The Execution of Mithridates the Brazen Bull

ONE BLOODY THING AFTER ANOTHER THE ANCIENT WORD T H E B R A Z E N B U L L T H E E X E C U T I O N O F M I T H R I DAT E S Phalaris, a Greek tyrant ruler of Agrigentum in Sicily seized power In 401 BCE the revolt of Cyrus the Younger against his elder in around 570 BCE, and extended his rule over much of the island. brother King Artaxerxes II of Persia ended at the battle of Cunaxa. He was rumoured to be a cannibal who devoured infant children. A soldier called Mithridates had struck Cyrus in the temple with His cruellest legacy was the brazen bull, which he commissioned a spear, making him groggy. As Cyrus climbed back on to his horse, to be the means of execution for capital crimes. Its inventor was he was struck in the leg by another soldier. In this diminished Perillos of Athens. The device itself was simple: a hollow bronze state, he fell from his animal, hit his wounded temple, and died. bull with a door in its side. The condemned was placed inside and Being proud, Artaxerxes wanted it believed he had killed a fire was lit below, which heated the bronze and roasted the victim Cyrus himself. Mithridates was showered with costly gifts alive. The ingenious design then converted the smoke from the with the proviso he allow Artaxerxes to take credit for the roasting human into clouds of incense. A further refinement was death. Sadly for Mithridates this was beyond him and, drunk a system of pipes and stops in the bull’s head, which turned the on wine, he bragged of his achievement at a banquet after the screams of agony into the sound of a bellowing bull. battle. Artaxerxes was so incensed that he ordered Mithridates When he first revealed the bull, Perillos offered to display this to be put to death by scaphism, also known as ‘the torture of feature by climbing inside. However, Phalaris ordered that the the boats’. door be locked and a fire set beneath the contraption. Perillos’s The process was savage. The victim was placed tightly between screams did indeed turn into a bull’s bellows, but he was pulled two narrow boats (or hollow tree trunks), which fully enclosed out before he died. Rather than receive a reward or fee for his his body but left the hands, head, and feet protruding out of either invention, Perillos was thrown to his death from a hilltop on end. He was then force-fed a mixture of milk and honey, which Phalaris’s orders. The writer Lucian of Samosata claims that was also poured over his face to draw flies and other insects. Phalaris reacted so harshly to Perillos because even he ‘loathed Eventually the boats would fill up with the excrement of the the thought of such ingenious cruelty’, and vowed to punish victim, who was periodically fed with milk and honey to keep him its inventor. Ironically it was the bull that killed Phalaris when alive for as long as possible. Days later and gangrene would take he was overthrown around twenty years later: a mob seized hold in the victim’s extremities. The build-up of faeces would him and bundled him inside Perillos’s invention. He was roasted attract maggots, which would breed in the body, slowly consuming alive. the victim’s flesh. 8 9.

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