David Bromwich in the Huffington Post writing about US torture etc. mentions, inter alia:
Romans of the imperial age practiced torture against enemy combatants on an imposing scale of unrestraint. The gloves were really off. Any viewer of the final montage of Kubrick’s film of Spartacus will remember the captives of the slave rebellion nailed on their crosses like trees of that peculiar climate. The Christian religion was founded against the empire that did such things. It incorporated into its central symbol the purest revulsion from torture.
Okay … let’s distinguish between ‘torture for information’ and ‘torture as part of the execution process … do we have evidence of the Romans ‘torturing for information’ in a military context?
Haven’t seen any more coverage of this other than from the Ma’an News Agency:
Roman-era catacombs were unearthed in Bethlehem Saturday during construction in an empty lot beside Bethlehem University.
The small underground cave system opens facing north, and held four stone coffins with engravings on each, housed in two separate dug out burial areas.
Head of Antiquates department in Jericho Wael Hamamrah estimated the artifacts, complete with skeletal remains and some pottery are between 1,800 and 1,900 years old.
Construction workers preparing to lay pipe in the yard called Palestinian tourism and antiquates police when they went to investigate the sudden collapse of earth in an area they had been digging in that morning.
The underground hall leads to two rooms, one 70×28 centimeters and the other 40×24 centimeters,
Head engineer at the site Mohammad Al-Quraji said the crew was very surprised when the earth collapsed, and stunned when they peered into the underground tombs. They left the scene untouched until antiquities experts arrived, and helped remove debris as experts investigated the site.
A not-very-useful photo accompanies the original article …
Getting a smattering of coverage this past week was the announcement that the Cleveland Museum of Art would be returning 14 items (13 from the period within our purview) to Italy which were considered to be of dubious origin. In return, the CMoA will be receiving a loan of items of similar value. There don’t seem to be many photos of the items, but this red figure askos is one of my faves:
From the Cleveland Plain Dealer
An excerpt from the coverage in the Plain Dealer:
Italian authorities used evidence collected in a police raid in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1995, which exposed a network of “tombaroli,” or tomb robbers, who passed the works to middlemen who sold them to museums.
Among the most significant objects being returned to Italy from Cleveland is a fourth-century B.C. Apulian red-figured volute krater — a large wine vessel — by the Dorias painter, which stands roughly 4 feet high.
Other works include Etruscan silver bracelets; a Neolithic bronze warrior from Sardinia; an Attic rhyton, or drinking vessel, in the shape of a mule; and a large, Corinthian-column krater.
Rub said the condition of the objects was inspected both by Italian and museum officials Tuesday before they were crated and sealed for transfer today.
The museum turned down requests from The Plain Dealer to observe and photograph the packing of the artworks, in part out of concern for security and in part because museum views the transfer as less important than the agreement reached with Italy last fall.
“I look upon this as a kind of mechanical thing,” Rub said. “The big news for me was the signing of the agreement.”
Of equal (or perhaps greater) interest is a little excerpt tucked into a sidebar photo:
The Cleveland Museum ofArt and Italy have created a joint committee to examine the museum’s “Victory with Cornucopia (Chariot Attachment),” purchased in 1984, plus a large bronze statue of Apollo Sauroktonos, or “Lizard Slayer,” to determine whether the works were looted in violation of modern laws.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about that.
As always in such things, David Gill’s blogposts should be consulted:
rogueclassicism 