Flagellation

FLAGELLATION. - A means of punishment, variously employed, inflicted by blows of a whip or bundles of rods or flexible switches. Much used in ancient Egypt and in Assyria with workers assigned to construction works and with slaves who rowed and carried weights, it passed to Greece (young Spartans, even of distinguished family, were proud to endure the blows of rods and whips without uttering a lament) and to Rome.

Here flagellation must have become, as a means of punishment, very common, to judge from the various terms used to indicate the particular task of certain slaves (flagilones, verberones, lorarii, etc.) and from the various mentions that authors make of it (e.g., Cicero, Horace, Juvenal).

The instrument used was the flagrum or flagellum, formed of a handle, to which were bound thongs of leather and bunches of cords or little chains, ending in knots, small bones, little metal balls, points, hooks, grapnels (scorpiones). The condemned person was stripped and bound to a post or to a column in such a way as to present his back somewhat curved; sometimes he was even merely stretched out on the ground and held fast by the feet by those assisting (Cicero, In Verrem, actio II, 3, 54, 142; Suetonius, Caligula, 26, 3). The atrocity of the torture can easily be deduced from the phrases of various authors: e.g., «horribile flagellum» (Horace, Satires, I, 3, v. 119; Prudentius, Contra Symmachum, I, 36a: PL 60, 149), from the varied construction of the instruments, from the cruelty of the condemning magistrates and of the executioners, from the fact that the number of blows was not prescribed. No wonder that many, even without being condemned to perish by rods, ended by losing their lives or being reduced to a wretched state, worse than death (cf. Cicero, In Verrem, actio II, 3, 54, 142; 4, 39, 85; Philo, In Flaccum, 10, 75). Beginning with Cato the Elder, Roman citizens were free from flagellation (Lex Porcia a tergo civium of 195 B.C.); against them beatings with rods could be inflicted, and only after a regular trial; however, the execution of the capital penalty always began, even for citizens, with flagellation.

Among the Hebrew people the law (Deut. 25, 2) prescribed flagellation: «si eum, qui peccavit, dignum viderint plagis, prosternent et coram se facient verberari». But until a period that cannot be determined, beating with a stick was used instead of flagellation; the number of blows varied according to the gravity of the crime, but it was never, in any case, to exceed forty: «ita dumtaxat, ut quadragenarium numerum (di piaghe) non excedant, ne foede laceratus ante oculos tuos abeat frater tuus» (ibid. 25, 3). Of flagellation, it is true, speak, threatening it, Gideon with regard to his enemies, if they should fall into his hands (Judg. 8, 7), and Rehoboam to the Hebrews, who murmured against his way of proceeding (I Kings 12, 11-14), but they do not refer to a legal penalty. This, on the other hand, is openly recalled as such, for the first time, in the martyrdom of the seven Maccabean brothers (II Macc. 7, 1).

For Christians, the thought of flagellation immediately recalls the torture inflicted on Jesus by Pilate as a means of saving him from death (Mt. 27, 26; Mk. 15, 15; Jn. 19, 1). But the Gospel says nothing about the manner of the execution, the quality of the whips, the number of the executioners of the penalty, the number of the blows; consequently, what is found on these points in various mystical authors has no authority (cf. Benedict XIV, De festis Dom. N. Iesu Christi, I, 7, n. 56). Only this remains beyond doubt, that the penalty inflicted on Jesus was the one that the Romans reserved for slaves, which therefore had no limitation of blows.

Also regarding the column of the flagellation of Jesus Christ, little or nothing is known for certain. Ancient tradition from the 4th century (cf. the itinerary of the pilgrim of Bordeaux, of 333, in Itinera Hierosolymitana, ed. P. Geyer [CSEL, 39], Vienna 1898, p. 22) indicated it in the palace of Caiaphas; from there it must have been transported to the small church of the Cenacle, because St. Paula saw it in the Cenacle in 386 (St. Jerome, Epist., 108: PL 22, 284) and, about the same time, Prudentius (Dittochaeum, 81: PL 60, 108). Pilgrims continue to speak of it until the 10th century; nevertheless it appears different from the one today preserved in the church of the Holy Sepulchre. From the time of the Crusades another column is spoken of, lying in the praetorium of Pilate, and which today is venerated in Rome in the church of St. Praxedes, transported there by Cardinal Giovanni Colonna in 1223.

Jesus, as he had foretold his own flagellation (Mt. 20, 19; Mk. 10, 34; Lk. 18, 32), so he also foretold it for his Apostles (Mt. 10, 17, 20, 19), who, in fact, underwent it by order of the Sanhedrin (Acts 5, 40). St. Paul also declares that he underwent it five times at the hands of his countrymen: «A Iudaeis, quinquies, quadragenas, una minus, accepi» (II Cor. 11, 24); when, however, arrested in Jerusalem, the tribune Lysias wished to condemn him to flagellation, he protested, as a Roman citizen exempt from that penalty, and the tribune desisted from the punishment (Acts 22, 24).

As a sanction, flagellation was soon used in monastic discipline, and there are testimonies of it from the 5th century (cf. Palladius, Hist. Lausiaca, 6; Socrates, Hist. eccl., IV, 23; for the 6th century, the Rules of St. Caesarius of Arles [PL 68, 1111] and of St. Aurelian of Arles [PL 68, 392, 401-402]; for the 7th century, the Rule of St. Columbanus [PL 80, 215 ff.]). But soon flagellation came to be simply a practice of voluntary penance, as a means of mortification.

Celestino Testore

THE FLAGELLATION OF JESUS IN ART

The oldest representations of the flagellation go back to the 9th-10th century and can be identified in Ottonian miniature painting, as in the Codex Egberti of Trier (late 10th century) and in cod. no. 648 of the Royal Library of Brussels, where Christ is shown at the moment when one ruffian binds him to a column and another henchman, by order of Pilate, cudgels him. It reappears in Romanesque art, and not only in painting, as at S. Urbano alla Caffarella near Rome (11th century), but in the reliefs of the bronze doors of S. Zeno in Verona and of the cathedral of Benevento.

With the spread of the narrative taste proper to Romanesque and Gothic art, and perhaps also through the suggestion of the fact that in 1223 Cardinal Giovanni Colonna brought from Jerusalem to Rome a fragment of a column of blood-red jasper, today in S. Prassede, which according to tradition is the very one to which Jesus was bound, in the course of the 13th and then the 14th century representations of the flagellation become ever more frequent. This continued until, during the 15th century, the theme was especially favored, perhaps because it also offered an occasion to depict with accents of pity the perfect beauty of the human limbs of the Redeemer. Thus in a representation by Beato Angelico on a small panel of the Museo di S. Marco in Florence; thus in the very beautiful panel by Piero della Francesca in the Gallery of Urbino; thus in that by Luca Signorelli which is in the Brera Gallery in Milan; thus, finally, in the fresco by Sebastiano del Piombo which is in S. Pietro in Montorio in Rome and for which, according to a tradition, Michelangelo himself would have supplied the drawing. On the other hand, a drawing by Michelangelo is also connected with the bronze relief depicting the flagellation that adorns one of the panels of the ciborium by Jacopo del Duca which is in the Picture Gallery of the National Museum of Naples, in which city there is, in the church of S. Domenico, another very beautiful flagellation, the one painted by Michelangelo da Caravaggio in 1607.

Emilio Lavagnino