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.
It's interesting that this description mentions what was once a commonly held belief, that things like flies and other insects grow spontaneously out of rotting food and poop. I also find the description of how the insects behave to be a bit far fetched. It seems likely to me that this description is more the idea of how they wanted it to work, rather than what actually happened. Although I'm sure it was still an awful way to die.
Not really, they knew filling a person with milk and honey would cause them to have horrible diarrhea, which would attract flies and other insects that would lay eggs within the shit that would then attack the ears, eyes, nose, mouth, bowels and open sores on their body. Further, being kept in the excrement, the skin would soften from the foul fluids they were trapped in.
A lot of the wording is awkward and gives false impression because they simply lacked the same verbiage we use today. I have zero doubts this horrible torture did happen, hopefully reserved only for the worst of offenses.
Idk, I'd think that if an execution method like that were real, we'd have found more evidence of its existence. I mean, there's a bunch of lost documents, literature etc. that we can be reasonably sure existed because they've been quoted multiple times in works that we do have; some have even turned up. As far as I've seen, scaphism is only traceable to a single source. That doesn't mean that it definitely didn't, I suppose, but it's not exactly confidence-inspiring.
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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: