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The Death Row Baseball Team and Other Odd Episodes in History

Khalid Elhassan May 18, 2020 34 min

Death Row All Stars: A Story of Baseball, Corruption, and Murder - State Penitentiary — Alston's All Stars. Daily Mail

16. The Punishment of the Sack

Occupants of the sack in the poena cullei. Pintrest

Occasionally, some ancient Roman kids snapped and killed their patriarch. Unsurprisingly, what with ancient Rome being as pure a distillation of patriarchy as ever existed, it took a dim view of murdering a patriarch. Roman law was 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 dog, a snake, a rooster, and a monkey. 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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.