Later Roman Military Punishments

[Nathan Ross]

I think that we do have to differentiate between torture and what today we might consider to be harsh and cruel punishment.

I think you're right. Ulpian (Digest 47.10.15.21) says "By torture we should understand torment and corporeal suffering and pain employed to extract the truth." So it was apparently a procedure in interrogation - the quaestio - and not punishment per se from which soldiers and other honestiores were immune.

This is despite the fact that Callistratus (48.19.7) specifically mentions 'castigation with rods' as a method of torture. Seems it's all about the context!

So when Diocletian and Maximian (Code 9.41.8) write "We do not permit soldiers to be subjected to torture", they are not referring to the kind of corporal punishment traditionally employed in the army for military offences.

But did the soldiers often think their immunities went further than this? In the AD220s there were military uprisings by the troops in Pannonia and the praetorians in Rome against their commanders - the historian Cassius Dio and the jurist Ulpian respectively. In both cases it seems the complaint was that these men were trying to reimpose old-style discipline of some sort ("I ruled them with a firm hand", as Dio put it) - perhaps in this case the post-Severan soldiery thought they should indeed be immune from certain types of physical punishment, and mutinied when their commanders thought otherwise?

such punishment worse than death for men... the shame of those who commenced the flight... promising to prove worthy of the Roman name.

...they then were publicly humiliated by being chained, dressed in female attire and paraded around town... beaten to death... brutally tortured and finally executed.

Honour and shame were certainly important to the Romans, but I wonder how much of the effectiveness of these kind of 'shaming' punishments was the threat of being reduced to a humilioris status, and being left vulnerable to any kind of torture or execution, or even being sold as a slave?

some had their right hands cut off, others were burned alive.

There does seem to have been a rapid escalation in the severity of punishments generally during the fourth century. I've noticed before that even senators were being burned alive for 'adultery and sorcery' in Rome by the end of the century!