we are shackled to a corpse.”
If youʼve ever read The Aeneid by the first century Roman poet Virgil youʼve come across this gruesome passage:
The living and the dead at his command,
Were coupled, face to face, and hand to hand,
Till, chokʼd with stench, in loathʼd embraces tied,
The lingʼring wretches pinʼd away and died.1
It is a description of a form of torture in which they fastened a dead body to the victim, tying shoulder to shoulder, face to face, thigh to thigh, arm to arm
According to another source,
Cicero cites from Aristotle... the torture [was] inflicted by... Etruscan pirates. The gruesome details of the pirate-punishment are given in an essay by Jacques Brunschwig.
A living man or woman was tied to a rotting corpse, face to face, mouth to mouth, limb to limb, with an obsessive exactitude in which each part of the body corresponded with
its matching putrefying counterpart. Shackled to their rotting double, the man or woman was left to decay. To avoid the starvation of the victim and to ensure the rotting bonds
between the living and the dead were fully established, the Etruscan [pirates] continued to feed the victim appropriately.
Only once the superficial difference between the corpse
and the living body started to rot away through the agency of worms, which bridged the two bodies, establishing a differential continuity between them, did the Etruscans stop
feeding the living. Once both the living and the dead had turned black through putrefaction, the Etruscans deemed it appropriate to unshackle the bodies, by now
combined together.
There are historical reports of this form of torture lasting into the sixteenth century.
That is an incredibly horrific torture.
That’s the most disturbing thing I’ve read in some time.