(Latin, 'penalty of the sack')Richard A. Bauman (2005), Crime and Punishment in Ancient Rome, London & New York: Routledge, reprint of 1996 edition, , p. 23. under Roman law was a type of death penalty imposed on a subject who had been found guilty of parricide. The punishment consisted of being sewn up in a leather sack, with an assortment of live animals including a dog, snake, monkey, and a chicken or rooster, and then being thrown into water.
The punishment may have varied widely in its frequency and precise form during the Roman period. For example, the earliest fully documented case is from ca. 100 BC, although scholars think the punishment may have developed about a century earlier. Inclusion of live animals in the sack is only documented from Early Imperial times, and at the beginning, only snakes were mentioned. At the time of Emperor Hadrian (2nd century AD), the best-known form of the punishment was documented, where a rooster, a dog, a monkey and a viper were inserted in the sack. At the time of Hadrian, was made into an optional form of punishment for parricide (the alternative was being thrown to the beasts in the arena).
During the 3rd century AD up to the accession of Emperor Constantine, fell out of use; Constantine revived it, now with only serpents to be added in the sack. Well over 200 years later, Emperor Justinian reinstituted the punishment with the four animals, and remained the statutory penalty for patricides within Byzantine law for the next 400 years, when it was replaced with being burned alive. gained a revival of sorts in late medieval and early modern Germany, with late cases of being drowned in a sack along with live animals being documented from Saxony in the first half of the 18th century.
Execution ritual The 19th-century historian Theodor Mommsen compiled and described in detail the various elements that at one time or another have been asserted as elements within the ritualistic execution of a patricide during the Roman Era, and while the following paragraph is based on that description it is not to be regarded as a static ritual that always was observed, but as a descriptive enumeration of elements gleaned from several sources written over a period of several centuries. Mommsen, for example, notes that the monkey hardly can have been an ancient element in the execution ritual.Mommsen (1899), pp. 921–923
Other variations occur, and some of the Latin phrases have been interpreted differently. For example, in his early work De Inventione, Cicero says the criminal's mouth was covered by a leather bag, rather than a wolf's hide. He also says the person was held in prison until the large sack was made ready, whereas at least one modern author believes the sack, culleus, involved, would have been one of the large, very common sacks Romans transported wine in, so that such a sack would have been readily available. According to the same author, such a wine sack had a volume of .Cicero, Yonge (1852), p.369 and, on wine sack, Francesce (2007), pp. 184–185
Another point of contention concerns precisely how, and by what means, the individual was beaten. In his 1920 essay "The Lex Pompeia and the Poena Cullei", Max Radin observes that, as expiation, convicts were typically flogged until they bled (some commentators translate the phrase as "beaten with rods till he bleeds"), but that it might very well be the case that the rods themselves were painted red. Radin also points to a third option, namely that the "rods" actually were some type of shrub, since it documented from other sources that whipping with some kinds of shrub was thought to be purifying in nature.Radin (1920), p.119
Publicius Malleolus The picture gained of the ritual above is compiled from sources ranging in their generally agreed upon dates of composition from the 1st century BC, to the 6th century AD, that is, over a period of six to seven hundred years. Different elements are mentioned in the various sources, so that the actual execution ritual at any one particular time may have been substantially distinct from that ritual performed at other times. For example, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a treatise by an unknown author from about 90 BC details the execution of a Publicius Malleolus, found guilty of murdering his own mother, along with citing the relevant law as follows:
As can be seen from the above, in this early reference, no mention is made of live animals as co-inhabitants within the sack, nor is the mention of any initial whipping contained, nor that Malleolus, contained within the sack, was transported to the river in a cart driven by black oxen.
The Roman historian Livy places the execution of Malleolus to just about 10 years earlier than the composition of Rhetoricia ad Herennium (i.e., roughly 100 BC) and claims, furthermore, that Malleolus was the first in Roman history who was convicted to be sewn into a sack and thrown into the water, on account of parricide.Livy, Baker (1797)
Possible antecedents The historians Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Valerius Maximus,working primarily under emperors Augustus (r. 27 BCE – 14 AD) and Tiberius (r. 14 – 37 AD), respectively connect the practice of with an alleged incident under king Tarquinius Superbus (legendary reign being 535–509 BC). During his reign, the Roman state apparently acquired the so-called Sibylline Books, books of prophecy and sacred rituals. The king appointed a couple of priests, the so-called duumviri sacrorum, to guard the books, but one of them, Marcus Atilius, was bribed, and in consequence, divulged some of the book's secrets (to a certain Sabine foreigner Petronius, according to Valerius). For that breach of religion, Tarquinius had him sewn up in a sack and thrown into the sea. According to Valerius Maximus, it was very long after this event that this punishment was instituted for the crime of parricide as well, whereas Dionysius says that in addition to being suspected of divulging the secret texts, Atilius was, indeed, accused of having killed his own father.Valerius, Walker (2004), p.6 and Dionysius, Spelman (1758), p.262
The Greek historian Plutarch, however, in his "Life of Romulus" claims that the first case in Roman history of a son killing his own father happened more than five centuries after the foundation of Rome (traditional foundation date 753 BC), when a man called Lucius Hostius murdered his own father after the wars with Hannibal, that is, after the Second Punic War (which ended in 201 BC). Plutarch, however, does not specify how Lucius Hostius was executed, or even if he was executed by the Roman state at all. Additionally, he notes that at the time of Romulus and for the first centuries onwards, "parricide" was regarded as roughly synonymous with what is now called homicide, and that prior to the times of Lucius Hostius, the murder of one's own father, (i.e., patricide), was simply morally "unthinkable".Plutarch, Dryden (2008), p.55
According to Cloud and other modern scholars of Roman classical antiquity, a fundamental shift in the punishment of murderers may have occurred towards the end of the 3rd century BC, possibly spurred on by specific incidents like that of Lucius Hostius' murder of his father, and, more generally, occasioned by the concomitant brutalization of society in the wake of the protracted wars with Hannibal. Previously, murderers would have been handed over to the family of the victim to exact their vengeance, whereas from the 2nd century BC and onwards, the punishment of murderers became the affair of the Roman state, rather than giving the offended family full licence to mete out what they deemed appropriate punishment to the murderer of a relative.For this shift, see for example, Lintott (1999), p.38 Within that particular context, Cloud points out that certain jokes contained in the plays of the early 2nd century dramatist Plautus may be read as referring to the recent introduction of the punishment by the sack for parricides specifically (without the animals being involved).See footnote 86 reference to Cloud in Robinson (2007), p.45
Yet another incident prior to the execution of Malleolus is relevant. Some 30 years before the times of Malleolus, in the upheavals and riotings caused by the reform program urged on by Tiberius Gracchus, a man called Caius Villius, an ally of Gracchus, was condemned on some charge, and was shut up in a vessel or jar, to which serpents were added, and he was killed in that manner.Plutarch, Stadter (1999), p.99
First-century BC legislation Two laws documented from the first century BC are principally relevant to Roman murder legislation in general, and legislation on parricide in particular. These are the , promulgated in the 80s BC, and the Lex Pompeia de Parricidiis promulgated about 55 BC. According to a 19th-century commentator, the relation between these two old laws might have been that it was the Lex Pompeia that specified the (i.e., sewing the convict up in a sack and throwing him in the water) as the particular punishment for a parricide, because a direct reference to the Lex Cornelia shows that the typical punishment for a poisoner or assassin in general (rather than for the specific crime of parricide) was that of banishment, i.e., Lex Pompeia makes explicit distinctions for the crime of parricide not present in Lex Cornelia.Long (1855), p.55
Support for a possible distinction in the inferred contents of Lex Cornelia and Lex Pompeia from the remaining primary source material may be found in comments by the 3rd-century AD jurist Aelius Marcianus, as preserved in the 6th-century collection of juristical sayings, the Digest:
Modern experts continue to have some disagreements as to the actual meaning of the offence called "parricide", on the precise relation between the Lex Cornelia and the Lex Pompeia generally, and on the practice and form of the specifically. For example, Kyle (2012) summarizes, in a footnote, one of the contemporary relevant controversies in the following manner:
Writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero, the renowned lawyer, orator and politician from the 1st century BC, provides in his copious writings several references to the punishment of , but none of the live animals documented within the writings by others from later periods. In his defence speech of 80 BC for Sextus Roscius (accused of having murdered his own father), he expounds on the symbolic importance of the punishment as follows, for example, as Cicero believed it was devised and designed by the previous Roman generations:
That the practice of sewing murderers of their parents in sacks and throwing them in the water was still an active type of punishment at Cicero's time, at least on the provincial level, is made clear within a preserved letter Marcus wrote to his own brother Quintus, who as governor in Asia Minor in the 50s BC had, in fact, meted out that precise punishment to two locals in Smyrna, as Marcus observes.Cicero, Watson (1871), p.24
Julio-Claudian Dynasty, the two Senecas and Juvenal 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 the Emperor Augustus (r.27 BC–14 AD), Div. Aug. 33.1, notes the following reluctance on the emperor's part to actively authorize, and effect, that dread penalty:
Quite the opposite mentality seems to have been the case with Emperor Claudius (r.41 – 54 AD) For example, Emperor Nero's mentor, Seneca the Younger sighed about the times of Claudius as follows: It is also with a writer like Seneca that serpents are mentioned in context with the punishment;.But, serpents only, cf. Robinson (2007), footnote 91, p.46 Even before Seneca the Younger, his father, Seneca the Elder, who lived in the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula, indicates in a comment that snakes would be put in the culleus: