Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Decimation

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

You are probably familiar with the term decimation. The word is usually used in English to mean “to cause great destruction or harm”. However, to ancient Rome, the word had a very different and very specific meaning. It was one of the most devastating and brutal forms of punishment that the military could inflict. Learn more about Decimation, the ultimate collective punishment, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You are probably familiar with the term decimation. The word is usually used in English to mean to cause great destruction or harm. However, to ancient Rome, the word had a very different and specific meaning. It was one of the most devastating and brutal forms of punishment that the military could inflict. Learn more about decimation, the ultimate collective punishment on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the Thurline podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by audible.com. Today's audiobook recommendation is Caesar's legions, the epic saga of Julius Caesar's elite 10th Legion and the armies of Rome, by Stephen Dando Collins. Stephen Dando Collins paints a vivid and definitive portrait of daily life in the 10th Legion as he follows Caesar and his men along the blood-soaked fringes of the Empire. This unprecedented regimental history reveals countless previously unknown details about Roman military practices, Caesar's conduct as commander,

and his relationships with officers and legionnaires, and the daily routine of discipline in the Legion. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks By going to audible trial.com slash everything everywhere, or by clicking on the link in the show notes. Warfare in the ancient world required one thing more than anything else. Discipline. Soldiers would fight shoulder to shoulder and would fight as one giant unit. Whether it was Greek or Roman or Persian, they had to march, fight, and maneuver as a group, or else they would get killed. One of the worst things that could happen would be for soldiers to break ranks.

Once a cohort broke apart and began to flee, the battle was basically over. So much of the discipline and drilling which generals put their troops through was to avoid this singular outcome. When it did happen, soldiers which fled would often put an entire army at risk. As such, generals reserved their harshest punishment for soldiers who broke ranks. The word decimation comes from the Latin word decommatio, which means to remove a tenth. A decimation was literally that. Generals would take the unit which was to be punished and was always a group and order them into groups of ten men.

Each group of ten would then draw straws. The man who had the shortest straw would then be beaten to death by the other nine. This is where the term drawing the short straw comes from. The threat of being executed wasn't necessarily the worst part of the punishment. It was being forced to beat to death someone you might have spent years fighting side by side with, and who might even be your best friend. The punishment was not done frequently. Obviously, you don't want to kill your own troops.

It was literally a last resort. The vast majority of generals would never have had to inflict the decimation, and most soldiers would have never seen one. The first recorded example of it happening in the Roman Republic occurred in the year 471 BC. During one of the early wars against rival tribes on the Italian peninsula, Roman troops were under the command of the consul Apius-Claudeus subminus Regulinus. One of the units fled during combat, and Appius ordered them to be decimated.

All of the officers were scourged and beheaded, and all of the remaining men were divided into groups, as I described above, and one in ten were bludgeon to death. There wasn't another case of decimation in Rome for over 400 years. In the year 71, Rome was fighting in the Third Servile War. This was the massive slave revolt that was led by the Gladiator Spartacus. The commander of the Roman troops was Marcus Licinius Krasis, who was part of the first triumvirate, and one of the richest men in all of human history. He actually implemented decimations several times, and it is estimated that the number of soldiers killed through his decimations ranges from 1,000, up to 10,000.

Oftentimes, the real benefit to decimation wasn't performing the punishment itself, but just the threat of it. Julius Caesar was never known to perform a decimation, which might have been one of the many reasons why his troops loved him so much. However, in the Civil War against Pompey, he did threaten to decimate the Ninth Legion, and that stopped them from breaking ranks. Mark Anthony decimated one of his legions in the war against the Persians. The historian Plutarch noted, quote, Antony was furious and employed the punishment known as decimation on those who had lost their nerve. What he did was divide the whole lot of them into groups of ten, and then he killed one from each group, who was chosen by lot.

The rest on his orders were given barley rations instead of wheat, unquote. After the fall of Mark Antony and the end of the Roman Republic, decimations decreased dramatically under the Roman Empire. It was done under several early emperors, such as Augustus, but as the army became more professional and powerful, they simply refused to follow decimation orders. The Emperor McCroynus formerly adopted a punishment known as Kenti Samatio, which was basically the same thing as a decimation, but with one out of every hundred soldiers rather than one in ten. Perhaps the most infamous case of decimation occurred in the year 286, with the Theban Legion. The Legion got its name because it was stationed in Thebes in Egypt.

They were commanded to move to Gaul by the Emperor Maximian to help put down a rebellion. The Legion supposedly had converted en masse to Christianity. Along the way in what is today Switzerland, they encountered another group of Christians and they were ordered to fight them. They refused. Their general told them that if they didn't follow orders, they would be decimated. They still refused, so every 10th man was killed. They didn't kill each other, as they would have refused that as well. After the decimation, they were once again ordered to fight other Christians, and they refused.

So they were decimated once again. The decimations continued until all 6,66 men. were killed. Today the members of the Theban Legion are considered martyrs in the Christian Church, and their leader, St. Maurice, has been especially venerated in the city of San Maritz in Switzerland, which is named after him. In fact, his story is interesting enough that I might do a separate episode on it at a later date. You might think that the practice of decimation ended centuries ago, but unfortunately this is not the case. There have been cases of decimation in the 20th century. During World War I, Italian commander Louis I, Italian,

G. Cardona decimated a unit at the Battle of Caporetto. It was mostly random executions on people who were deserting, but there was an actual decimation on the 120 men of the 141st Cantazzaro Infantry Brigade who mutinied. During the Russian Civil War, Leon Trotsky decimated one of the units under his command for desertion. The last known case occurred during World War II during the Battle of Stalingrad, when the commander of the Soviet 64th Rifle Division decimated the unit for cowardice. Before I conclude, I should note that there was an additional meaning of the word decimation, which was used in the Middle Ages. As the literal meaning of decimation is to take one-tenth, a decimation became the term used for a tithe. It was the percentage of one's income that was given to the church.

So the next time you hear that something was decimated on the news, take a moment to think about how the original meaning of the word had to do with soldiers having to beat their best friends to death as a punishment. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAula. The associate producer is Thor Thompson. Remember to leave a five-star review to get your review read on the show. They can be left at Apple Podcasts, Podcasts, Podcast Republic, or wherever you listen to the show. Also, you can help support the show over at patreon.com.

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