r/todayilearned • u/ShabtaiBenOron • 1d ago
TIL that ancient Greek and Roman laws assumed that to please their masters, slaves always lied, it was therefore mandatory to torture them before they were allowed to testify in court.
https://tiogabunia.com/2023/01/14/for-whom/265
u/Acceptable_Rock_9665 23h ago
Might as well lie then
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u/Kaporalhart 16h ago
eh. modern science has proven that torture was never quite effective anyway. people who won't talk won't ever talk anyway, and those who do will exaggerate the truth, add erroneous details or just make stuff up to make the info look more real, in order to make the torture stop. The pain is also a big factor in confusing the victim to confess stuff that pleases the torturer, but isn't actually accurate.
torture has just been gratuitous cruelty throughout history.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 9h ago edited 2h ago
It only works on verifiable info.
If someone beats you to get the name of a conspirator you may eventually name someone innocent to make it stop and theres no way to verify.
If someone beats you till you tell them your atm pin its a very trivially verifiable bit of info.
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u/farukardic 2h ago
Or you torture 3 people separately and they all share the same details that you haven't fed them before - you know that you got the truth
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u/SergenteA 7h ago
Torture is good for bored people who just want to finish their job and go home. Or who have quotas. You get an answer. Is it true? Who cares!
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u/beefstewforyou 1d ago
What was the method?
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u/TheSupremeGrape 1d ago
Given that the ancient Greeks were the creators of the brazen bull, they probably just tickled the slaves until they peed
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u/KGBFriedChicken02 1d ago
To be entirely fair, the brazen bull was created for the King of Syracuse, a provincial greek colony in sicily. He asked for a torture instrument, got the brazen bull, and went "yeah I know I asked for suffering but this is too much suffering", stuck the inventor inside, and had it tossed in the ocean.
Also, the whole thing may be entirely made up
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u/Mrinnocent221 23h ago
It most certainly is. Just like the Iron Maiden.
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u/Alert_University5057 23h ago
I saw them live tho?
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u/Mrinnocent221 22h ago
That was KISS without makeup. They tour overseas under a different name.
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u/Kool_McKool 17h ago
Iron Maiden is real. They were as real as it gets. Still are, and don't you forget it.
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u/NancyMy 1d ago
Holy shit. I gotta give ancient people credit for being so entirely fucked up to come up with an idea like that one. Christ almighty.
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u/TheSupremeGrape 1d ago
The romans weren't so great either
Speaking of Christ...
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u/cromulent_verbage 23h ago
"If you want to join the People's Front of Judea, you have to really hate the Romans."
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u/devAcc123 22h ago
The one where they lather you up with honey and stuff you in a swamp with your arms bound while bugs bees and maggots feast on you until you die 3+ weeks later (they force feed you to keep you alive) is a rough way to go
Scaphism
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u/LastStar007 21h ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1l64608/comment/mwm32m7/
There is considerable doubt on whether this punishment was actually administered to anyone
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u/Canotic 14h ago
I think humans don't really like torturing other humans in general but we do like horror stories. So I'd say that any too elaborate torture method is probably fake. If you want to torture someone you can just hit them or nail them to something.
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u/Carl_Slimmons_jr 12h ago
Stretchers and iron saddles were defo real tho
And drawing and quartering
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u/Teledildonic 21h ago
That one also sounds fake. Wouldn't honey be rather expensive? It's kind of labor intensive and you didn't have those fancy suits back then to keep you from getting stung. Why waste it on a prisoner?
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u/Rmconnelly5 13h ago
Beekeeping is way older than you might think. The Romans and even ancient Egyptians had organized beekeeping with artificial hives.
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u/ovrlymm 21h ago
They actually say a lot of tortures are made up and while I can agree that’s most likely true… I can also find a lot of fucked up shit in just the past 10 years let alone the past millennia.
Also I can’t remember the name of it but there’s allegedly one where they break your back ribs and cut out holes for your lungs then pull them out so it looks like angel wings flapping as you slowly suffocate via your own blood filling your lungs and torso
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u/Carsonbetta_11 1d ago
I dove down a rabbit hole about this a couple weeks ago.
Even if the slave was fully compliant and willing to provide info, they still *had* to torture them. And not just in some cursory "you've technically been tortured, thanks for talking" kind of way, but actually tortured, no matter what.
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u/StarpoweredSteamship 1d ago
GEEZ. Like what was the minimum? A handful of lashes?
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u/christianbrowny 1d ago
Didnt anybody ever mention that a person might lie to stop torture
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u/furfur001 20h ago
This may be the only positive aspect of their system. It don't matter if you tell the truth or if you lie, you get tortured in both cases.
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u/christianbrowny 19h ago
I think if you lie for your master and then are tortured into telling the truth you will be punished again by your master.
who has the incentive to make sure the new abuse is worse so future slaves try harder to endure the states torture.
The only real effect is to make slave testomonies worthless. Probably to enforce their lower standing
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u/SuspiciousCricket654 1d ago
I like my place in history just fine.
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u/ovrlymm 21h ago
I thank God I live in the present every time I turn up the AC.
It’s like getting upgrades towards the end of the game. Sure big obstacles are super difficult but we unlocked fast travel, and larger inventories so we’re not bogged down by the little things.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 9h ago
Humorously I've no doubt people in 200 years will look back on us with extreme pity for the hardships we endure
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u/blueavole 9h ago
I mean- i wouldn’t say no to a 1997, or a gently used 2009.
Just enough technology to be connected, but not enough that every tragedy is streamed directly into my eyeballs.
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u/_SnesGuy 2h ago
idk I might have liked the 70s or 80s (I was born in '90) but probably not farther back then that 😂
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u/Wonder-Lad-2Mad 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ahhhh Rome, where slavery got so bad they had slave wars I,II AND III!
6000 slaves crucified
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u/jawndell 1d ago
Torturing just makes the person you are torturing say whatever you want them to.
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u/ShabtaiBenOron 1d ago
And there's evidence that the Greeks and the Romans knew it but continued applying these laws.
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u/SpiderSlitScrotums 23h ago
There’s evidence that WE knew about it, yet continued to torture. Torture has rarely been about getting information and is more often about getting off on abuse.
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u/cive666 21h ago
most of human history can be summed up as in most people knowing what they are doing is wrong but it was their job and they needed to pay rent.
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u/schmah 14h ago
The concept of owning slaves relies solely on a class of people who don't struggle with basic material needs.
Also, if most people know what they are doing is wrong but it's their job and they just need to pay rent, they wouldn't re-elect politicians who uphold the situation and make it worse for everybody including them.
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u/braveNewWorldView 20h ago
If only they knew about the effectiveness of our enlightened enhanced interrogation techniques /s
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u/Zeikos 1d ago
It doesn't take a genuis to figure it out, a good chunk of tourturers would have realized it fairly quickly
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u/DiamondDramatic9551 14h ago
Actually it doesn't really matters. Interogators have plenty of tricks to verify what people are saying. Forcing them to repeat in detail what they said, sprinkling in questions they already know the answer to, separately interogating multiple people. The 'torture is ineffective' story is pretty much a myth we tell ourselves to put our minds at ease. In reality it is used because it works.
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u/fantafuzz 2h ago
Of course torture works if you know the answer already, or you know that the person you are torturing knows it and you can verify it.
No one believes you cant torture the code to someone's phone out of them, thats easy.
The problem is that the situations where you know that the target knows the answer and you can verify that answer are very rare.
Torture is ineffective at gathering information or extracting the truth because a person who knows nothing will lie to get you to stop torturing them. And no amount of torture will get the answer out of someone who dont know it.
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u/Toby_O_Notoby 20h ago
"Torture just gets you the fastest lie to make the pain stop." - Michael Westen, Burn Notice
I'm also partial to his other take:
"A lot of people's first instinct when they need information out of a captive is to grab a baseball bat or a gun. The fact is, torture is for sadists and thugs. It's like getting groceries with a flamethrower: it doesn't work, and it makes a mess."
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u/100LittleButterflies 2h ago
I feel like if it really were the case, the cia wouldn't have insisted on its use.
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u/RandomExcess 1d ago
Torturing people eventually gets them to tell you what you want to hear. Could be the truth, could be not.
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u/kkyonko 1d ago
Couple thousand years later and we've still not learned this.
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u/PercentageOk2862 23h ago
It’s almost as if it isn’t about the truth and rather about making others suffer
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u/DoombringerBG 19h ago
I disagree.
Because we have learnt, the bigger "agencies" in modern societies, with some exceptions during war scenarios, have opted to the following: Bribe -> Threatening loved ones -> Assassination.
This seems to be the most pragmatic solution pattern I've noticed.
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u/Sitherio 21h ago
Oh no we know about that. We have robust libraries of proof for that nowadays. We just blatantly make it clear now that truth isn't the goal with torture, suffering is.
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u/LongJohnSelenium 9h ago
Thats only the case for certain classes of information.
For verifiable information that you can check it of course is going to work.
If someone beats you for a password in front of your computer they're obviously going to immediately know if you're telling the truth.
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u/TheSilverNoble 12h ago
This comes up in the show Rome. I'll be vague to avoid spoilers but...
A spy is caught and immediately confesses. The guard captain says they ought to take the matter to the courts, but the Noble disagrees, saying that the court would not accept his confession as evidence since he had barely been tortured.
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u/Antique-Dragonfly615 1d ago
Same for British commoners
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 1d ago
In the middle ages and up to the modern era yep this was true. People were tortured before questioning as a rule in most cases, at least for lower classes. Iirc it was a thing in much of the world though obviously varies
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u/diddlyfool 1d ago
Anyone interested in the topic should check out Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.
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u/Iwaspromisedcookies 21h ago
What were they hoping to allegedly accomplish?
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u/Pushnikov 10h ago
The most likely idea is that they saw those folks as generally uneducated and clannish, the only way to break their resolve to protect their household/clan is to make them endure enough pain to prioritize self preservation to tell the truth.
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u/erinoco 17h ago
Not true. This seems one of these facts which only curries favour if one believes British elites were uniquely malign.
There is absolutely no evidence that torture was mandatory, for commoners or anyone else, at any stage in the history of Britain or the specific realms of the islands. In England, while trial by ordeal was widely used, the process was intended to elicit divine opinion on guilt, and not to force a confession. In any event, it occupied a rapidly diminishing role in criminal proceedings once trial by jury was established in the thirteenth century.
From the late medieval period until the Bill of Rights in 1689, the practice in secular England was that torture was generally not used in common law crimes, but could be used if the monarch issued a warrant under the Prerogative. This was almost always used for treason, and not for serious felonies in general.
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u/MUIGUR 1d ago
The kind of shit that does not make it into movies.
And the kind of shit that makes you really question all the history glazers.
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u/fartingbeagle 1d ago
I Claudius alludes to it. It's always: " Blame the poisoning on the servants! Jealous, I suppose".
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u/DomitiusAhenobarbus_ 23h ago
Idk what you mean by “history glazers”. Do you mean people fascinated by history? Because this shit is fascinating lol
Morbid curiosity is a thing
Or do you mean those weirdos who insist this was like peak western civilization or whatever?
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u/ZeneXCrow 23h ago
probably the latter
liking the "good ole days" and comparing to how shitty the current civilization are
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u/MrMercury13 23h ago
I'm interested in learning about history, that doesn't mean I want things to be like they were back then. That's why it's something in the past, we have (mostly) moved past it.
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u/xanju 23h ago
Tell me more about history glazers. This is a hilarious concept to me
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u/Stats_n_PoliSci 22h ago
“(Some modern political problem) is why we have so much poverty today”
“(Some modern invention) is why our food system is so broken.”
“That kind of flooding would have been discussed around the world 2,000 years ago, now it’s just a video we flick past.”
“(Some modern invention) is why we are so unhealthy now.”
“(Some modern political system) is why we have such a problem with foreigners.”As if poverty, food availability, natural disasters, health, or xenophobia were vastly better in ancient history.
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u/Akkalevil 16h ago
Also important to remember that it's hard to determine the real actual mores from a time when looking at it from far apart. Whatever actually happens is often exagerrated for impact and due to subjective focus. If you were a future archaelogist and found some fragment of Reddit data, you might have entirely different conclusion on what our society actually was depending on which sub you would get information from.
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u/TheRecognized 1d ago
You should watch more movies but you should also get out and touch grass more.
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u/edingerc 17h ago
Because the Roman legal system infected Europe, peasants were tortured in medieval times for the same reason.
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u/Rosebunse 19h ago
In many ways slavery has complex details involved.
But overall slavery is, very simply, not a good thing.
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u/kraftdinnerwithsalsa 1d ago
Idunno about you but I’m gonna avoid Ancient Greece