French Literature Reviews - 2026

Torturing in Antiquity: Torture, Penalties, and Punishments in Greece and Rome
History, Politics and Society

Torturing in Antiquity: Torture, Penalties, and Punishments in Greece and Rome
Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle
Sami Ben Hadj Yahia, Edouard Durand, Florence Fitte-Vallée

Amputating, beating, beheading, boiling, stoning, sawing: the punishments inflicted in Antiquity are sometimes (grimly) commonplace, yet the Greeks and Romans also proved to be remarkably inventive. Phalaris, tyrant of Sicily, roasted his victims inside a bronze bull that transformed their agonizing screams into desperate bellowing; the Roman Vedius Pollio fed clumsy slaves to the lampreys in his fishpond. As for adulterers—punished with a horseradish root, a fish, or paraded on a donkey—they fell victim to the fertile imagination of the Ancients. Divine punishments were even more extraordinary: Marsyas was flayed alive by Apollo, and Erysichthon, struck with an insatiable hunger, was reduced to devouring his own limbs.

This book offers a guided tour through this miniature museum of horrors via more than a hundred translated texts, while also exploring, behind the gruesome anecdotes, the underlying mechanisms that explain the severity of such repression: in short, why punish?

The study of ancient penal practices offers insight into how societies in Greece and Rome maintained social order through public spectacle and severe retribution. Writers and historians examining classical antiquity often encounter a wide array of judicial penalties, ranging from standard corporal punishments to elaborate forms of public execution. These mechanisms reflect broader cultural attitudes toward authority, deviance, and the limits of human endurance within ancient Mediterranean civilizations.

Readers interested in the history of legal punishment, classical civilization, and ancient social practices may find this work relevant.