Was crucifixion rare?

[M. Demetrius]

True. But the Romans didn't invent all that much; they took what others had invented and improved upon it or simply assimilated it. Like the Borg, sorta.

But the process would have been about the same regardless of the century, I'd reckon.

[Gaius Decius Aquilius]

Nero was born on December 15, in 37. After the Great Fire in 64, a group of Praetorians decided to do something nice for the observance of Nero's birthday. They rounded up a group of Christians and undesirables and crucified the lot of them in front of the Golden House. They then went inside and brought Nero out to see what they had done for him. Nero thought this was a very nice gesture, and told the Praetorians that it was very thoughtful of them, and arranged for a full orgie in full view of the scene, so as to better enjoy it. The crucified Christians were moaning and some were singing, and soon most of them died. One kept on singing but in a low voice. It was getting late, but this guy just kept on weakly singing. Nero was getting impatient, but Nero's curiosity got the better of him and he went up close to hear what it was this person was singing and he caught the words: "Happy Birthday to you!"

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Ralph

[Phaichtos]

This is total nonsense.

Crucifixion was not rare at all, it was one of the most common punishments for slaves, non-citizen criminals and enemy combattants when there was an uprising.

According to a clearer summary I read, the author's argument is that there is lots of evidence of executing people by suspending them from different things, but very little of killing people by suspending them from a cross. We translate all these as "crucifixion" but I'd bet there are several Latin and Greek words for them. I'll have to read Summarson's paper, but it sounds interesting. One obvious question would be how the detail about the cross entered the story of Jesus' death.

This honestly wouldn't surprise me all that much. I think looking backwards in time, we tend to think of things being a lot more "standardized" than they would have been. If you were going to go to the trouble to horribly torture and execute 90,000 prisoners just to prove a point, what would be more important: that they were all hung on things that we would call crucifixes, or that they were all killed in a horrible manner?

That said, speaking of the wooden planks in question, I've read somewhere before that our modern image of a crucifix might even be flawed, and that the ancients would have used something that looked more like a Greek tau than a Roman lowercase "t", the reasoning being (among other things) that a "tau" would be easier to mass produce. I can't say I argue with that. The majority of times we read about crucifixion in the ancient world, it is indeed on a terribly massive scale.

[john m roberts]

An advantage of crucifixion from the Roman point of view was its visibility. A body raised on a cross is seen by the whole crowd, not just those in the front-row seats. And they remained visible for a long time. When Crassus crucified the survivors of the slave revolt along the Appian way, he was raising cautionary billboards along the superhighway of antiquity, guaranteed to be seen by the maximum number of slaves, who would surely spread the word. If the Romans understood one thing fully, it was showmanship. In the same way, the 18th century British admiralty suspended the bodies of executed pirates on promontories near harbors, so that sailors would see the consequence of piracy. Often in iron cages to keep the corpses whole and covered with tar, the bodies could stay visible for years.

[hoplite14gr]

Herodotus 9.120 "they nailed [Artayctes the Persian commander] to a plank of wood and suspended him from it, and then stoned his son to death before his eyes."

Nowhere does it say Artayctes died. The thesis is about Roman cucifixion during Tiberius' reign, not about Greek or Persian punishments in the 5th century BC.

M.VIB.M.

The Greek text say they suspended Artayctes to a pole. The punishment was known as "apotympanismos".
No suspension details have survived. Forget the cugeling the net talks about; cugeling was known as "skytalismos"

Kind regards