And to narrate their virtue and their manly endurance under every torment, what language would suffice? For as every one who chose was at liberty to abuse them, some beat them with wooden clubs, [1317] and others with rods, and others with scourges, and others again with thongs, and others with ropes. And the spectacle of these modes of torture had great variety in it, and exhibited vast malignity. For some had their hands bound behind them, and were suspended on the rack and had every limb in their body stretched with a certain kind of pulleys. [1318] Then after all this the torturers, according to their orders, lacerated with the sharp iron claws [1319] the whole body, not merely, as in the case of murderers, the sides only, but also the stomach and the knees and the cheeks. And others were hung up in mid-air, suspended by one hand from the portico, and their sufferings were fiercer than any other kind of agony by reason of the distention of their joints and limbs. And others were bound to pillars, face to face, not touching the ground with their feet, but hanging with all the weight of the body, so that their chains were drawn all the more tightly by reason of the tension. And this they endured not simply as long as the governor [1320] spoke with them, or had leisure to hear them, but well-nigh through the whole day. For when he passed on to others he left some of those under his authority to keep watch over these former, and to observe whether any of them, being overcome by the torture, seemed likely to yield. But he gave them orders at the same time to cast them into chains without sparing, and thereafter, when they were expiring, to throw them on the ground and drag them along. For they said that they would not give themselves the slightest concern about us, but would look upon us and deal with us as if we were nothing at all. This second mode of torture our enemies devised then over and above the scourging. Footnotes: [1317] xulois. What is meant, however, may be the instrument called by the Romans equuleus, a kind of rack in the shape of a horse, commonly used in taking the evidence of slaves. [1318] manganois tisi. [1319] The text gives amunteriois ekolazon, for which Nicephorus reads amunteriois tas kolaseis. The amunteria were probably the Latin ungulæ, an instrument of torture like claws. So Rufinus understands the phrase. [1320] hegemon. That is probably the Roman Præfectus Augustalis. |
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