Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

cut off both his nose and his ears, and put out one of his eyes, and kept him bound at my palace entrance, where all could see him.’ So Darius had boasted, detailing his treatment of one particularly noxious rebel. ‘Then I had him impaled.’2 Not every victim of the Great King’s anger, though, was necessarily suspended and exposed as he died. The Greeks reported in hushed tones of disgust one particularly revolting torture: the scaphe, or ‘trough’. The executioner, after placing his victim inside a boat or hollowed-out tree trunk, would then attach a second one over the top of it, so that only the wretched man’s head, hands and feet were left sticking out. Fed continuously with rich food, the criminal would have no choice but to lie in his own excrement; smeared all over with honey, he would find himself powerless to brush away the buzzing flies. ‘Worms and swarms of maggots were bred of the rottenness and the putrefaction of the excrement; and these, eating away at his body, bored into his intestines.’3 The victim would finally expire only once his flesh and organs had been almost entirely consumed. One man, so it was reliably reported, had endured the scaphe for seventeen days before finally breathing his last.