Nov 23rd, 2020

Author: donich_admin

Poena cullei

This is what in Roman times they used to do to people who killed their parents. According to Cicero… He doesn’t mention the animals sewn into the sack but apparently it was generally a dog, snake, monkey, and a chicken or rooster,

“They therefore stipulated that parricides should be sewn up in a sack while still alive and thrown into a river. What remarkable wisdom they showed, gentlemen! Do they not seem to have cut the parricide off and separated him from the whole realm of nature, depriving him at a stroke of sky, sun, water and earth – and thus ensuring that he who had killed the man who gave him life should himself be denied the elements from which, it is said, all life derives? They did not want his body to be exposed to wild animals, in case the animals should turn more savage after coming into contact with such a monstrosity. Nor did they want to throw him naked into a river, for fear that his body, carried down to the sea, might pollute that very element by which all other defilements are thought to be purified. In short, there is nothing so cheap, or so commonly available that they allowed parricides to share in it. For what is so free as air to the living, earth to the dead, the sea to those tossed by the waves, or the land to those cast to the shores? Yet these men live, while they can, without being able to draw breath from the open air; they die without earth touching their bones; they are tossed by the waves without ever being cleansed; and in the end they are cast ashore without being granted, even on the rocks, a resting-place in death”

I wonder whether you could justify doing that to people who close your road over and over again. I dare say you could put them in a sack with a pine marten, a raven and a badger and drop them in Loch Goil. I’d never do this because I would be too sorry for the creatures that died too.