It was esteemed an ignoble death, and must have been anguish to a sensitive mind; the cruel nails rending the flesh, barely supporting the weight of the writhing body, must have been severe, while the dreadful thirst of the fevered victim must have been a culminating horror.
The State criminals sometimes came floating over the Tarpeian rock, and smashed into pulp below.
This has been emulated by Theodore of Abyssinia, at his mountain fastness of Magdala, and by Tippoo Sahib at the Droorg, one of the peaks of the Neilgherry mountains in Southern India, where is a convenient precipice over 1000 feet clear of sheer natural wall.
The Roman taste for the joys of the circus stimulated their imagination to devise novel torment, and criminals or Christians, or simply prisoners of war, were exposed to combat wild beasts, or each other, to “grace a Roman holiday.”
They sometimes, however, executed distinguished folks in polite fashion, merely sending a polite message for them to “stand not on the order of their going, but go” out of the world at their earliest convenience.
A good deal of bleeding to death in warm baths and sudden insertion of the “bare bodkin” resulted.
The chivalric Japanese custom of harikari is a similar concession to the conventionalities of society, and is also eminently useful as a duelling agent necessitating the absolute retirement of both disturbers of the peace and their friends’ serenity.
It is hardly necessary to dilate on the ceremonious surroundings of these interesting occasions, when the accomplished gentleman who has offended the laws, or has been offended by a friend, calls his relatives and acquaintances together and, supported by a second, a veteran in the punctilio of the local code of honour, makes his little speech, drinks his farewell toast, and then proceeds to carve himself in the most approved style, proudly feeling as he dies that he has done his duty to his country, his family, and the world at large, and that the gentleman he had the difficulty with cannot survive him.
The Druids, like the Huns, the Aztecs, and the Ashantees and Dahomeyans in the present day, were rather sanguinary.
Funerals were fittingly honoured by the sacrifice of a proportionate number of slaves and criminals, to form a retinue for the worthy departed in the world of spirits. The Druids usually burned a few hundreds in a great wicker image of the human figure.