13. Scaphismus would see you marinade in your own dung and be eaten alive by vermin
Scaphismus, also known as The Boats, was an ancient Persian technique of execution that involved a slow, painful, and humiliating death. The 12th-century Byzantine Chronicler, Joannes Zonaras, describes the execution doled out to the soldier Mithridates for murdering King Cyrus by the latter’s mother in 401 BC. ‘Two boats are joined together one on top of the other, with holes cut in them in such a way that the victim’s head, hands, and feet only are left outside. Within these boats the man to be punished is placed lying on his back, and the boats then nailed together with bolts.
‘Next, they pour a mixture of milk and honey into the wretched man’s mouth, till he is filled to the point of nausea, smearing his face, feet, and arms with the same mixture, and so leave him exposed to the sun… flies, wasps, and bees, attracted by the sweetness… miserably torment and sting the wretched man. Moreover, his belly, distended as it is with milk and honey, throws off liquid excrements [breeding] swarms of worms… Thus the victim lying in the boats, his flesh rotting away in his own filth and devoured by worms, dies a lingering and horrible death’.
