Quote:Sejanus was thrown from here.
Wasn't he thrown down the Gemonian Steps?
Actually, I was wondering a while ago whether the Tarpeian Rock and the Gemonian Steps were more or less the same place... The Tarpeian is usually assumed to be the south-west point of the Capitoline (as shown on
this plan from Platner & Ashby) - but the ancient sources don't actually say where it was. There are a couple of notes in Dionysius that the rock 'overlooked the Forum' - but the assumed location doesn't, really; you'd have to be standing on top of a basilica to see it very clearly, I'd say...
The Gemonian steps, on the other hand, are usually assumed to climb up to the Arx from behind the Carcer - and so very much did overlook the Forum. The Steps come into vogue as a place of execution (or display of bodies - criminals were first strangled, I believe) around the same time that the Rock falls out of use. If we suppose instead that the Rock was the southern cliff of the Arx, then the Gemonian steps would have scaled the side of it - a body thrown down the steps would therefore end up in the traditional place at the foot of the Rock, there to be mauled by dogs, exposed to the insults of the rude populace, etc.
I also wondered how people might have been killed at the Tarpeian - died from the fall, we would assume. But even at the height of the current exposed summit, the fall would not be certainly fatal. And throwing a live - and presumably desperate and struggling - person from a high rock would be rather difficult, I'd think. Might the malefactor have been strangled on top of the rock, and then the corpse flung down? This was the routine later on the Gemonian steps, and secret strangulation was the method in the Carcer. The ignominy would therefore lie in the public nature of the death, rather than the spectacular fall... :eek: