Tortures and humiliations on Roman coins

[Bill Perry]

Carthage taught Rome early on that to let an enemy off with terms was to fight them again and again. Though the salting of the earth part was myth I believe. Raze the enemies cities? Yes - kill the population? Yes - destroy the farmland for long term - nada. They'd as soon destroy the gold and valuables they looted. This was an agricultural society and land/grain/food was like gold. They only destroy that kind of thing if they can't keep it. And after the punic wars, Carthage - they kept.

The one thing you knew after the early republic - was if the Romans went after you - they never ever stopped. This broke down a bit in the mid-latter empire where holding your own became more of there thing.

[Pscipio]

Arrogance is one of the most common reasons for military problems or defeats. I always liked the tale about Pyrrhos, who is said to have thought he was fighting uncivilized barbarians - until he saw a roman field camp for the first time.

Lars

[slokind]

No sooner were boots invented than Eannatum's army is trampling the bodies of the enemy and showing vultures carrying off heads by the ears in their beaks (large stele in the Louvre, Lagash, 26th century BCE) or wheels invented before chariots are riding roughshod over them ("standard" from Ur, British Museum, also Early Dynastic III, 26th century BCE).  Neither of these insulting acts is very practical (the chariots surely would tip over, even as slow as they were).  Probably the Greco-Roman bully insults also are just that, too.  Not pretty.  Not edifying.   Pat L.

[Numerianus]

I add one more illustration, of Theodosius with  the leg on a captive.

By the way, It is not so obvious  who was soldiers of the Valens army.
Probably, also Goths...  Christians? Not obvious...   At this period  Rome The City  cannot be identified with the
empire. For  many decades the army was the army of mercenaries and one is not sure that the soldiers and officers
were even Roman  citizens.  Do you know that in Napoleon's La Grande Armee (524 thousands?) invading
Russia in 1812 there were 350 thousands foreigners: 180 thousands Germans, 90 thousands Polish, 32 thousands Italisns? You will be extremely surprized to learn what is the major confession of the army in Iraq...

[Bill Perry]

I'll say this one last time then stop posting in this thread. It seems there are two types of postings going on here - those trying to keep it historical and talking about how the romans saw coins and what those coins were - and those trying to make a policital statement about current events, using the coins as some sort of backup.

If your shooting for a flame fest or an out of control thread - by all means keep up the propaganda with "oh and look the romans did it too!" stuff.

[basemetal]

I've posted similar to this before but this thread makes it even more relavent:
Mercy was rare or unknown and even seen as an oddity in itself.   It was at times, shown to the very young or very old, and then rarely.
Never to cripples, the mentally ill, those "different" somehow, and most especially not to foreign enemies. The Romans lived with the spectre of short lifespans, competition for the basics (among the poorer classes), and this lack of mercy  was accepted behaviour toward fellow citizens or slaves.  I've often said that I like collecting coins for several reasons, paramount among them is the chance of getting a "feel" for how a modern would see the Romans from a modern perspective.
A simple metaphor:
How many modern schoolchildren are "picked on" today for being different in some way.  We've all seen it.
 Well, consider that there were no laws or social restraints on "picking on"-I'm using a mild metaphor here on purpose-those who were different. 
Now consider "enemies"
"Slay them all!...well, not the ones that can be sold as slaves which was considered in exactly the same way as was other captured valuables.
The lack of "mercy" is probably one of the hardest concepts for moderns to accept.

[Numerianus]

1. There is an opinion that the decrease in violence in the modern society is due to the aging of the population.
As Basemetal noticed the lifespan  of Romans was shot. Some calculations show that the life expectancy
was a bit more than 30 years.  So, slightly exaggerating, one may think that  the roman society  was the society of violent teenagers (including emperors!)
having no parential control...

2. Very interesting is Gert's comment: "I think this coin of Constantine, a 1/2 follis from Rome, minted after his defeat of Maxentius (313), was the first instance of this type. There are also coins of Maximinus II with the same scene. It shows Mars dragging a captive by the hair. I wonder if there are earlier coins that display this sort of scene (humiliation)."  Example below is from WW: Constantine I Follis, AE 16-17mm. IMP CONSTANTINVS PF AVG; bust right / FVNDAT PACIS, Mars, helmeted, nude, advancing right, looking left, trophy across left shoulder, flying chlamys, dragging captive by the hair; RT in exergue.
    Who is the captive? Maxentius loyalist? There  was  a civil war.  In which army were  more Christians: of Maxentius or Constantine? More  "true" Romans?
Quite probable that in the army of Maxentius...  What was done with the soldiers of the defeated army? I do not exclude that they were incorporated to the
victorious one (for lower salary   ).

[Robert_Brenchley]

The average life expectancy may have been 30-ish, but if you took the aristocracy, who had an easier life than the peasants, and eliminated everyone who died at under 15, lets say, I think you'd get a very different picture. Even at the lower levels, once childhood mortality was removed from the picture, life expectancy would have been significantly longer. Look at all the colonia, for instance, founded by retired legionaries. For that type of system to work, they must have had a reasonable expectation of living to complete their service, and still being fit enough to manage a farm.

[Numerianus]

Of course, it would be better  to have a look an the demographic profile of the population but such information
seems to be unavailable. Clearly, the youngest cohorts  were dominating.  If one excludes, say, 5 long-lived emperors,
an average of the remaining will be a violent person under 30.  The message (``propaganda") is that in the younger
society there is more violence. 

[Heliodromus]

We see Sol with the traditional hogtied captive both after Constantine's civil war with Maxentius and after his first civil war with Licinius... the captive wearing a Phrygian cap in both cases. I'd be interested to know who'd be taken captive after a civil war - could citizens be sold into slavery? Does the Phrygian cap imply anything? (Rome also issued Sol with a bare-headed captive after the war with Licinius).

Ben

RIC VI Aquileia 144 312-313, RIC VII Aquileia 1 316-317

[slokind]

"Imply" is the key word.  These bound figures on the coins are not representations of what captives looked like but are pictographs of submission or subjection, and as such were used on the coins, IMO.  They are like early hieroglyphs or some of the signs at the very beginning of Chinese writing, halfway between a picture and a sign.  The fundamental term for them is 'trope'.  I think we should remember to 'read' them on coins as such.  The Phrygian (vel sim.) cap, accordingly, means 'foreign' or 'exotic'.  Thus considered, they are important to interpreting coins.  I thought that their being used with Sol Invictus, rather than some soldier or general, helps to make this plain, just as Sol Invictus is not a representation of the sun itself as such.  Pat L.

[Heliodromus]

Thanks, Pat. What then do think the message is of these "foreign" captives given that these were civil wars? An after-the-fact attempt to dehumanise the (at least nominally) Roman enemy as alien perhaps? Or maybe a totally generic experession of victory with disregard to the nationality of the conquored?

Ben

[slokind]

Well, I THINK about halfway in between.  When they win (ANY 'they'), they aren't thinking of the full-humanity question when they proclaim victory publicly.  I mean, if you asked Constantius II whether the 'others' were real humans, he might object to your even asking him such a thing, impugning him.  But when winning is your life, practically...  When you want the spenders of coins to know what's what...  When you want to pump up that exercitus of yours.  Perhaps not quite generic (but did the engravers always bother about headgear?  I don't know).  Anyway, the bound captive was so old an icon that it must have suffered loss of significance even as dead metaphors do.  A shabby tiger?   Pat L.