38. The Romans Super Frowned Upon Kids Killing Their Dads
Considering the extraordinary powers – we might call them excessive nowadays – that Roman fathers exercised over their offspring, it is perhaps unsurprising that, from time to time, some kids snapped and did in the patriarchs. It is also unsurprising that, ancient Rome is as pure a distillation of patriarchy as ever existed, that patriarchy took a particularly dim view of the crime of murdering a patriarch. Romans – or at least Roman law – were particularly horrified and revolted by patricide, or the killing of one’s father. So they expressed their abhorrence with a particularly inventive punishment: poena cullei, or the “Punishment of the Sack“.
Those convicted of patricide were first severely beaten with blood-colored rods, while their heads were covered in a bag made of a wolf’s hide. Then the patricide was sewn into the poena cullei, a sack made of ox hide, together with an assortment of live animals including a snake, a rooster, a monkey, and a dog. The sack was then beaten to rile up the animals and get them to bite and tear at the patricide. It was then put on a cart driven by black oxen, to a river or the sea, where the sack and its occupants were thrown into the water.
