To browse Academia. Purposeful absence to the census was sanctioned very severely: the property of an incensus was confiscated and auctioned, and the citizen himself was sold into slavery, and in consequence, he suffered a capitis deminutio maxima, that is lost his liberty and citizenship Dion. I am convinced that these consequences were brought only by a sentence in criminal proceedings held before a centuriate assembly, initiated only after lustrum Paris.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. The purpose of this article is to trace the development of judicial torture in Rome from the time of Augustus to the Severan age particularly from the point of view of the lower classes, the ordinary plebeian citizens.
This development becomes much more intelligible once it is fully realized that in case of Roman citizens the torture of convicted criminals to make them reveal accomplices was traditionally the only legal form of torture known to the Romans. Torture was considered no different from corporal punishment, so in the Roman mind to put a citizen to torture before condemnation would have been equivalent of condemning a formally innocent person to potentially lethal penalty.
Nevertheless, the rule forbidding the torture of a Roman citizen was no longer valid if he was condemned as a result of a fair trial to corporal capital punishment, consequence of which was a slave-like exclusion from the civic community, technically known as a servitus poenae. Because the guilt of the convict was already established inthe trial, the torture after condemnation could have as its sole formal and logical purpose the exposure of accomplices, although this is not to deny that in practice posthumous confessions helped to release the judges from any lingering doubt and responsibility.
The main purpose of the lex Iulia de vi publica was to halt torture and any other acts leading to execution of punishment as long as an appeal to the Emperor was pending, not to absolutely ban it. When the Romans considered it necessary to overcome these strictures governing the use of torture, they did not proceed arbitrarily but introduced legal categories of offenders not protected by the lex Iulia.
