It's an expansion of my previous post on Asian and Muslim penalties, specifically their methods of impalement.
After that part 2 on the Origin and Evolution of Roman "Crucifixion" (Do you guys really think they nailed to crosses -- the kind of things you see at the front end of your church??? Come on already!).
Then I will tear into the Introduction section of John Granger Cook's Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World.
Showing posts with label Romans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romans. Show all posts
Monday, May 16, 2016
Monday, May 2, 2016
Origin and Evolution of Roman "Crucifixion"
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| "Awl in a deye's wuhk," said the Centurion from Australia. Yet another lurid Christian Crucifiction scene. |
Based on and expanded from a back-translation into English from the Italian, Leolaia, Ph.D., I fatti sulla crocifissione, lo stauros, e il palo di tortura. (ca 2008), Section III, "l’Origine della crocifissione Romana," pp. 5-8. Link: http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/bible/92381/1/The-facts-on-crucifixion-stauros-andthe-torture-stake.
LSJ stands for: Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. revised and augmented throughout by. Sir Henry Stuart Jones, with the assistance of. Roderick McKenzie. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1940). Accessible at PDL and Perseus Greek Word Study Tool.
Lewis & Short stands for: A Latin Dictionary. Founded on Andrews' edition of Freund's Latin dictionary. revised, enlarged, and in great part rewritten by. Charlton T. Lewis, Ph.D. and. Charles Short, LL.D. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1879). Accessible at PDL, and at Numen and Perseus Latin Word Study Tools
PDL stands for: the Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ . Linked PDL: specified section of work within. Definitions of all Greek and Latin Words can be verified therein.
Scholars of the subject generally believe that the execution pole called the crux compacta or crux commissa, consisting of a vertical pole and a transverse bar on which a person’s arms were bound or nailed, was a Roman invention that was obtained by combining indigenous practices of executions of Rome and Latium with those acquired from contact with neighbouring peoples. There are several predecessors ofcrucifixion in the ancient Near East and North Africa, including live impalement, and the post-mortem exposure of the corpse. The first method was to penetrate prisoners or slaves alive with pointed stakes, and as illustrated by some Assyrian reliefs, the best confirmation of this ancient practice is located in the Code of Hammurabi, dating to 1700 BCE; the second method was the exposure of the condemned after death, was likely to have been accomplished by impalement also, and was practiced by the ancient Israelites.
After being stoned to death, the idolaters and blasphemers were hung on trees to show that they were cursed by God (Deuteronomy 21:23); the law also required that these bodies should not remain suspended upon the trees all night. The ancient Persians instead executed their criminals and prisoners by attaching them while they were still living onto trees and poles. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament claims that "the Persians invented or first used this method of execution [i.e.,crucifixion]. Probably they did not contaminate the earth, which was dedicated to Ormuzd, with the bodies of people who were executed." [1]
What distinguishes this practice from the Jewish post-mortem suspension is that the victims were still alive when their bodies were hanged or impaled. It is believed that the references to suspension, hanging or “smiting” in Ezra 6.11 and Esther 7.9 and 10 were Persian suspensions -- the texts do not appear to be specific enough. [2]
The Greco-Persian Wars (449-479 BC) made this form of execution known to the Greeks and Herodotus (Histories, 1.128.2 [ἀνεσκολόπισε], 3.125.3 [ἀνεσταύρωσε], 3.132.2 [ἀνασκολοπιεῖσϑαι], 3.159.1 [ἀνεσκολόπισε], 4.43.2-7 [ἀνασκολοπιεῖσϑαι, ἀνεσκολόπισε], 6.30.1 [ανέσταύρωσαν], 7.194 [ἀνεσταύρωσε]) has frequent references to this custom among the Persians (see also Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 1.110.3 [ἀνεσταυρωϑη], for its use in Egypt of the time). The verbs, which are inflected forms of ἀνασταυρόω, and ἀνασκόλοπιζω respectively, are obviously derivatives of σταυρός, at that time an upright pale or pole, and σκόλοψ, an upright pointed stake or pole (LSJ).
For example, Herodotus mentions a viceroy called Sandoces, son of Tamas, who had been "condemned to be impaled by Darius" Darius then had a change of opinion: "Sandoces had already been suspended, when Darius, reflecting carefully, he discovered that his good deeds towards the royal family were greater than his error: he found this and realizing that he had acted more quickly than with wisdom, and so made him free. So Sandoces, whom Darius freed, lest he be utterly destroyed (ἀπολέσϑαι), was able to escape death." (Histories, 7.194) The passage clearly indicates that Sandoces was still alive when he was reportedly impaled. The verb ἀπολέσϑαι means “be utterly destroyed, demolished, killed” (LSJ).
The shape of the instrument Persians used in their executionary suspensions varied considerably. Herodotus does not describe it, but explicitly states that tall poles were used for the suspension of impaled heads. (Histories, 4.103.1-3) He also mentions that Polycrates was “executed in a manner not fit to be described and then suspended on a pale / pole” (Histories, 3.125.3); [3] while Plutarch reports that as many as four vertical pales (σταυροι) were used for the same single victim (Artaxerxes 17.5). Ctesias reports that a leader of an Egyptian rebellion or coup was suspended on three pales / poles (Ctesias, Fragments 688F 14.39). Apparently, the configuration of this device did not matter to Persians, it was enough to bring out its purpose.
One of the penalties that the Romans drew on (and developed separately their own penalty of exposure known as dierigere “to hang or erect with limbs apart” [4]) was the Greek penalty of ἀποτύμπανισμος (apotympanismos). This punishment goes way back into the pre-Archaic mists of Greek culture and the first mention of it is in Homer’s Odysseus, or The Odyssey. At the end of the main character Odysseus’ long journey, when he had returned home and revealed himself, his son Telemachus and a farmhand or friend Eumaeus grabbed the goatherd Melanthius who had acted treasonably to Odysseus and had him executed by suspending him hog-tied around some boards:
This would be a slow and painful death, suspended while bound to planks or simply crimp-nailed / garroted or tied to a wooden plank or pole. The penalty -- ἀπὸτυμπανίσμος (apotympanismos) – was normally meted out to noxious criminals and they were left to die gradually. It was in broad use in the Greek-speaking areas, even in Pentecontaetian Athens. The only difference in later days is, the criminal was executed in public and exposed to the abuse of the masses. [6]
Through their interaction with the Persians, the Greeks adopted their method of execution as a military strategy, while keeping their own penalty of apotympanismos. The adopted method was practiced mainly by Alexander the Great in his wars against the Persians (336-323 BCE). Thus, after the siege of Tyre in 332 BCE brought to an end, "two thousand men, ... were affixed to cruces and remained suspended along a long stretch of the beach" (Curtius Rufus, Histories of Alexander the Great, 4.4.17. The writer Quintus Curtius Rufus, in the First or Second Century CE, describes this execution in terms of a Romancrucifixion (crucibus adfixi). See also Plutarch, Alexander 7.2 on the suspension of the Persian doctor made by the Macedonian king. After Alexander's death his successors (the Diadochi) continued to use the Persian style against their enemies (see also Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library, 16.61.2), but the Greeks never fully integrated it into their legal system as a civil punishment. Greeks were allegedly disgusted with a brutal showy execution of this kind (cf. Herodotus, Histories 7.128, 9.78). Possibly as a result of the Greek siege of Tyre, Phoenicians and Carthaginians adopted the tactic of this sort of suspension en masse for use in wartime, unless they were already practicing it – Carthaginian suspensions, at least of individuals, predated Alexander’s siege of the city of Tyre by some 300 years. [7] Carthaginians were notorious for suspending their generals who did not follow ordered strategies and tactics, even if they returned victorious, and also enemy individuals whom they captured or who came under their power (Valerius Maximus, Memorabilia, 2.7, Silius Italicus, The Punic Wars, 2.339-44).
During the Punic Wars (264-146 BCE), the Romans encountered the Phoenician-Punic version of suspension and promptly appropriated it as an instrument of capital punishment for slaves, combining it with their dierectus. Disregarding the purpose for which the Phoenicians had originally conceived, the Romans converted it into a brutal instrument of torture. It was accomplished by placing a wooded transom set on one pole or between two poles called a patibulum. [8] In addition, a thorn- or spike-shaped peg called a sedile [9], an impaling stake or at the very least a short (but sufficiently long) beam was set underneath upon which the victims rested their weight. Without this “seat” or a similar support, the Romans would have to have the condemned sustained with ropes. [10] It is not known, however, if Romans’ development of this penalty was gradual, or if they invented a device similar to our cross straightaway. Before their invention of crucifixion Romans used the patibulum to humiliate condemned slaves marching to their execution. Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes this archaic practice:
crucifixion in which the victim was carrying his patibulum (the horizontal bar used to hoist up and suspend the condemned). This march of shame not always led to execution, but was often used for the sole purpose of humiliation.
Other descriptions of this primitive form of punishment can be found in Livy and Plutarch, both of whom tell of this custom in pre-republican Rome and reveal that the wood carried by the victim was also called a furca, i.e., yoke or Y-shaped gibbet.
And this piece of wood that will become in later centuries the horizontal arm of the Roman crux. The crux compacta / commissa might have come into existence when probably the Romans merged the Phoenician suspension method with the preexisting punishment of the forced-march transport of the patibulum. Since then, the punishment of slaves and fugitives was not only to be forced to parade naked through the city streets yoked to a patibulum, but also to be hanged from it. And when was this procedure started? We must examine the first known descriptions of the mode of execution adopted by the Romans and the specific terms used to refer to it.
Notes:
[1] Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans (1985), p. 16. There is not enough information from the Persian epigraphy to verify this; the inscriptions on the Behistun Rock have been translated either as “impale” or “crucify”, which means the scholars are just as much in the dark as we are. Nevertheless, I find this claim of Persian crucifixion to be dubious.
[2] See David W. Chapman’s discussion of these passages in his Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion, Tübingen / Grand Rapids, Mich.: Mohr Siebeck / Baker Academic (2008), pp. 162-71.
[3] Histories 3.125.3: άποκτείνας δέ μιν ουκ άξίως άπηγήσιος Όροίτης άνεσταύρωσε. Clearly back then, one was likely to be led to believe that the method of execution was by impalement, that is, Polycrates perished when the pale inside him hit a vital organ or a blood vessel and he was still on the ground, and so did not have to undergo a humiliating and extended death struggle in this manner.
[4] The OLD (1982 ed.) defines it as “Word of uncertain etymology used predicatively, app[arently] conveying the sense of peremptory dismissal or sim[ilar]” It doesn’t give a particular meaning for the word, but in the Lewis & Short (1879 ed.) we have “stretched out and raised on high,” i.e., hanged with limbs apart so that one was also put to the rack, so to speak, by Earth’s gravity acting on one’s body mass. Hence the phrase, I dierecte in maxumam malam crucem! from Plautus, Poenulus 1.2.134, can literally translate into: “Go and be hanged with limbs apart into the most wicked extreme torture [i.e., onto the most wicked torture-stake]”, denoting not only the expressed wish for the lifting of the addressed with a patibulum, but also his being parked or affixed onto some kind of stake.
Nota bene that mala (nom. of malam) seems to have had the same sense in Plautus’ Old Roman Latin, that the word “wicked” does in one of its senses in modern Boston English: as an amplifier.
There are discrepancies in the etymology of the word itself. Although the Lewis and Short goes by the late 19th Century consensus of the word being derived from dis (divided in two, in two different directions) and erectus (participle of erigo, “raise, set up, erect”). This is affirmed in note 15 of line 457 (Act 2, Scene 4, line156) of T. Maccius Plautus, Trinummis: Three Pieces of Money, in: Henry Thomas Riley, ed., The Comedies of Plautus. London: G. Bell and Sons (1912) (PDL) and in note 1 of line 579 (Act 4, Scene 1, line 7) of Bacchides: The Twin Sisters in Riley, in Riley, The Comedies of Plautus. (PDL). On the other hand, Varro (116-27 BCE), found in Nonius Marcellus (Severan era, early 3rd C. CE), De comp. doct. 49.26 (?) has this to say about the origin of the word: Dierecti dicti crucifixi, quasi ad diem erecti. (Of crucifixus called dierectus, as though erected by daylight).
[5] http://stoa.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/odysseus-judge-and-executioner/
[6] Ibid. For a short discussion of the penalty see also Martin Hengel, Crucifixion, trans. John Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress Press (1977), pp. 67-72; nota bene the information in notes 2, 4, 6, 11 and 12, and beware the conflation the author makes between the Greek penalty and (the modern understanding of) crucifixion.
[7] About 550 BCE the Carthaginian general Malchus lost a battle and was put into exile. Not willing to accept the penalty he returned with his army and besieged his own home town. When his son came out to greet him, wearing all his purples and ornaments, the father had him suspended on a skyscrapingcross. See John Granger Cook, Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck (2014), p. 147, and “The Cross and Its Significance,” The Open Court. London: [vol. and no. unknown], (18??), pp. 149-163, esp. p. 153. The latter dates this event to about 600 BCE. Anecdote sourced from Justin (fl. ca 2nd – 4th C. CE), Epitome 18.7.15. “This he commanded that he be fixed to a very high cross with his adornment in view of the city (Atque ita eum cum ornatu suo in altissimam crucem in conspectus Urbis suffigi iussit).” Trans. J. C. Yardley, Justin, Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, I, comm. W. Heckel, Oxford (2011), 8-13, strikeout typeface of “cross” mine, because Justin probably understood the crux to be something T-shaped like the Roman execution device or our utility pole and certainly not a cross! or tropaeum.
[8] Some may argue that sometimes in Latin patibulum indicates more than the horizontal arm of the cross, be confused with crux, that indicates a pole, impaling stake, T-pole or scaffold tout court. The problem has been studied by G. Serbat in his Les dérivés nominaux latins à suffix mediàtif, Paris, 1975, pp. 54-58 and this confusion is from the late-antique period, not about the sources we are analyzing.
[9] Tertullian, Ad Nationes 1.12.3-4: Sed nobis tota crux imputatur, cum antenna scilicet sua et cum illo sedilis excessu (But to us is imputed a completecross, certainly with its ship’s yard, and as well as the well-known projection of a seat). The noun excessu is an ablative derived from excessus, meaning protuberance, projection, as well as towering above, departure from standard (i.e., from a regular seat), excess for the intended purpose (i.e., for merely sustaining the person), transgression, and death; itself derived from excedere, to exceed, depart, to go out, to rise above, to transgress, to die. There are other terms for it, such as acuta crux (sharpened torture-stake [Seneca, Ep. 101.10-14, esp. 12]) upon which one was “to press down his own ‘wound’” (vulnus suum premere [ibid.]) with his own body weight; κέρας… ἐφ᾽ ᾧ ἐποχοῦνται οἱ σταυρούμενοι (a horn… upon which “ride” those who are being crucified [Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 91]); finis / summitas (end/high point [Irenaeus, Against all Heresies 2.24.4]); cornu (horn [Tertullian An Answer to the Jews 10.2.7 and Against Marcion 3.18.3-4]). Tertullian tops this last off in both references, with unicornis autem medio stipite palus (of the unicorn [i.e., rhinoceros] on the other hand is the palus at/from the middle of the stake) in the former and unicornis autem medius stipitis palus (of the unicorn on the other hand is the central palus of the stake) in the latter; stake (stipes), in both cases, probably means the main pole of the frame as understood by Tertullian (cf. Apology 12:3 “You put Christians on crosses and stakes” [crucibus et stibitibus imponitis Christianos]).
Nota bene that vulnus here is a euphemism for the rear end, that is, the arse, κέρας and palus were euphemisms for the phallus and even crux itself was a euphemism for the phallus! (See Sportive Epigrams on Priapus, by divers poets in English verse and prose, translation by Leonard C. Smithers and Sir Richard Burton (1890), p. 101 at Sacred Texts.com, The Priapreia, Sodomy with Women for vulnus, J. N. Adams, Latin Sexual Vocabulary. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press (1982), p.11, n. 1, ref. Archilochus 247 for κέρας; Lewis & Short s.v. palus, II. Transf. "= membrum virile", ref. Horace, Satires 1.8.1-7; Priapeia (Appendix Vergiliana) 2.16-21 and Virgil, Aenid VII-XII. Minor Poems, vol. 2 LCL, ed. and trans. H. R. Fairclough, Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard Univ. Press (1918), p. 483, cited in Cook, Crucifixion, p. 106 n. 245, for crux.)
[10] Mishaps can occur quite frequently in modern votive crucifixions, especially when the support for the body, probably always a suppedaneum (footrest), gives way. See The Crucifixion of Sebastian Horsley, part 1 and part 2, on You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUPxjC7yfBA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0n_ys40CrM respectively (both accessed 4-26-2016). Mr. Horsley’s involuntary descent happens toward the beginning of part 2.
LSJ stands for: Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. revised and augmented throughout by. Sir Henry Stuart Jones, with the assistance of. Roderick McKenzie. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1940). Accessible at PDL and Perseus Greek Word Study Tool.
Lewis & Short stands for: A Latin Dictionary. Founded on Andrews' edition of Freund's Latin dictionary. revised, enlarged, and in great part rewritten by. Charlton T. Lewis, Ph.D. and. Charles Short, LL.D. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1879). Accessible at PDL, and at Numen and Perseus Latin Word Study Tools
PDL stands for: the Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ . Linked PDL: specified section of work within. Definitions of all Greek and Latin Words can be verified therein.
Scholars of the subject generally believe that the execution pole called the crux compacta or crux commissa, consisting of a vertical pole and a transverse bar on which a person’s arms were bound or nailed, was a Roman invention that was obtained by combining indigenous practices of executions of Rome and Latium with those acquired from contact with neighbouring peoples. There are several predecessors of
After being stoned to death, the idolaters and blasphemers were hung on trees to show that they were cursed by God (Deuteronomy 21:23); the law also required that these bodies should not remain suspended upon the trees all night. The ancient Persians instead executed their criminals and prisoners by attaching them while they were still living onto trees and poles. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament claims that "the Persians invented or first used this method of execution [i.e.,
What distinguishes this practice from the Jewish post-mortem suspension is that the victims were still alive when their bodies were hanged or impaled. It is believed that the references to suspension, hanging or “smiting” in Ezra 6.11 and Esther 7.9 and 10 were Persian suspensions -- the texts do not appear to be specific enough. [2]
The Greco-Persian Wars (449-479 BC) made this form of execution known to the Greeks and Herodotus (Histories, 1.128.2 [ἀνεσκολόπισε], 3.125.3 [ἀνεσταύρωσε], 3.132.2 [ἀνασκολοπιεῖσϑαι], 3.159.1 [ἀνεσκολόπισε], 4.43.2-7 [ἀνασκολοπιεῖσϑαι, ἀνεσκολόπισε], 6.30.1 [ανέσταύρωσαν], 7.194 [ἀνεσταύρωσε]) has frequent references to this custom among the Persians (see also Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 1.110.3 [ἀνεσταυρωϑη], for its use in Egypt of the time). The verbs, which are inflected forms of ἀνασταυρόω, and ἀνασκόλοπιζω respectively, are obviously derivatives of σταυρός, at that time an upright pale or pole, and σκόλοψ, an upright pointed stake or pole (LSJ).
For example, Herodotus mentions a viceroy called Sandoces, son of Tamas, who had been "condemned to be impaled by Darius" Darius then had a change of opinion: "Sandoces had already been suspended, when Darius, reflecting carefully, he discovered that his good deeds towards the royal family were greater than his error: he found this and realizing that he had acted more quickly than with wisdom, and so made him free. So Sandoces, whom Darius freed, lest he be utterly destroyed (ἀπολέσϑαι), was able to escape death." (Histories, 7.194) The passage clearly indicates that Sandoces was still alive when he was reportedly impaled. The verb ἀπολέσϑαι means “be utterly destroyed, demolished, killed” (LSJ).
The shape of the instrument Persians used in their executionary suspensions varied considerably. Herodotus does not describe it, but explicitly states that tall poles were used for the suspension of impaled heads. (Histories, 4.103.1-3) He also mentions that Polycrates was “executed in a manner not fit to be described and then suspended on a pale / pole” (Histories, 3.125.3); [3] while Plutarch reports that as many as four vertical pales (σταυροι) were used for the same single victim (Artaxerxes 17.5). Ctesias reports that a leader of an Egyptian rebellion or coup was suspended on three pales / poles (Ctesias, Fragments 688F 14.39). Apparently, the configuration of this device did not matter to Persians, it was enough to bring out its purpose.
One of the penalties that the Romans drew on (and developed separately their own penalty of exposure known as dierigere “to hang or erect with limbs apart” [4]) was the Greek penalty of ἀποτύμπανισμος (apotympanismos). This punishment goes way back into the pre-Archaic mists of Greek culture and the first mention of it is in Homer’s Odysseus, or The Odyssey. At the end of the main character Odysseus’ long journey, when he had returned home and revealed himself, his son Telemachus and a farmhand or friend Eumaeus grabbed the goatherd Melanthius who had acted treasonably to Odysseus and had him executed by suspending him hog-tied around some boards:
“I and Telemachus will keep the lordly wooers within the hall, how fierce so ever they be, but do you two bend behind him his feet and his arms above, and cast him into the store-room, and tie boards behind his back; then make fast to his body a twisted rope, and hoist him up the tall pillar, till you bring him near the roof-beams, that he may keep alive long, and to suffer grievious torment.
“Then the two [Eumaeus and Telemachus] sprang upon him [Melanthius] and seized him. They dragged him in by the hair, and flung him down on the ground in sore terror, and bound his feet and hands with galling bonds, binding him firmly behind his back, as the son of Laertes bade them, the much enduring, goodly Odysseus; and they made fast to his body a twisted rope, and hoisted him up the tall pillar, till they brought him near the roof-beams.”
(Homer, The Odyssey, as quoted in Stoa.Wordpress.com. [5])
This would be a slow and painful death, suspended while bound to planks or simply crimp-nailed / garroted or tied to a wooden plank or pole. The penalty -- ἀπὸτυμπανίσμος (apotympanismos) – was normally meted out to noxious criminals and they were left to die gradually. It was in broad use in the Greek-speaking areas, even in Pentecontaetian Athens. The only difference in later days is, the criminal was executed in public and exposed to the abuse of the masses. [6]
Through their interaction with the Persians, the Greeks adopted their method of execution as a military strategy, while keeping their own penalty of apotympanismos. The adopted method was practiced mainly by Alexander the Great in his wars against the Persians (336-323 BCE). Thus, after the siege of Tyre in 332 BCE brought to an end, "two thousand men, ... were affixed to cruces and remained suspended along a long stretch of the beach" (Curtius Rufus, Histories of Alexander the Great, 4.4.17. The writer Quintus Curtius Rufus, in the First or Second Century CE, describes this execution in terms of a Roman
"A fairly well known Roman had delivered one of his slaves to other slaves for leading him to death and the punishment was so sensational, he ordered him dragged, whipping through the Forum and any other place in town that was heavilly frequented, ahead of the procession which the Romans staged in honor of the god on that occasion. The men that led the slave to torture, after having stretched out his arms and tied them to a beam (τὰς χεῖρας ἀποτείναντες ἀμφοτέρας καὶ ξύλῳ προσδῆσαντες) that, along the chest and shoulders, extended out to his wrists, followed him with the whip hitting his naked body."The punishment of transporting the patibulum, during which a slave was whipped and driven through the city, was practiced in pre-republican Rome. It was the direct ancestor of the ritual of
(Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 7.69.1-2)
Other descriptions of this primitive form of punishment can be found in Livy and Plutarch, both of whom tell of this custom in pre-republican Rome and reveal that the wood carried by the victim was also called a furca, i.e., yoke or Y-shaped gibbet.
"They were then setting up the grand games in Rome, which had been begun by head. The reason for the repetition was as follows: on the morning of games, before they started the show, a head of a household had led around the Circus under a yoke (furca) a slave, scourging him as he went."
(Livy, Histories, 2.36.1)
"A man had entrusted one of his servants to other servants, with orders to lead him through the Forum with scourgings of the whip and then kill him. While performing the order and beating the slave, who because of his suffering is bent in every way possible and stirred with other contortions in horrible pain, by chance the Sacred Procession in Honour of Iuppiter found itself to advance behind them. ... If a slave had committed some fault, it was already considered a severe punishment to go around the neighborhood carrying on their shoulders the wood that is used in wagons to support the tow-pole. In fact, the one who had suffered this punishment and had been seen by friends and neighbors is discounted, losing their credit and is called a furcifer, since what the Romans called a furca is that thing which the Greeks call an ὑποστάτην (hypostatên: prop) or a στήριγμα (stêrigma: support)."
(Plutarch, Lives, Caius Marcius Coriolanus, 24.3-5)
And this piece of wood that will become in later centuries the horizontal arm of the Roman crux. The crux compacta / commissa might have come into existence when probably the Romans merged the Phoenician suspension method with the preexisting punishment of the forced-march transport of the patibulum. Since then, the punishment of slaves and fugitives was not only to be forced to parade naked through the city streets yoked to a patibulum, but also to be hanged from it. And when was this procedure started? We must examine the first known descriptions of the mode of execution adopted by the Romans and the specific terms used to refer to it.
Notes:
[1] Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans (1985), p. 16. There is not enough information from the Persian epigraphy to verify this; the inscriptions on the Behistun Rock have been translated either as “impale” or “crucify”, which means the scholars are just as much in the dark as we are. Nevertheless, I find this claim of Persian crucifixion to be dubious.
[2] See David W. Chapman’s discussion of these passages in his Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion, Tübingen / Grand Rapids, Mich.: Mohr Siebeck / Baker Academic (2008), pp. 162-71.
[3] Histories 3.125.3: άποκτείνας δέ μιν ουκ άξίως άπηγήσιος Όροίτης άνεσταύρωσε. Clearly back then, one was likely to be led to believe that the method of execution was by impalement, that is, Polycrates perished when the pale inside him hit a vital organ or a blood vessel and he was still on the ground, and so did not have to undergo a humiliating and extended death struggle in this manner.
[4] The OLD (1982 ed.) defines it as “Word of uncertain etymology used predicatively, app[arently] conveying the sense of peremptory dismissal or sim[ilar]” It doesn’t give a particular meaning for the word, but in the Lewis & Short (1879 ed.) we have “stretched out and raised on high,” i.e., hanged with limbs apart so that one was also put to the rack, so to speak, by Earth’s gravity acting on one’s body mass. Hence the phrase, I dierecte in maxumam malam crucem! from Plautus, Poenulus 1.2.134, can literally translate into: “Go and be hanged with limbs apart into the most wicked extreme torture [i.e., onto the most wicked torture-stake]”, denoting not only the expressed wish for the lifting of the addressed with a patibulum, but also his being parked or affixed onto some kind of stake.
Nota bene that mala (nom. of malam) seems to have had the same sense in Plautus’ Old Roman Latin, that the word “wicked” does in one of its senses in modern Boston English: as an amplifier.
There are discrepancies in the etymology of the word itself. Although the Lewis and Short goes by the late 19th Century consensus of the word being derived from dis (divided in two, in two different directions) and erectus (participle of erigo, “raise, set up, erect”). This is affirmed in note 15 of line 457 (Act 2, Scene 4, line156) of T. Maccius Plautus, Trinummis: Three Pieces of Money, in: Henry Thomas Riley, ed., The Comedies of Plautus. London: G. Bell and Sons (1912) (PDL) and in note 1 of line 579 (Act 4, Scene 1, line 7) of Bacchides: The Twin Sisters in Riley, in Riley, The Comedies of Plautus. (PDL). On the other hand, Varro (116-27 BCE), found in Nonius Marcellus (Severan era, early 3rd C. CE), De comp. doct. 49.26 (?) has this to say about the origin of the word: Dierecti dicti crucifixi, quasi ad diem erecti. (Of crucifixus called dierectus, as though erected by daylight).
[5] http://stoa.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/odysseus-judge-and-executioner/
[6] Ibid. For a short discussion of the penalty see also Martin Hengel, Crucifixion, trans. John Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress Press (1977), pp. 67-72; nota bene the information in notes 2, 4, 6, 11 and 12, and beware the conflation the author makes between the Greek penalty and (the modern understanding of) crucifixion.
[7] About 550 BCE the Carthaginian general Malchus lost a battle and was put into exile. Not willing to accept the penalty he returned with his army and besieged his own home town. When his son came out to greet him, wearing all his purples and ornaments, the father had him suspended on a skyscraping
[8] Some may argue that sometimes in Latin patibulum indicates more than the horizontal arm of the cross, be confused with crux, that indicates a pole, impaling stake, T-pole or scaffold tout court. The problem has been studied by G. Serbat in his Les dérivés nominaux latins à suffix mediàtif, Paris, 1975, pp. 54-58 and this confusion is from the late-antique period, not about the sources we are analyzing.
[9] Tertullian, Ad Nationes 1.12.3-4: Sed nobis tota crux imputatur, cum antenna scilicet sua et cum illo sedilis excessu (But to us is imputed a complete
Nota bene that vulnus here is a euphemism for the rear end, that is, the arse, κέρας and palus were euphemisms for the phallus and even crux itself was a euphemism for the phallus! (See Sportive Epigrams on Priapus, by divers poets in English verse and prose, translation by Leonard C. Smithers and Sir Richard Burton (1890), p. 101 at Sacred Texts.com, The Priapreia, Sodomy with Women for vulnus, J. N. Adams, Latin Sexual Vocabulary. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press (1982), p.11, n. 1, ref. Archilochus 247 for κέρας; Lewis & Short s.v. palus, II. Transf. "= membrum virile", ref. Horace, Satires 1.8.1-7; Priapeia (Appendix Vergiliana) 2.16-21 and Virgil, Aenid VII-XII. Minor Poems, vol. 2 LCL, ed. and trans. H. R. Fairclough, Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard Univ. Press (1918), p. 483, cited in Cook, Crucifixion, p. 106 n. 245, for crux.)
[10] Mishaps can occur quite frequently in modern votive crucifixions, especially when the support for the body, probably always a suppedaneum (footrest), gives way. See The Crucifixion of Sebastian Horsley, part 1 and part 2, on You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUPxjC7yfBA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0n_ys40CrM respectively (both accessed 4-26-2016). Mr. Horsley’s involuntary descent happens toward the beginning of part 2.
Friday, March 18, 2016
John Granger Cook's Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World (Revised and Updated)
Title:
Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World
Series: Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament 327
Author: John Granger Cook
Bibliographic info: xxiv + 536 pp. = 560 pages in all.
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck, 2014.
Buy the book at your local bookseller.
Also available Abebooks, Barnes and Noble, the Publisher, or Amazon.com.
Also available Abebooks, Barnes and Noble, the Publisher, or Amazon.com.
Another cognitive failure relevant to religious belief [and to conventional wisdom] is the so-called confirmation bias, a psychological tendency to seek confirmations rather than disconfirmation of any hypothesis we’ve adopted however tentatively. People notice more readily and search more diligently for whatever confirms their beliefs, and they don’t notice or readily and certainly don’t look as hard for what disconfirms them.... Francis Bacon was aware of this bias in the seventeenth century when he wrote, “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number of weight and instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises.”- John Allen Paulos, Irreligion. New York, Hill and Wang, 2008, pp. 108-9
John Granger Cook has written an immense volume on how the Romans suspended people, reviewed a little more than a year ago at various places, like here. The tome appears to be an exhaustive work on the Roman practice and Dr. Cook has done a great deal of research, and mind you, careful research, too. I've gone through the first one hundred pages of the text proper so far and for the most part it's very excellent.
This work by Professor Cook was preceded by two recent volumes on the same subject: David W. Chapman’s Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion, which is an exhaustive analysis of how the Jews around the time of the ancient Roman Empire viewed the Roman penalty; followed by Gunnar Samuelsson’s Crucifixion in Antiquity, an in-depth minimalist study of the Greek and Latin verbiage used for crucifixion (and to a lesser extent, the Hebrew and Aramaic) to determine the semantics of the words employed for suspension on wood. An earlier work, of which this one was originally meant to be a revamp thereof, at Martin Hengel’s request, was his – for better or for worse -- era-defining survey, titled Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross. But Cook’s book is no mere survey: it is an almost-encyclopaedic study of nearly all the writings, epigraphs and archaeological evidence documenting Roman crucifixion – which deviates in every way from the modern common understanding of the penalty, which is: nail to a cross, or tropaeum.
In the introduction, pp. 1-50, Prof. Cook sets out his assumptions and parameters (and perimeters) of the study with an analysis of most of the Greek and Latin terms for crucifixion and a survey of imperial murders under Gaius “Caligula” Caesar. He admits that the Greek terms can be ambiguous at times but he claims the Latin terms are more precise and that impalement, rare in explicit mention in the Latin texts, is to be excluded if the context of the suspension-upon-wood indicated a long death struggle, since impalement allegedly results in a quick death.
In Chapter One, pp. 51-158, Prof. Cook then runs through a long list, consisting of fifty-nine authors, of almost all the mentions of crucifixion in the Latin texts. These authors appear in chronological order without regard to the type of vocation each author had: whether historian, playwright, satirist, philosopher, rhaetor, etc. Each mention is looked at to determine if the executionary suspension is a crucifixion, an impalement, or a suspension of some other kind. Needless to say, he determines all the mentions except two to be describing crucifixions, whether actual or fictitious.
In Chapter Two, pp. 159-217, Prof. Cook deals with the occurrences of this sort of death from the time of the Second Punic War to the imperium of Maximinus Daia, who drowned and was defeated at the Milvan Bridge in 312 CE by the Emperor Constantine. Although this chapter has forty subdivisions, indicated by time periods, major events, geographical areas, topics such as armed criminality and the like, covering individual suspensions and suspensions en masse, the number of pages devoted to each are very few, usually one or two, indicating that the number of recorded occurrences is astonishing low. For example, there is not one example of suspension-on-wood in Transalpine Gaul (modern-day France) or Celtic Britain (the UK) in retaliation to known uprisings there, nor is there any mention of such in Palestine, outside of the works of Flavius Josephus.
In Chapter Three, pp. 218-310, Prof. Cook examines the ancient Greek writers’ recordings of the various forms of executionary suspension-on-wood and the verbiage therein. Although, as he admits, the Greek meanings of the terms are quite ambiguous, yet he had found in many instances clear and unambiguous depictions of the Roman method that was typical for the time. Now this chapter is much better organized than Chapter One. Cook has arranged this chapter into several sections: first Historians (plus others who wrote historical or current events’ accounts) during the Roman Republic, then the Historians, etc. during the Empire, followed by Romance Novelists, Rhetors, Philosophers, non-Jewish Critics of Christianity, Astrologers, Dream Interpreters and Physicians, capped off with the Byzantines’ understanding of (I presume) various forms of.
Chapter Four, pp. 311-357, is a look at the subject matter from the viewpoint of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic texts. Prof. Cook includes with his analysis of twenty-seven or so Jewish texts a discussion of ancient Near East impalements, Muslim crucifixions and other penal suspensions. Although the Tanakh contains not one reference to any Roman crucifixions but the Septuagint might – most likely in the later-translated books, such as Esther. Later Hebrew and Aramaic texts certainly do contain references thereto and various Rabbinical texts, like a few from the Mishnah and the Talmud, deal with the issues surrounding the Roman penalty.
In Chapter Five, pp. 358-416, Prof. Cook looks crucifixion in the at the perspective of the legal codes and their historical development. This is the part of the book where one would expect to see a discussion of when the penalty was adopted and how it evolved. New Testament scholars, Christian apologists and others often claim that Rome adopted it from Carthage in the latter quarter of the III C. BCE and developed the stake or frame into a brutal killing machine whereupon the suspended person literally tortured himself to death, involuntarily. Prof. Cook notes that the last such suspension-on-wood occurred in 335 CE, two years before Constantine did away with the penalty as a sort of going-away present to the Imperial Christian Church (established in 325 CE at the Council of Nicaea by the self-same emperor), which for its own purposes probably already had mutated the crux (T-pole, torture-stake) into a CROSS, or tropaeum.
In Chapter Six, pp. 417-449, Prof. Cook looks at the New Testament writers dealt with Roman crucifixion, and makes his own determinations on how it was practiced and why it was such a vile, shameful death. (Hint: the suspended person “sat” on a “peg.”) He then discusses the possible medical causes of death by this sort of suspension, only to conclude in the end that the suspended persons “died from ‘different physiological causes’” (p. 435), depending on how each person was suspended. He finishes off the chapter by developing a theologia crucis for the gospel of Mark. He also makes an astonishing claim that Jesus’ dereliction cry does not invoke the whole of the 22nd Psalm, stating that “Attempts to insert the entire psalm into Mark 15:34 fundamentally ignores the brutality of Roman crucifixion” (p. 445). This would be news to the early “Church Fathers” who literally mined the psalm for “prophecies” of Jesus’ execution. Unfortunately for us who do not share the Christian faith, this whole chapter is so much ado about nothing, and would have been best developed as its own separate book.
Prof. Cook wraps up the work with a brief, two-page conclusion, presenting his findings or confirmations, including such that the Greek verbs σταυρόω and ἀνασταυρόω probably do not refer to impalement of a live person or a corpse, but to crucifixion instead; that the Persians invented crucifixion; that the Greeks performed a similar suspension or exposure on wood, and that the Romans developed a brutal form of crucifixion starting with the Second Punic War and kept it until Constantine replaced it with the furca (fork) in 337 CE.
The volume is made complete by eleven pages of images, a nineteen page bibliography, divided into sections for ancient sources, present-day databases/CD-Roms/websites, and modern works of scholarship; a twenty-seven page sources index, divided by type; an index of images; and indices of ancient writers and other persons, modern authors, and subject matters.
At $210 a copy for the hardcover and $80 for the paperback, this book is not meant for the general public, but rather for the serious scholar, whether credentialed or of the armchair variety (with means, of course). It gets very, very technical, given the subject matter involved and the objective of the writer. Each page is literally stuffed with footnotes, themselves frequently stuffed with references, with the notes often taking up more than half the page.
New Testament scholars will probably lap this book up; but on the other hand, Classicists and scholars of Ancient History should pursue it more critically, keeping a keen eye on the meanings of the original Latin, Greek, Hebrew, etc., and keep at their side a copy of David W. Chapman’s volume and Gunnar Samuelsson’s work for cross-checking – for despite his caution that Roman crucifixion probably did not conform to the modern common concept of crucifixion (p. 448), he often, and apparently carelessly and uncritically, translate a suspension account in the original language as “crucifixion.” A lay reader or unknowledgeable scholar reading this book would certainly be justified in assuming that the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Jews in their own private kingdom, and the Persians crucified people by nailing them to a cross, or tropaeum. And certainly by that crabbed modern definition held by probably most of the laity and even perhaps most of the clergy, Prof. Cook unwittingly acknowledges that in all likelihood, the Romans never crucified.
This work by Professor Cook was preceded by two recent volumes on the same subject: David W. Chapman’s Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion, which is an exhaustive analysis of how the Jews around the time of the ancient Roman Empire viewed the Roman penalty; followed by Gunnar Samuelsson’s Crucifixion in Antiquity, an in-depth minimalist study of the Greek and Latin verbiage used for crucifixion (and to a lesser extent, the Hebrew and Aramaic) to determine the semantics of the words employed for suspension on wood. An earlier work, of which this one was originally meant to be a revamp thereof, at Martin Hengel’s request, was his – for better or for worse -- era-defining survey, titled Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross. But Cook’s book is no mere survey: it is an almost-encyclopaedic study of nearly all the writings, epigraphs and archaeological evidence documenting Roman crucifixion – which deviates in every way from the modern common understanding of the penalty, which is: nail to a cross, or tropaeum.
In the introduction, pp. 1-50, Prof. Cook sets out his assumptions and parameters (and perimeters) of the study with an analysis of most of the Greek and Latin terms for crucifixion and a survey of imperial murders under Gaius “Caligula” Caesar. He admits that the Greek terms can be ambiguous at times but he claims the Latin terms are more precise and that impalement, rare in explicit mention in the Latin texts, is to be excluded if the context of the suspension-upon-wood indicated a long death struggle, since impalement allegedly results in a quick death.
In Chapter One, pp. 51-158, Prof. Cook then runs through a long list, consisting of fifty-nine authors, of almost all the mentions of crucifixion in the Latin texts. These authors appear in chronological order without regard to the type of vocation each author had: whether historian, playwright, satirist, philosopher, rhaetor, etc. Each mention is looked at to determine if the executionary suspension is a crucifixion, an impalement, or a suspension of some other kind. Needless to say, he determines all the mentions except two to be describing crucifixions, whether actual or fictitious.
In Chapter Two, pp. 159-217, Prof. Cook deals with the occurrences of this sort of death from the time of the Second Punic War to the imperium of Maximinus Daia, who drowned and was defeated at the Milvan Bridge in 312 CE by the Emperor Constantine. Although this chapter has forty subdivisions, indicated by time periods, major events, geographical areas, topics such as armed criminality and the like, covering individual suspensions and suspensions en masse, the number of pages devoted to each are very few, usually one or two, indicating that the number of recorded occurrences is astonishing low. For example, there is not one example of suspension-on-wood in Transalpine Gaul (modern-day France) or Celtic Britain (the UK) in retaliation to known uprisings there, nor is there any mention of such in Palestine, outside of the works of Flavius Josephus.
In Chapter Three, pp. 218-310, Prof. Cook examines the ancient Greek writers’ recordings of the various forms of executionary suspension-on-wood and the verbiage therein. Although, as he admits, the Greek meanings of the terms are quite ambiguous, yet he had found in many instances clear and unambiguous depictions of the Roman method that was typical for the time. Now this chapter is much better organized than Chapter One. Cook has arranged this chapter into several sections: first Historians (plus others who wrote historical or current events’ accounts) during the Roman Republic, then the Historians, etc. during the Empire, followed by Romance Novelists, Rhetors, Philosophers, non-Jewish Critics of Christianity, Astrologers, Dream Interpreters and Physicians, capped off with the Byzantines’ understanding of (I presume) various forms of.
Chapter Four, pp. 311-357, is a look at the subject matter from the viewpoint of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic texts. Prof. Cook includes with his analysis of twenty-seven or so Jewish texts a discussion of ancient Near East impalements, Muslim crucifixions and other penal suspensions. Although the Tanakh contains not one reference to any Roman crucifixions but the Septuagint might – most likely in the later-translated books, such as Esther. Later Hebrew and Aramaic texts certainly do contain references thereto and various Rabbinical texts, like a few from the Mishnah and the Talmud, deal with the issues surrounding the Roman penalty.
In Chapter Five, pp. 358-416, Prof. Cook looks crucifixion in the at the perspective of the legal codes and their historical development. This is the part of the book where one would expect to see a discussion of when the penalty was adopted and how it evolved. New Testament scholars, Christian apologists and others often claim that Rome adopted it from Carthage in the latter quarter of the III C. BCE and developed the stake or frame into a brutal killing machine whereupon the suspended person literally tortured himself to death, involuntarily. Prof. Cook notes that the last such suspension-on-wood occurred in 335 CE, two years before Constantine did away with the penalty as a sort of going-away present to the Imperial Christian Church (established in 325 CE at the Council of Nicaea by the self-same emperor), which for its own purposes probably already had mutated the crux (T-pole, torture-stake) into a CROSS, or tropaeum.
In Chapter Six, pp. 417-449, Prof. Cook looks at the New Testament writers dealt with Roman crucifixion, and makes his own determinations on how it was practiced and why it was such a vile, shameful death. (Hint: the suspended person “sat” on a “peg.”) He then discusses the possible medical causes of death by this sort of suspension, only to conclude in the end that the suspended persons “died from ‘different physiological causes’” (p. 435), depending on how each person was suspended. He finishes off the chapter by developing a theologia crucis for the gospel of Mark. He also makes an astonishing claim that Jesus’ dereliction cry does not invoke the whole of the 22nd Psalm, stating that “Attempts to insert the entire psalm into Mark 15:34 fundamentally ignores the brutality of Roman crucifixion” (p. 445). This would be news to the early “Church Fathers” who literally mined the psalm for “prophecies” of Jesus’ execution. Unfortunately for us who do not share the Christian faith, this whole chapter is so much ado about nothing, and would have been best developed as its own separate book.
Prof. Cook wraps up the work with a brief, two-page conclusion, presenting his findings or confirmations, including such that the Greek verbs σταυρόω and ἀνασταυρόω probably do not refer to impalement of a live person or a corpse, but to crucifixion instead; that the Persians invented crucifixion; that the Greeks performed a similar suspension or exposure on wood, and that the Romans developed a brutal form of crucifixion starting with the Second Punic War and kept it until Constantine replaced it with the furca (fork) in 337 CE.
The volume is made complete by eleven pages of images, a nineteen page bibliography, divided into sections for ancient sources, present-day databases/CD-Roms/websites, and modern works of scholarship; a twenty-seven page sources index, divided by type; an index of images; and indices of ancient writers and other persons, modern authors, and subject matters.
At $210 a copy for the hardcover and $80 for the paperback, this book is not meant for the general public, but rather for the serious scholar, whether credentialed or of the armchair variety (with means, of course). It gets very, very technical, given the subject matter involved and the objective of the writer. Each page is literally stuffed with footnotes, themselves frequently stuffed with references, with the notes often taking up more than half the page.
New Testament scholars will probably lap this book up; but on the other hand, Classicists and scholars of Ancient History should pursue it more critically, keeping a keen eye on the meanings of the original Latin, Greek, Hebrew, etc., and keep at their side a copy of David W. Chapman’s volume and Gunnar Samuelsson’s work for cross-checking – for despite his caution that Roman crucifixion probably did not conform to the modern common concept of crucifixion (p. 448), he often, and apparently carelessly and uncritically, translate a suspension account in the original language as “crucifixion.” A lay reader or unknowledgeable scholar reading this book would certainly be justified in assuming that the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Jews in their own private kingdom, and the Persians crucified people by nailing them to a cross, or tropaeum. And certainly by that crabbed modern definition held by probably most of the laity and even perhaps most of the clergy, Prof. Cook unwittingly acknowledges that in all likelihood, the Romans never crucified.
Yet I already have a few beefs with it. First, the Latin crux and the Greek σταυρός certainly do mean, which Dr. Cook disputes, "a pole in the broadest sense" -- Gunnar Samuelsson's words, not mine. My previous post, Crux Utilitatis, demonstrates that they do mean exactly that. Second, the Romans probably never or hardly ever used crosses (two timber beams inlaid into each other); more likely they usually pushed up or hoisted people onto poles using lifting-beams (i.e., patibula) instead, and other times they nailed the lifting-beam with the person on it onto the pole and tilted the macabre assembly up. Third, that the Romans never impaled people when they "crucified" them -- two graffiti and some of the ancient writings give lie to that!
Well this is my first installment of my review, I'll be updating this post with a description of the book and then follow up with my musings on it as time progresses.
A call-out of appreciation goes out to Messrs. Jim West of the Quartz Hill Theological Seminary, Charles L. Quarles of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and “Diglot” of Diglotting.com, without whose reviews I would have found it very impossible to complete this post. Also my thanks go out to Mohr Siebeck and GoogleBooks for their preview copy of this book,
Well this is the revised and updated first installment of my review, I am going to go into a more in-depth review of the separate chapters in separate posts to follow as time and money permit; for at the prices above-noted, this book is extremely expensive and for me, downright unaffordable.
Well this is the revised and updated first installment of my review, I am going to go into a more in-depth review of the separate chapters in separate posts to follow as time and money permit; for at the prices above-noted, this book is extremely expensive and for me, downright unaffordable.
- Edward Miessner
Saturday, February 20, 2016
Crux utilitatis
This is about utility poles: telephone poles and power poles, not crosses of the kind you see in churches!
Now please go back to my previous post with the carefully constructed cruces commissae / semi-immissae (Katrina crosses). Which sort of pole would the Romans have suspended and killed people on? A CROSS!? Or a utility pole?
* Formerly University Hospital, Perdido Street side.
Here is a power pole with single transom (crossarm), behind the East Jefferson Regional Library, Metairie, LA.
Here is another power pole behind the Robert E Smith Library in New Orleans
And here is a power pole with two transoms behind the Niversit* building, New Orleans, LA. Nota bene how this pole leans.
And here is a power pole with four cantilevered transoms on Jackson Avenue at Simon Bolivar Street
in New Orleans. Note there is a cross looking on from a storefront church.
And here is yet another utility pole next to the St John's Lutheran Church school gym in Mid-City.
Note the contrast between the utility pole (crux utilitatis) and the gym's cross (tropaeum).
Now please go back to my previous post with the carefully constructed cruces commissae / semi-immissae (Katrina crosses). Which sort of pole would the Romans have suspended and killed people on? A CROSS!? Or a utility pole?
* Formerly University Hospital, Perdido Street side.
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