A recent Facebook post piqued my interest, and I was quick to look up the history behind it. This was the term used for punishments or penalties under Roman law, probably a few thousand years ago. Wiki says it could be from ca. 100 BC—whatever that means. Well, my concern isn’t the time frame, it’s the practice of punishment that was startling. People or subjects caught for murdering their own father were put in a leather sack along with a few other animals and thrown into the water. What a terrible way to die now! As much as I try not to picture that in my mind, the image from Wiki and Facebook rests in my head and simply won’t go. I’m caught between feeling sad, not just for the person himself but for the animals who accompany him too.
What troubles me the most now is: what did the poor animals do now to be thrown alive with the person in water? He committed the crime, so why haul in the other creatures now? Supposedly, there were five animals chosen: a snake, a monkey, a chicken, or a rooster, and the last animal mentioned is upsetting: a dog. Why would you throw the poor thing in there now?
Now I harden myself and picture the scene this time. Humans, animals, birds, and a serpent are all in one sack. Who’d be biting, screaming, or barking inside? Probably everyone inside. What a gross thing, isn’t it? My mind also starts to imagine if any of them would have managed to escape from the sack. When being thrown into the water with the person strapped in wooden shoes and being beaten up badly before, would he have stood a chance? Could one of the animals have managed to cut open the sack? And if, by some mere luck, the sack opened up, my guess would be that the snake could have crawled out and swam away if it had any life left. I can’t think of the rest making it out even half alive, and even if they did wonder what was in the water now,.
The whole thing seems like such a bad idea to me. For the murder of one parent, there’s a death to five other lives; it’s a bigger loss in totality. Thank God we live in better days now; at least I think we are foregoing all the bad that could be happening still and going unreported.
If this topic intrigues you like it did me, check out the link below.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poena_cullei
No comments:
Post a Comment