185: TÊTE OFFENSIVE
A non-Nabokovian Invitation to a Beheading, offset by direction to Mike Dash’s ‘Dry as Dust’ FT blog of 25 January 2011, plus Frances Larson’s Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found (Granta Books, 2014).
Nothing funny about ISIS decapitations and paradings of severed heads (though shades of Irish Murdoch here). Nothing new, either. There’s (alas) a rich ancient litany of precedents. Literary as well as historical. And not just classical. We all know the Queen of Hearts’ mantra: Off With His Head! Clearly an unusually well-read playing card, since she is borrowing from a favourite Shakespearean ejaculation, e.g. Queen Margaret’s ( Henry VI Part III), “Off with his head, and set it on York Gates; / So York may overlook the town of York.”
No shortage of head-lopping in the OT, along with other savageries, though for sheer horror ISIS and all other sadists must give way to the Assyrians, justly described by Byron as coming down like a wolf upon the fold. Takes a strong stomach to get through the Ancient Biblical Beheadings website.
“He slashed off his head and sent it rolling like a rounded boulder through the crowd” – Homer, Iliad, bk. v165. That’s poetry on the battlefield, based in reality, surpassed by this piece of Roman grand guignol (Appian, Civil Wars, bk. ch26: “Trebonius, who was in bed, told his captors to lead him to Dolabella. One of the centurions replied facetiously, ‘Go where you like, but leave your head behind, because we are ordered to bring your head, not yourself.’ Dolabella displayed it on Trebonius’s official chair, then the soldiers rolled it from one to another in sport along the city streets like a ball until it was completely crushed” – and so Serie A was born. Just possibly, this scene was in Queen Elizabeth I’s mind when she remarked to a defender of Mary, Queen of Scots, “I will make you shorter by the head.”
En passant, although both ancient and modern Greeks have a word for it, Greece is strikingly omitted from the extensive Wikipedia list of country-by-country kephalotomies – no Chop-Chop Square in Athens – in which England features among the most prominent.
Cue here for mention of Oliver Cromwell’s posthumous severed bonce, a popular 18thcentury curiosity (‘Oliver’s Scull’ was slang for ‘chamber-pot’), dismissed by Carlyle as “fraudulent moonshine”, authenticity defended by Pearson & Morant (Biometrika 29, 1934, p109), finally re-interred (1960) at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge [ FT115:40-42].
Gaius Rabirius pickled the head of populist agitator Saturninus (stoned to death, 100 BC) and kept it for mockery on his dining- room table. Thirty-seven years later, he was prosecuted for complicity in murder by Julius Cæsar, defended by Cicero.
The great orator’s own truncated head and hands were displayed on the Roman Rostra by Mark Antony in revenge for his Second Philippic’s fiery denunciation (albeit never actually delivered). Spectators felt they were really gazing at Antony’s ‘black soul’.
Earlier, Marcus Gratidianus’s head, after his torture and ritualistic dismemberment, was paraded through Rome; in the same year (82 BC) fellow-officer Censorinus’s was sent to rival general Marius to lower his soldiers’ morale.
Punic spirits were similarly shattered (207 BC) when, to signal a key Roman victory, the head of Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal was (Livy, bk27 ch51) “tossed between the forward posts of the enemy,” thus prefiguring Rugby, American, Australian, and Canadian football.
Credit a canny Septimuleius for morbid ingenuity. Enemies of radical tribune Gaius Gracchus had promised bounty-hunters gold equal to his head’s weight on its production – shades of Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia. Septimuleius dug out the brain, poured in molten lead, thus boosting its avoirdupois to seventeen-and-two-thirds pounds.
In those pre-Instagram days, severed heads were the most reliable proof of an enemy’s death. Pompey’s Egyptian assassins embalmed his head to send to Cæsar, stomach-turningly described by Lucan ( Civil War, bk. vv663-91). Roman poets had a suggestive taste for such lucidities; cf. Andrew McClellan, ‘Headless but not Harmless’ (on-line).
That of Crassus, killed (53 BC) by the Parthians (who blamed poor Roman performance on the Greek porno found in their knapsacks) arrived just in time to be used as a stage prop finale to Euripides’s Bacchæ, in which Agave enters carrying the head of her royal son whom she and fellow-Bacchantes had torn to pieces. This outdoes even John the Baptist’s served up on a platter for Salome. Had Christ, as Paul, been a Roman citizen, he’d have been beheaded, not crucified. That would have made a difference: no symbolic cross, and would the Resurrection have been a headless ghost buster?
Bald heads were a nuisance. A Galba lyncher had to carry that emperor’s by sticking his thumb up a nostril (Suetonius, ch20 para2).
Gloating over heads is a regular event in Tacitus’ Annals, for notable instance Poppæa’s glee on seeing that of her murdered rival Octavia. Given the dark nature of this column, a bit of Nero’s black humour makes fitting finale: “Why was I ever afraid of a man with such a big nose?”