelieve in your god; just don't jinx the community good luck totem). Or massacre of a city for not surrendering... very bad, but they did have a chance to save themselves and save the Roman legion from risking their lives.

Edited September 29, 2009 by caesar novus

[Maty]

1) ?

2) Claudius Naumachia where 19,000 POWs fight and die. http://www.the-colosseum.net/games/navmachiae.htm

3) ?

4) ?

5) ?

6) ?

7) ?

8) ?

9) Commodus slaying groups of cripples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodus#Commodus_the_gladiator

10) ?

 

Your version? I started by focusing on over the top, gratuitious depravity even by primitive day standards. Just put yourself in the victims place, when they are about to make a show of pouring liquid lead down your throat or something you could never have dreamed of in your experience. It seems a bit less bad to be torched as a Christian if they had already given you a chance to simply show respect for pagan totems (not even to believe in them or disbelieve in your god; just don't jinx the community good luck totem). Or massacre of a city for not surrendering... very bad, but they did have a chance to save themselves and save the Roman legion from risking their lives.

 

I'd put their habit of crucifying dogs once a year up there in terms of gratuitous cruelty - maybe not cruelty to humans, but revolting nevertheless.

[Centurion-Macro]

I can not think of many off the top of my head, but...

 

~Nero's crucifying of Christians, who he blamed for the fire of Rome in AD 69.

 

~Commodus fighting gladiators...all of whom had been blinded, had their arms broken, and were half starved.

[Ursus]

I'd put their habit of crucifying dogs once a year up there in terms of gratuitous cruelty - maybe not cruelty to humans, but revolting nevertheless.

 

Totally agreed. Also, all the animals slaughtered needlessly in the arenas.

[GhostOfClayton]

How about "the use of military action to force their rule of law, way of life, values, etc. on almost a fifth of the world's population, (predominantly against their will)."

 

It's not the sort of thing you're after, really, is it? So how about Betar. The Jerusalem Talmud relates that the numbers slain were enormous, that the Romans "went on killing until their horses were submerged in blood to their nostrils". This obviously comes under 'Body Count', but the worst part of the cruelty was the aim to eradicate an established religious belief.

Edited September 30, 2009 by GhostOfClayton

[Primus Pilus]

The butchering and enslavement of Epirus after the 3rd Macedonian War (c. 168 BC) by L. Aemilius Paullus. Epirus became the "example" for resistance to Rome in the Aegean/Macedonian theatre.

[Aurelia]

Roman punishment methods, in particular the combo of scourging and crucifixion were pretty atrocious.

 

A particularly "lovely" example is the mass crucifixion of 6,600 slaves along the via Appia following the 3rd Servile War in 73-71 BC.

Edited October 1, 2009 by Aurelia

[Northern Neil]

For fiendishness, I think Carausius does quite well when he allows Saxon pirates to raid villas, then apprehends the pirates, pocketing the loot for himself.

[Augustus Caesar]

There is one particular episope that strikes me as being particularly nasty... and that is one in which the Emperor Caligula plays one of his most wicked cards in his short tenure as Emperor.

 

He took his armies to the shores in great anticipation of a huge invasion of foreign lands only to play his matercard and turn all his might and anger toward Neptune. To take on this awesome task and to defeat him was an amazing feat and showed just what a brilliant leader of his troops Claigula was. To rub it in even further upon Neptune's defeat Caligula got his armies to collect thousands of Neptune's 'soldiers' (sea-shells for the uninitiated) and present them to the Senate upon his return thus creating a militarial masterstroke.

 

Now, I know I poke fun at Caligula here, but to him this was real. So does it count as particularly evil? I mean, really, in regard to his troops and generals who faithfully followed him and no doubt were as sick as pigs when he set them home with all his 'booty'.....

[caesar novus]

Let's see, quantity or quality of depravity? One account of a royal child's execution sticks in my mind due to the sick way they solved a certain legalistic snag about killing youngsters... I can't even type in the particulars. On the other extreme, the naumachia slaughters sound so wildly over the top. Put aside the technicalities of putting it on water, but to have tens of thousands of POW's hack each other to death for a cold blooded show!? Also I hear there may have had to be several "staff" for every prisoner of war, such as to row or guard; that must have been a scary profession done by Romans, like the poor sods who had to hold prisoners still while wild animals tore into them.

 

It would be nice to come up with tidy top ten lists, but I guess it is too numbing of a sick subject for that...

Edited October 5, 2009 by caesar novus

[Northern Neil]

Let's see, quantity or quality of depravity? One account of a royal child's execution sticks in my mind due to the sick way they solved a certain legalistic snag about killing youngsters...

 

Would this perchance be an allusion to the execution of Sejanus' nine year old daughter?

[caesar novus]

Gladiatorial games and related spectacles were the most notorious examples of the overlap of sadism and exemplary punishment in the Roman society; on both counts, from Claudius

[Kosmo]

All states resort more or less to violence in order to defend their interests and all societies have their share of sadists. What is striking about romans it's that violence became a regular form of entertainment with the gladiatorial fights. Many, if not most, gladiators were not fighting because they wanted to, but because they were slaves and forced to fight, unlike knights in a joust that chose to take part and had some control over the lethality of the fight.

Generally I agree with what Sylla said above.

The punishment that impressed me most was the blinding of Bulgarian POWs by the great emperor Vasile II.

[caesar novus]

You're then answering your own question, at least partially.

Additionally. I would think most if not all of us (UNRV members) would perfectly get the usefulness of the panem et circenses concept; we're naturally talking here about the circenses part.

You seem to say punishment in order to make an example is nothing noteworthy for the time. Maybe a sort of hot-blooded knee-jerk variety was the norm, but I find the Roman style of cold blooded (staged) exemplary punishment beyond the pale. I really like Roman civilization as altruistic for the most part, so this selfish side of making potential innocents suffer sticks out as gangster-think. And it can even be counterproductive; think of how some bombings have rallied the victims or think of how many analysts today are saying the gov'ts exemplary punishment of Lehman (folding) greatly magnified todays financial crises.

 

Commodus is entirely known from utterly hostile narratives; even so, Dio, Herodian and the Historia Augusta were not especially uncomfortable regarding the fate of the victims; they were essentially denouncing this emperor for cheating and for using populist methods (ie. profitting from the heroic archetype of Hercules and the gladiatorial games); he was hardly the only one. His methods may have been unorthodox, but institutional populism was standard practice all along the Empire.

I don't think Commodus' victims would have found him particularly more cruel (for killing them himself) than Claudius, Vespasian or Trajan for making others do the job.

We are not informed on how most of these victims were selected; arguably some may have "deserved" it more than the others; in any case, it would be naive from us to infer that such victims would have never been executed in any alternative way, even if the gladiatorial games have never ever existed.

The use of crippled fighters (or even deliberately crippling them) was extremely cruel, but it was an obvious requirement if the Roman head of state was going to participate in the games at all.

Besides, we have no reason to believe that these were the only fixed gladiatorial fights ever.

It's true I was going from summaries inferring the cripples were otherwise innocent and only there for the sick needs of a theatrical narrative. If they might in fact be guilty of something, then fine... I guess there were no jails, so offenders had to be sorted into extremes of very light or very harsh punishment. But it seems a stretch to project guilt, with no evidence.

 

BTW, I'm a bit puzzled why some emperors pandered largely to populism, esp via cruelty. It's one thing where my "genius" emperors balance pandering to the army, elites, AND populace to kind of keep the peace, but wasn't it really mainly the army that you had to buy off in order to survive and thrive?

 

Your main problem seems then to be that you are trying to mix myriads of entirely different unrelated poorly-defined categories; "institutional cruelty" (however you may define it) plus exemplary punishment and executions plus personal ruler sadism plus deliberate genocide plus massive war casualties plus famines, natural disasters and miscellaneous, to say the least.

Homogenous samples are an absolute requirement for reaching any meaningful conclusion.

In any case, there's more than enough evidence that perfectly functional emperors ("geniuses") like Octavian, Vespasian and Trajan were perfectly capable and willing to perform extremely cruel actions when required.

For goodness sake, I was being metaphorical. If you require such tidiness to reach any conclusion, then no conclusion can be reached for Rome with it's incomplete evidence. One thing that is certain is archeological remains, and I think Roman architecture, engineering, and art just shout refinement for the most part. But the scraps of surviving narrative contrast so much from what we associate with refinement, that it's reasonable to assume where there is smoke there may be fire. So it's interesting to look at the contrast, and not get at all relativistically jelly spined about it. Romans are interesting precisely because when imposing TODAYs standards they look so good in many ways... and bad in others (with volumes of admittedly shakier evidence for the latter).

Edited October 11, 2009 by caesar novus

[GhostOfClayton]

1) ?

2) Claudius Naumachia where 19,000 POWs fight and die. http://www.the-colosseum.net/games/navmachiae.htm

3) ?

4) ?

5) ?

6) ?

7) ?

8) ?

9) Commodus slaying groups of cripples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodus#Commodus_the_gladiator

10) ?

 

Your version? I started by focusing on over the top, gratuitious depravity even by primitive day standards. Just put yourself in the victims place, when they are about to make a show of pouring liquid lead down your throat or something you could never have dreamed of in your experience. It seems a bit less bad to be torched as a Christian if they had already given you a chance to simply show respect for pagan totems (not even to believe in them or disbelieve in your god; just don't jinx the community good luck totem). Or massacre of a city for not surrendering... very bad, but they did have a chance to save themselves and save the Roman legion from risking their lives.

 

 

 

Hey CN. Do you mind if I pinch your idea (and some of the replies) and use it as a basis for a lecture for the local History Group?

 

"The Top Ten Roman Attrocities" is a title that would really pack 'em in (what does that tell you about human nature?) . . . . and bums on seats usually means new members. I could play with the number of attrocities based on time available, and finish (or maybe start . . . no, finish) with The Rape of the Sabine Women. Sounds like an attrocity, but (arguably) wasn't. I could even tell it to make the Romans sound like the good guys! Let the audience go out on a feel-good story.

 

Is that OK?