this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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Rough Roman Memes

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A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.

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Not sure where to start on Roman history?

A quick memetic primer on Republican Rome

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"Sentenced to death, it says right there, damn you!" (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by PugJesus@lemmy.world to c/roughromanmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 13 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Explanation: When noxii (criminals considered especially heinous by the Roman government) were condemned to die in the arena, they were expected to damn well die. So if any were still breathing after the real gladiators and animals had their fun with them, a man would come out with a mallet, dressed as Dis Pater (one of the Roman gods of the underworld), and give them a friendly tap on the head to crush their skulls as they lay dying on the ground. Brutal stuff.

[–] teft@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Video of the event:

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

And the crowd goes WIIIIIIIIILD!

There's a reason the Romans noted that 'foreigners' got queasy at the gladiator games, lmao.

[–] itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That's super interesting! Do you know where I could read up more on that? I've searched Wikipedia and there it describes something similar, but says that a pair of men dressed up as Mercury and Charon respectively would poke the bodies with hot iron to check if they're dead, and then smash their heads with a hammer

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Eleven (16% of MNI) individuals exhibit a total of 16 well-healed antemortal cranial traumata. Five of the 11 individuals showed multiple trauma. Ten (15% of MNI) individuals exhibited a total of 10 perimortal cranial traumata. This is a surprisingly high frequency of deadly head injuries, taking into account that most of the gladiator types wore helmets. A possible explanation could be the frequently reported deathblow technique used by the hammer-carrying death god “Dis Pater”.

After the final blow, arena servants carried the combatant on a stretcher into the carcass chamber and gave the twitching body a deathblow. It is not known exactly how this execution was performed. The executor, a costumed arena servant, associated with the Roman god of death “Dis Pater” or the Etruscan counterpart “Charun” carried a deadly hammer accompanying the gladiator on his last journey [2], [3].

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0379073805005815

Page 38 here as well clarifies that noxii were under a death sentence, specifically, when getting their heads crushed, though I can't copy-paste anything from it.

https://archive.org/details/worldofgladiator0000shad/page/38/mode/2up

[–] itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 months ago

Thanks for the reading! Morbid, but fascinating stuff