Part 1: Ancient Practice of the Carthaginians
The practice of crucifixion is thought to have originated with the Carthaginians. The first documented crucifixion was that of Torag, king of a neighboring north African kingdom conquered c. 480 B.C. According to the anonymous “Annals of Carthage,” Torag had been a Carthaginian ally, but had turned against them. Probably for his treachery, more than for his resistance to Carthaginian rule, Torag’s entire family was executed:
“Torag he [Sulo, a Carthaginian general] crucified, then executed his family before the cross as the king looked on. His four sons he emasculated before hanging them. His wife and five daughters he impaled in the most shameful way. His brothers, uncles, and cousins he killed with the sword. All of this was Torag made to witness from his cross.”
Of course this episode from the Annals does not describe the crucifixion, but assumes the reader knows what it is, so it seems the practice predates Torag, assuming the entry was written close to the time.
We can learn the most about Carthaginian crucifixion from the Macedonian adventurer known to posterity as Nicholas the Scholar, who spent between 10 and 20 years at the Carthaginian court in the late 2nd century B.C., serving as court historian, sometimes soldier, and occasionally inventor. Nicholas owed his position to and kept his life at the pleasure of his Carthaginian hosts, so his accounts of Carthaginian exploits sometimes border on hagiography and cannot necessarily be relied upon in all cases. But when he speaks of the horrors of crucifixion, he leaves nothing unsaid. Indeed, Nicholas’ unflinching descriptions of the crucifixions he witnessed shed some light upon the general attitude of Carthaginians toward the practice; they apparently were not ashamed of their deeds.
Nicholas writes:
“Carthage has devised a most unmerciful attitude toward cowardice and failure among her warriors. Any soldier found to be a coward, or any general who fails the mission entrusted to him, is put to death. The method is terrible. In the presence of all his peers and subordinates, the unfortunate man is stripped of his robes and made to march in this naked condition up and down the ranks of the army. This being completed, he is flogged until his blood runs down his back. Following this, and still in the presence of the army, he is nailed to a cross, with great spikes through his arms and legs, so that his arms are outspread and he cannot move. This cross is then hoisted up so that the man is made to hang from it, and all the men watch him die.”
This is the most complete ancient description of crucifixion in any time or place. There are many other mentions of Carthaginian crucifixion, but most are mere mentions, and shed little light on the details of the practice.
The most enlightening are two further mentions by Nicholas. In the first, he lands on an unnamed island in the Mediterranean, which has recently been ravaged by pirates. “[The pirates] had not only taken everything of value and raped the women, but had crucified the whole village. Many of the people being still alive, we spent much of the day taking them down from the crosses. But the men complained of the work, as the villagers would die anyway.”
It is impossible to know how literally to take Nicholas’ claim that the pirates had crucified “the whole village,” but it is the first reference to a mass crucifixion, and the first to imply that both sexes were put to death in this way. (It seems unlikely that the phrase refers only to men. Nicholas has just finished referring to the women separately in the same sentence.) It also gives us some idea of how long victims of crucifixion might survive on their crosses. Depending on how scholars interpret Nicholas’ timeline in this section, he arrived on the island either two or three days after the pirates had left.
Later, Nicholas mentions that he was surprised upon entering Carthage after a campaign, to see two women hanging on crosses beside the road: “There hung two women among several men. I was surprised to see that these women should suffer so. For even being criminals, and deserving of their deaths, the Greeks would not expose a female in such an indecent way.”