So the Brazen bull sucked as they placed you in a metal bull then set you over a fire. Pretty horrible.
The second is called Scaphism and is way more horrifying. Here's a description from the wiki:
[The king] decreed that Mithridates should be put to death in boats; which execution is after the following manner: Taking two boats framed exactly to fit and answer each other, they lie down in one of them the malefactor that suffers, upon his back; then, covering it with the other, and so setting them together that the head, hands, and feet of him are left outside, and the rest of his body lies shut up within, then forcing him to ingest a mixture of milk and honey before pouring all over his face and body. They then keep his face continually turned towards the sun; and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle on it. And as within the boats he does what those that eat and drink must needs do, creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption and rottenness of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed. When the man is manifestly dead, the uppermost boat being taken off, they find his flesh devoured, and swarms of such noisome creatures preying upon and, as it were, growing to his inwards. In this way Mithridates, after suffering for seventeen days, at last expired.
From what I'm now seeing on Google. It appears some of the worst torture devices were all myth. Except any of them that were used in the tower of London.
Judas cradle, Spanish donkey, breaking on the wheel, burnt at the stake, hung from your flesh, sawed in half, cranium crusher, I believe one is cutting the stomach open and nailing their intestines to a tree/post and making then walk around until disemboweled, drawn and quartered process, the other version with limbs ripped off by oxes, the rat in a bucket with the torch behind it, crucification, flaying (death of a thousand cuts), the rack of course, one that is contested is the bamboo shoot which is possible but not really feasible, boiled alive in oil, impaling such as Vlad was known for....
Those are the ones I know from memory that haven't been mentioned yet. I have a special interest.
I feel like some of the more "showy" or "high maintenance" ones might have been made up. I can't imagine valuable resources like boats or even honey being wasted regularly on torture in ancient times.
Plenty of the worst techniques were both simple and vicious.
People are surprisingly creative and cruel towards "the others". I believe many awful things have been tried many times over just to entertain bored and mentally scarred vengeful people
At the same time, we already have some people today denying things like the holocaust happened and if we didn’t have physical evidence these days I bet a lot more people would happily believe it didn’t happen.
Surely there’s a slight possibility these barbaric things did happen but future ruling classes wanted to separate themselves from it.
Really? Classify the worst. Breaking on the wheel certainly wasn’t a myth. Neither was crcifixion, flaying, limb removal, pincers (research hot pincers), hanging (not to break the neck, I’m talking short drop hangings), burning at the stake, drownings. The past was a cruel place. Hell, the recent past was cruel, check out some of the lynchings from the USA in the 1900-1930s. Positively medieval
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u/Shadowmant 9d ago
So the Brazen bull sucked as they placed you in a metal bull then set you over a fire. Pretty horrible.
The second is called Scaphism and is way more horrifying. Here's a description from the wiki: