* Although Jesus is described in the gospels as carrying a stauros, the Greek word for a cross, the likelihood is that he carried what in Latin was termed a patibulum: a horizontal cross bar. ‘Let him carry his patibulum through the city, and then be nailed to his cross.’ So wrote the Roman playwright Plautus, a couple of centuries before the crucifixion of Jesus.
* The earliest Christian texts, Paul’s letters, also report that Jesus was ‘buried’ (1 Corinthians 15.4).
* The phrase is from the title of R. I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society.
ANTIQUITY
I
ATHENS
479
BC
: T
HE
H
ELLESPONT
At one of the narrowest points on the Hellespont, the thin channel of water that snakes from the Aegean up towards the Black Sea, and separates Europe from Asia, a promontory known as the Dog’s Tail extended from the European shore. Here, 480 years before the birth of Christ, a feat so astonishing as to seem the work of a god had been completed. Twin pontoon bridges, stretching from the Asian shore to the tip of the Dog’s Tail, had yoked the two continents together. That none but a monarch of infinite resources could possibly have tamed the currents of the sea in so imperious a manner went without saying. Xerxes, the King of Persia, ruled the largest empire that the world had ever seen. From the Aegean to the Hindu Kush, all the teeming hordes of Asia marched at his command. Going to war, he could summon forces that were said to drink entire rivers dry. Few had doubted, watching Xerxes cross the Hellespont, that the whole continent beyond would soon be his.
One year on, the bridges were gone. So too were Xerxes’ hopes of conquering Europe. Invading Greece, he had captured Athens; but the torching of the city was to prove the high point of his campaign. Defeat by sea and land had forced a Persian retreat. Xerxes himself had returned to Asia. On the Hellespont, where command of the strait had been entrusted to a governor named Artaÿctes, there was particular alarm. He knew himself, in the wake of the debacle in Greece, ominously exposed. Sure enough, late in the summer of 479, a squadron of Athenian ships came gliding up the Hellespont. When they moored beside the Dog’s Tail, Artaÿctes first barricaded himself inside the nearest stronghold; and then, after a lengthy siege, made a break for safety, accompanied by his son. Despite a successful escape in the dead of night, they did not get far. Hunted down, father and son were soon being hauled back in chains to the Dog’s Tail. There, on the furthermost tip of the promontory, Artaÿctes was fixed by his Athenian captors to a wooden board, and hung from it. ‘Then, before his very eyes, they stoned his son to death.’1 Artaÿctes himself was left to a much more lingering end.
How had his executioners succeeded in keeping him attached to the upright plank? In Athens, criminals convicted of particularly heinous crimes might be fastened to an instrument of torture called the apotumpanismos, a board furnished with shackles for securing the neck, wrists and ankles. There is no suggestion, however, that this particular device was employed by the killers of Artaÿctes. Instead, in the one account of his death we have, we are told that he was fastened to the board with passaloi: ‘pins’.* The executioners, forcing their victim onto his back, had evidently driven spikes through his living flesh, hammering them deep into the wood. Bone would have rubbed and scraped against iron as the board was then levered erect. Artaÿctes, watching as his son was left a pulped and broken mess, would also have been able to look up to the skies, and see the birds there wheeling, impatient to settle on him, to feast on his eyes. Death, when it finally claimed him, would have come as a release.
His captors, in making such a protracted spectacle of Artaÿctes’ suffering, were also making a statement. To execute him on the very spot where Xerxes had first stepped onto European soil broadcast an unmistakable message. To humiliate the Great King’s servant was to humiliate the Great King himself. The Greeks, who had long lived in the shadow of Persia, had good reason to regard it as the home of ingenious tortures. It was the Persians, they believed, who had first initiated the practice of exposing criminals on stakes or crosses, so that humiliation compounded the agonies of death. Certainly, the punishments inflicted on those who defied the royal dignity were as excruciating as they were minatory. Some forty years before Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, his father, Darius, had dealt with those who disputed his right to the throne by torturing them in the most public manner possible. Entire forests of stakes had been erected, on which his rivals, writhing and screaming as they felt the wood start to penetrate their innards, had been impaled. ‘I cut off both his nose and his ears, and put out one of his eyes, and kept him bound at my palace entrance, where all could see him.’ So Darius had boasted, detailing his treatment of one particularly noxious rebel. ‘Then I had him impaled.’2
Not every victim of the Great King’s anger, though, was necessarily suspended and exposed as he died. The Greeks reported in hushed tones of disgust one particularly revolting torture: the scaphe, or ‘trough’. The executioner, after placing his victim inside a boat or hollowed-out tree trunk, would then attach a second one over the top of it, so that only the wretched man’s head, hands and feet were left sticking out. Fed continuously with rich food, the criminal would have no choice but to lie in his own excrement; smeared all over with honey, he would find himself powerless to brush away the buzzing flies. ‘Worms and swarms of maggots were bred of the rottenness and the putrefaction of the excrement; and these, eating away at his body, bored into his intestines.’3 The victim would finally expire only once his flesh and organs had been almost entirely consumed. One man, so it was reliably reported, had endured the scaphe for seventeen days before finally breathing his last.
Yet cruel though such a torture might be, it was not wantonly so. The Greeks, when they charged the Great King with heedless displays of despotism, mistook for barbarous savagery the sense of responsibility that characterised his concern for justice. In truth, from the perspective of the Persian court, it was the Greeks who were the barbarians. Although the Great King was content to allow his subject peoples to uphold their own laws – provided, of course, that they were dutifully submissive – he never doubted the cosmic character of his own prerogatives and responsibilities. ‘By the favour of Ahura Mazda am I king,’ declared Darius. ‘Ahura Mazda bestowed kingship upon me.’ 4 Greatest of the gods, the Wise Lord, who had created both the heavens and the earth, and clad himself in the crystalline beauty of the skies above the snows and sands of Iran, he was the only patron whom Darius acknowledged. The justice the Great King gave to his subjects was not of mortal origin, but derived directly from the Lord of Light. ‘The man who is loyal, I reward; the man who is faithless, I punish. It is by the favour of Ahura Mazda that people respect the order I uphold.’5
This conviction, that the rule of a king might be as beneficent as a god’s, was not original to Darius. It reached back to the very beginning of things. To the west of Iran, watered by two mighty rivers, stretched the mudflats of the region known to the Greeks as Mesopotamia: ‘the land between the rivers’. Here, in cities older by far than the Persians, monarchs had long been in the habit of thanking the gods for their assistance in administering justice. A thousand years and more before Darius, a king named Hammurabi had declared himself charged with a divine mandate: ‘to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, and to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers, so that the strong should not harm the weak’.6 The influence of this claim, that a king best served his people by providing them with equity, was to prove an enduring one. Babylon, the city ruled by Hammurabi, regarded itself as the capital of the world. This was not mere wishful thinking. As wealthy as it was sophisticated, the metropolis had long attracted superlatives. Although its greatness had ebbed and flowed over the course of the centuries, the grandeur and antiquity of its traditions were grudgingly acknowledged across Mesopotamia. Even in Assyria, a land to the north of Babylon, and which, until the collapse of its ferociously militarist regime in 612 BC, had repeatedly launched punitive expeditions against the great city, its kings echoed the pretensions of Hammurabi. They too claimed a dazzling and intimidating status for their rulings. ‘The word of the King,’ so one of them ringingly declared, ‘is as perfect as that of the gods.’7