Crazily, it was claimed by multiple Greek-speaking writers, such as Aristophanes (c. 450-388 BCE) and Lucian of Samosata (c. 120-180+ CE), that a conventional punishment was used against adulterers that bizarrely involved radishes. Of course, the topic will be explicit, but, unfortunately, the risqué nature of the punishment comes not from the crime of adultery, itself, but rather the crudeness comes from the unfortunate way the authorities used the aforementioned radish. There is no elegant way of putting it—the radish was said to have been shoved up the rear-end of the convicted adulterer. Aristophanes lightly alluded to the supposed practice in his play, The Clouds, in which he wrote a person who was “detected as an adulterer” could be subjected to “suffer the radish” (Aristophanes, The Clouds, approximately between lines 1067-1085). Although Aristophanes left tastefully obscure what suffering the radish meant, the opposite approach was taken by the satirist, Lucian, who described the radish punishment in all of its uncensored absurdity. Lucian wrote of the peculiar radish punishment while commenting on the life of the philosopher, Peregrinus, who was “caught in adultery in Armenia, got a thoroughly good beating, and eventually managed to escape by jumping down from a roof, with a radish plugging his anus” (Lucian, The Death of Peregrinus, section 9). To the likely relief of the reader, there are no further quotes to recount, as the two passages mentioned above make up the bulk of the existent writings about the peculiar ancient radish punishment for adulterers. Hopefully, the radish stories were exaggerated, but, then again, it would not be the first or last time that humans created horrifyingly depraved techniques for punishment and torture.
Written by C. Keith Hansley
Picture Attribution: (Manuscript illustration labeled Cod. Ser. n. 2644, fol. 52r, Tacuinum sanitatis, Rafani, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons, Europeana and the Austrian National Library).
Sources:
- Lucian, Selected Dialogues, translated by C. D. N. Costa. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World Classics), 2005, 2006, 2009.
- http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0241%3Acard%3D1067
