Socrates was lucky. Found guilty of heresy and "corruption of the young," he was condemned to drink a cup of hemlock, a relatively honorable and painless death. By the standards of history, his execution in 399 B.C. was singularly humane.
Not until the Enlightenment, 200 years ago, did societies seriously question the states' right to kill. Until then, the only dilemma had been to find the most ingenious and cruel methods of execution. Boiling, burning, choking, beheading, dismembering, impaling, crucifying, stoning, strangling, burying alive—all were in vogue at various times. The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ was, for its day, only a routine execution.
In ancient China, an occasional penalty was "death by the thousand cuts," the slow slicing away of bits of the body. A 19th century French traveler described an excruciating method in India during the rule of the rajahs: "The culprit, bound hand and foot, is fastened by a long cord, passed round his waist, to the elephant's hind leg. The latter is urged into a rapid trot through the streets of the city, and every step gives the cord a violent jerk, which makes the body of the condemned wretch bound on the pavement . . . Then his head is placed upon a stone, and the elephant executioner crushes it beneath his enormous foot."
What kinds of crime incurred such punishments? Murder and treason have almost always ensured death. Under the Mosaic law, capital offenses ranged from gathering sticks on the Sabbath and adultery to the sacrifice of children to the god Molech. A medieval German code decreed: "Should a coiner [counterfeiter] be caught in the act, then let him be stewed in the pan or a cauldron."
England's response to the bewildering social evils caused by the Industrial Revolution was unique even in a world long used to such officially sanctioned slaughters as the Spanish Inquisition, when tens of thousands of convicted heretics were burned. The English meted out the death penalty for more than 200 offenses, including stealing turnips, associating with gypsies, cutting down a tree or picking pockets. "Hanging days" were public holidays, and in 1807 a crowd of 40,000 became so frenzied at an execution that nearly a hundred were trampled to death. Frequently both victims and executioner were drunk, and occasionally the job was botched, with the condemned man being hanged two or even three times. Afterward the crowds surged toward the corpse, because it and the scaffold were believed to have curative powers.
Death sentences were often arbitrarily applied. The social standing, sex, citizenship or religion of the victims usually determined the degree of horror they would suffer. Death alone was rarely considered a sufficient penalty unless it was preceded by terror, torture and humiliation, preferably in public. One of history's most spectacular executions was that of Damiens, the unsuccessful assassin of Louis XV, in Paris in 1757. His flesh was torn with red-hot pincers, his right hand was burned with sulfur, his wounds were drenched with molten lead, his body was drawn and quartered by four horses, his parts were set afire and his ashes scattered to the winds. The execution was accomplished before a large crowd.