ABSTRACT
What level of violence was acceptable, thinkable, in Late Antiquity? This chapter approaches that question through Augustine’s reflections on the desires of the hangman, the Late Antique carnifex. Like the hangman of pre-Enlightenment regimes, the carnifex had a brutal, even sadistic job. It was to extort confession or to impose punishment by inflicting the maximum pain and to frighten others by giving that pain maximum visibility. The carnifex operated not in the cellars of the secret police but in a public courtroom. His lead-weighted whip and red-hot metal plates, his rack and hooks grimly nicknamed “pony” and “claws,” left broken and bleeding bodies in this small-scale arena. People died under investigative torture and from the effects of flogging. In popular stories of Christian martyrs the carnifex exhausted his repertoire and his strength, defeated by his apparently helpless victim. He was an image of uncontrolled violence, not an individual moral agent. In present-day novels and films, gangsters or drug pushers employ such characters. In Late Antiquity the carnifex was on the staff of the Roman officials who presided over law courts and maintained public order. The instruments he used could be exhibited on the steps that led up to the judge’s tribunal or taken to remote borderlands in a display of Roman justice.2 This violence was legitimized.3
