Capital Punishment in Early Rome

The crucifixion of Christ made the fact of capital punishment one of the most familiar features of the Roman world order. Millions of people know nothing of the Romans save that they put to death the central figure of their religion. The tradition of the Christian martyrs added many more victims to traditional memory, and other horrifying forms of execution. In modern times, popular literature has added to the theme, with lurid tales of the condemned sent to fight men or beasts in the Arena. Historical movies made the bloodthirstiness of Roman authorities a standard image, as in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, with its widescreen Technicolor vision of the six thousand rebel slaves put to death when their revolt failed.

The Roman imposition of capital punishment, commonly portrayed as cruel and arbitrary, has thus become a major part of our standard popular image of Rome. In ironic counter

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eter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 158. his life was forfeit should he ever return. (A similar practice was followed in ancient Athens; thus, Socrates was offered a quasilegal "escape" from his death sentence, but rejected it.) Eventually, this informal alternative to the death penalty was established in law as a form of capital punishment, as were several other harsh (but not fatal) penalties. Thus, according to the Institutes, Some public prosecutions are capital, some are not. We term capital those which involve the extreme punishment of the law [i.e., death], or the interdiction from fire and water, or deportation, or [slavery in] the mines. Those which carry with them infamy and a pecuniary penalty are public, but not capital.14 Thus, the Romans at this time recognized only two classes of criminal penalties, capital punishment  including exile or condemnation to slavery in the mines as well as death  and those which involved mere "infamy" and a money fine. The punishment for serious offenses most familiar to us, "doing time" in prison, was generally unknown to Roman law. Prisons were use
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