Today I will talk about something very particular, namely one of the most atrocious public tortures of ancient Rome: the culleus or poena cullei. We well know how Roman society and culture, as well as those of other ancient civilizations, could also be very violent. After all, it was thought that an exemplary punishment could be an excellent deterrent but, above all, behind some particularly bloody tortures there were very deep religious motivations, such as to be able to justify such cruelty. What did the poena cullei consist of?

It was a particularly cruel and bloody death sentence, dedicated to those who were guilty of the worst of crimes: parricide, killing their own father . We recall how the figure of the pater familias, the one who effectively governed the home, also having the power of life and death over children, wives and slaves, was also the one who officially recognized the unborn child immediately after birth. If this did not happen, for various reasons, the child was destined to be abandoned and, practically, to certain death. Therefore, the children owed everything to their father, in every sense, and killing him was equivalent to not accepting the natural rules that the Gods, society and nature itself had decreed. What was the culleus made up of? The guilty of parricide was completely wrapped head and face with wolf skin, with wooden clogs on his feet. He was forbidden any kind of contact with the world, be it the air or the sky. Then, having reached the banks of the Tiber, he was thrown into the icy waters of the river inside a waterproof bag, together with exotic animals: a monkey, a snake (often a viper), a dog and a hen. Why exactly these animals and not others? The hen, for the ancients, was considered a particularly ferocious beast, capable of frightening even a lion! Furthermore, his battles against vipers were famous, snakes that were not only poisonous but also (as Pliny wrote) capable of not waiting for the natural birth but of getting out of their mother's body by gutting her, impatient to come into the world. Clear reference to patricide. And the dog? Unfortunately for him it was considered an unclean, dirty, rough, worn-out beast, without any dignity. Think that even today, in many cultures, addressing someone as a dog is the worst epithet. Finally, the monkey which, already from the ancients, was considered a caricature of a human being. Imagine how much pain the unfortunate person could feel: inserted inside this large bag, with the air that gradually decreases and, above all, with the animals which, by Nature, find themselves fighting each other, also prey to fury and terror. It must be just a horrible experience.

The culleus, after all, was a punishment balanced with respect to the crime committed. Following the words of Eva Cantarella, an outstanding scholar of the Greco-Roman world, especially from a legal and cultural point of view, the offender was indeed “alive, but without being able to breathe the air of heaven; thrown into the sea, but in conditions that did not allow his bones to touch the ground; driven by the waves but not washed by them". In the eyes of the Gods, the parricide had proved to be a being unworthy of breathing air, touching earth or water. It had to be cancelled, put simply. Horrible indeed, but let's think about how this torture was used, especially in the archaic and early republican age. Even Cicero praises it as a nice expedient found by his ancestors to punish a crime, simply, against Nature...