With the end­ing of one of my favourite TV shows from Starz, Spar­ta­cus, it brought about the rem­i­nisc­ing of my favourite parts of a good four sea­son long show, filled with gore, death, tits and more gore then you can poke a stick at. One part in par­tic­u­lar shows just the kind of sav­age world the Romans lived in, (WARNING! A SPOILER FOR SEASON 3).

Mar­cus Cras­sus orders the “Dec­i­ma­tion” of his sons unit because of fail­ure to fol­low orders and flee­ing from the enemy.  Now Luke brought this up in con­ver­sa­tion by talk­ing about the series and say­ing “I for­got how they made the sol­diers beat the dec­i­mated to death” to which I casu­ally responded: “what did you think they do? Tickle ‘em?”.

For those of you who are not aware “Dec­i­ma­tion” was the Ancient Roman Army prac­tise of pun­ish­ing troops, used on rare occa­sions, for deser­tion. It involved the sol­diers of a unit or cohort draw­ing lots and every tenth man being sin­gled out for exe­cu­tion regard­less of fault, action or rank. The luck of the draw. These unlucky chaps would then be beaten to death with clubs or stoned by their fel­low com­rades until the twitch­ing stopped, tidy.  Even back in those days this was seen as a bar­baric act of dis­ci­pli­nary action, today the thought of lin­ing up a hun­dred peo­ple and shoot­ing every tenth per­son is just a lit­tle bit extreme.

This unpleas­ant con­ver­sa­tion took a turn for the worst when Luke tries to per­suade me that the prac­tise of dec­i­ma­tion was a great idea for every­one involved. He pushed the point that it instilled fear into the men and made them fear him more than the enemy and so they would be less likely to run in com­bat. (Luke– In my defence on  the sur­face, totally makes sense) Of course this is com­plete non­sense and so I used my supe­rior his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge and com­mon sense to explain why dec­i­ma­tion is a bad idea, in the con­text. Firstly the loss of man­power would not be worth it, sec­ondly the morale dam­age would be severe and thirdly the sol­diers may fear you but they would also hate you for mak­ing them kill their own chums. Every war has a mutiny or two and hav­ing your men kill their own en mass is a lit­tle bit of overkill and I would not be sur­prised if it was Lega­tus Luke who was then stoned to death by dis­con­tent soldiers.

Even­tu­ally Luke won round to my logic and I fin­ished off with “As if you would order dec­i­ma­tion any­way” to which he responded “of course I wouldn’t” thus end­ing a point­less dis­cus­sion on the topic of Ancient mil­i­tary cor­po­ral punishment.

This comes from our new writer Jim, who’ll be help­ing me add to the site.