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

A quick memetic primer on Imperial 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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[–] 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