The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment through History by Mark P Donnelly, Daniel Diehl Page A

BC the Tyrant Draco (Tyrant then being an official title as was Dictator) decided that if a little capital punishment was good then a lot of it would be all that much better. Thus he declared that administering the law would become vastly easier if there was only one punishment for all crimes – death. Everything from stealing a loaf of bread to murder was punished by death. When asked why he imposed such a law, Draco quipped: ‘The poor deserve to die and I can think of no greater punishment to inflict upon the rich’. Draco – which, interestingly, translates as ‘serpent’ – may not have lasted long, but his name is still attached to harsh laws, or measures, in the term ‘draconian’.

     
Most readers will be familiar with this device. Far more than being a simple mode of imprisonment, it served to trap the victim’s head and hands in a position where they could not protect or defend themselves against assaults, thrown objects or molestations by the jeering populace of the city.
     
    The Greeks, in general, seemed to have had a difficult time striking a happy medium in their judicial system. Three and a half centuries after Draco, the Athenian lawgiver Charondas came up with a slate of laws known as the Thurian Code. We are not here to take issue with the code itself – which was the basic ‘eye for an eye’ approach to juris prudence common among early societies – but rather with how it was administered. In order to prevent any ambitious reformers from arbitrarily altering his new laws, Charondas decreed that anyone proposing a change to the code would be forced to wear a noose around his neck until the matter was fully debated among the assembly of lawgivers. Should the change be rejected, the man was to be immediately strangled with the noose already so conveniently in place. It is hardly surprising that while Charondas remained in power only three such changes were proposed. Worth mentioning is the fact that even the hard-nosed Charondas was completely dedicated to adhering to his laws. When he inadvertently appeared at a public assembly wearing a sword (an act outlawed by the Thurian Code) he drew the offending blade and plunged it into his own heart.
    In their more enlightened moments, the Greeks introduced some of the first punishments designed to cause no physical harm to the convicted. Among these was the pillory, a device still in common use at the end of the eighteenth century, in which the condemned had their head and arms locked into a wooden frame mounted on a pole. It was an uncomfortable thing, no doubt, and made all the more so by the fact that the malefactor was displayed in a public place and subjected to the taunts and harangues of passers-by, but there was no long-term damage to their body (at least not any inflicted by the pillory itself). The most common offence which led to the pillory was public drunkenness. Curiously, when an individual committed a crime while drunk they were charged and tried twice – once for being drunk and a second time for the associated crime. Evidently the Greek legal system did not necessarily agree with Aristotle when he said: ‘ In vino veritas ’ – ‘In wine there is truth’.

     
Here we witness an unfortunate victim being stuffed within the brazen bull and a great fire being lit beneath. This would of course function much like a cast bronze oven and would quickly become unbearably hot to touch. The howls and screams of the roasting culprit would be heard to issue forth from the mouth of the bull like snorts and grunts, much to the amusement of the torturers and assembled court.
     
    Not all Greek tortures were designed as punishment and the use of torture to extract confessions may well have originated in Classical Greece. To this end they employed both the rack and a version of the wheel. In Greek wheel torture, the victim was simply tied to a cart wheel and spun around until they offered up the required information. More severe ‘turns’ on