Why did the Romans crucify people?

Not a Roman invention

Persians, Carthaginians and Alexander the Great all crucified people before Rome made a system of it. After taking Tyre in 332 BC, Alexander hung 2,000 of its defenders on crosses along the shore (Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander 4.4.17). In Judea, the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus crucified 800 of his Jewish opponents around 88 BC (Josephus, Antiquities 13.380).

Who was crucified

Romans called it the slaves’ punishment. It fell on slaves, pirates, bandits, rebels and provincials who had challenged Roman order: people without rank or rights. Citizens were normally spared. In 70 BC, prosecuting the governor Verres, Cicero made famous the case of a Roman citizen flogged and crucified in Sicily, and called crucifixion the cruelest and foulest of penalties (Against Verres 2.5.162–170). In Judea only the Roman governor could order it, which is why responsibility for Jesus’s death comes back to Pilate.

Why so cruel

The point was to be seen. A Roman book of practice speeches says that when the guilty are crucified, the busiest roads are chosen, so that as many people as possible will look and be afraid ([Quintilian], Lesser Declamations 274). Victims were usually flogged, made to carry the crossbeam, then nailed or tied, with a placard naming the crime. Death could take hours or days, naked and exposed to sun and birds. Seneca describes crosses of many shapes, some with the victim head down (To Marcia 20.3), and asks who would choose to waste away on one, limb by limb, rather than die at once (Letters 101.14). The English word “excruciating” comes from the same Latin root as crux, cross.

Death by the thousand

When Rome felt threatened, it crucified in bulk:

• 71 BC, Italy. After Crassus crushed the slave revolt of Spartacus, 6,000 captives were crucified along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome (Appian, Civil Wars 1.120).
• 4 BC, Judea. When revolts broke out after Herod’s death, Varus, the governor of Syria, crucified 2,000 rebels near Jerusalem (Josephus, Antiquities 17.295). In AD 9 the same Varus would lose three legions in the Teutoburg Forest.
• AD 70, Jerusalem. During Titus’s siege, Josephus says, soldiers crucified up to 500 captives a day in front of the walls, nailing them in different postures for sport, until there was no room left for the crosses (Jewish War 5.449–451).

The heel bone of Jehohanan

For all those thousands, physical evidence is rare. Wood rots, nails were pulled out and reused, and most victims were never buried. Then, in 1968, builders at Giv’at ha-Mivtar in Jerusalem opened a first-century Jewish family tomb. A stone bone box bore the name “Jehohanan son of Hagkol.” Inside, his right heel bone was still pierced by an iron nail 11.5 centimeters long, its point bent, with traces of wood at both ends: the nail could not be pulled free, so it was buried with him. Reexamining the bones in 1985, Joseph Zias and Eliezer Sekeles found no sure sign of nails in the arms, which were probably tied. In 2021 archaeologists announced a second nailed heel bone, from a Roman settlement at Fenstanton in England.

Accursed, and then a symbol

For Jews the cross carried an extra shame, because of a law in the Torah:

his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall surely bury him the same day; for he who is hanged is accursed of God.

That is why Paul calls a crucified Messiah “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Constantine, the first Christian emperor, abolished the penalty in the fourth century (Aurelius Victor, On the Caesars 41.4), and Rome’s instrument of terror became the sign of the Christians, whose founder had died on one.