Was Scaphism a Real Thing?

In November 2019, I published an article about how most supposed “medieval torture devices” were actually never used during the Middle Ages. A number of people responded to that article by asking whether or not scaphism was real. I have therefore decided to write an entire article specifically dedicated to this question.

In case you’re unfamiliar with scaphism, it is a method of execution that was supposedly used in ancient Persia. Supposedly, it involved sealing the victim between two boats, feeding him milk and honey, and covering his face with milk and honey so that flies would swarm around his face. Then, as the victim defecated inside the boats, flies and maggots would grow up inside and slowly begin to devour his flesh. Thus, the victim would die an incredibly slow, agonizing death.

Scaphism is known for being quite arguably the most disgusting, horrible way a person can possibly die. It is hard to say, though, whether the ancient Persians ever actually executed anyone in this manner, since there is only one independent ancient source for the use of scaphism and there are some very good reasons to doubt this source’s reliability.

Scaphism in the ancient sources

There is only one independent mention of scaphism in any surviving ancient source: The Life of Artaxerxes, written by the Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 AD). Ploutarchos states that Artaxerxes II’s brother Cyrus attempted to usurp the throne, but he was killed by a young Persian soldier named Mithridates.

According to Ploutarchos, Artaxerxes falsely claimed that he had killed Cyrus himself, but Mithridates got drunk at a party and told everyone the truth about how he had killed Cyrus, not Artaxerxes. Artaxerxes was enraged at this and ordered for Mithridates to be executed by scaphism. Ploutarchos then goes on to describe how an execution by scaphism was performed in gruesome detail. Here is what Ploutarchos says in his Life of Artaxerxes, chapter 16, as translated by Bernadotte Perrin for the Loeb Classical Library:

“Afterwards the eunuch told the matter to Parysatis, and she to the king; and the king was incensed, as being openly convicted of falsehood, and likely to forfeit the fairest and most pleasing feature of his victory. For he wished that all Barbarians and all Greeks should be fully persuaded that when he and his brother had charged and grappled with each other, he had given and received a blow, being only wounded himself, but killing his brother. He therefore gave orders that Mithridates should be put to death by the torture of the boats.”

“Now, this torture of the boats is as follows. Two boats are taken, which are so made as to fit over one another closely; in one of these the victim is laid, flat upon his back; then the other is laid over the first and carefully adjusted, so that the victim’s head, hands, and feet are left projecting, while the rest of his body is completely covered up. Then they give him food to eat, and if he refuse it, they force him to take it by pricking his eyes. After he has eaten, they give him a mixture of milk and honey to drink, pouring it into his mouth, and also deluge his face with it. Then they keep his eyes always turned towards the sun, and a swarm of flies settles down upon his face and hides it completely.”

“And since inside the boats he does what must needs be done when men eat and drink, worms and maggots seethe up from the corruption and rottenness of the excrement, devouring his body, and eating their way into his vitals. For when at last the man is clearly dead and the upper boat has been removed, his flesh is seen to have been consumed away, while about his entrails swarms of such animals as I have mentioned are clinging fast and eating. In this way Mithridates was slowly consumed for seventeen days, and at last died.”

Although this passage from Ploutarchos is the only surviving ancient description of scaphism, some people have noticed that scaphism is also mentioned by the twelfth-century AD Byzantine chronicler Ioannes Zonaras in his Annals. Zonaras writes, as translated by Antonio Gallonio:

“The Persians outvie all other barbarians in the horrid cruelty of their punishments, employing tortures that are peculiarly terrible and long-drawn, namely the ‘boats’ and sewing men up in raw hides. But what is meant by the ‘boats,’ I must now explain for the benefit of less well informed readers. Two boats are joined together one on top of the other, with holes cut in them in such a way that the victim’s head, hands, and feet only are left outside. Within these boats the man to be punished is placed lying on his back, and the boats then nailed together with bolts.”

‘Next they pour a mixture of milk and honey into the wretched man’s mouth, till he is filled to the point of nausea, smearing his face, feet, and arms with the same mixture, and so leave him exposed to the sun. This is repeated every day, the effect being that flies, wasps, and bees, attracted by the sweetness, settle on his face and all such parts of him as project outside the boats, and miserably torment and sting the wretched man.”

“Moreover his belly, distended as it is with milk and honey, throws off liquid excrements, and these putrefying breed swarms of worms, intestinal and of all sorts. Thus the victim lying in the boats, his flesh rotting away in his own filth and devoured by worms, dies a lingering and horrible death.”

This may superficially seem like an independent confirmation of scaphism, but there is a catch; Zonaras was writing at a time when the Persian Empire no longer existed and his description of scaphism matches Ploutarchos’s so closely that we can be almost certain that he was just repeating what he’d read in Ploutarchos’s Life of Artaxerxes. This means that Zonaras doesn’t count as an independent source.

ABOVE: Modern imaginative illustration of scaphism, produced as a cover for “Festering Human Remains,” the debut album of the Massachusetts death metal band Scaphism

Why we should probably be skeptical of this story

The fact that Ploutarchos is our only independent source for the use of scaphism in ancient times sends up a pretty big red flag. There are several more facts about Ploutarchos that also send up immediate red flags about the reliability of his account of scaphism.

One major problem with Ploutarchos’s reliability is that he was militantly anti-Persian. He hated the Persians so much that, in his essay On the Malice of Herodotos, he accused the earlier Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BC), whom modern scholars have accused of being biased against the Persians, of being a φιλοβάρβαρος (philobárbaros)—that is, a “barbarian-lover”—in part because Herodotos didn’t portray the Persians as totally irredeemable villains.

The fact that Ploutarchos hated the Persians so much means that, when he is writing about them, his reliability is seriously compromised because he might be willing to trust unreliable stories that he otherwise wouldn’t have trusted simply because they portray the Persians in a negative light.

Another major problem is that Ploutarchos was writing many hundreds of years after the events he describes purportedly took place. Ploutarchos claims that the execution of Mithridates by scaphism took place during the reign of Artaxerxes II of the Achaemenid Empire, who ruled from 404 BC to 358 BC. Ploutarchos was only born in around 46 AD, though, and he probably wrote his Life of Artaxerxes sometime in the late first century AD or early second century AD. This means that, by the time Ploutarchos was writing, the execution of Mithridates was already ancient history.

Ploutarchos’s account is only as reliable as the sources it relies on. As it happens, we know that Ploutarchos’s Life of Artaxerxes relies heavily on the Persika, a now-lost history of Persia written by the fifth-century BC Greek historian Ktesias of Knidos. It is possible that Ploutarchos may have gotten the story about scaphism from Ktesias, but this wouldn’t necessarily make the story any more reliable, because Ktesias was a notoriously unreliable writer.

Ktesias is known to have described lands filled with all sorts of bizarre creatures, including people with the heads of dogs, headless people with faces in their torsos and their eyes where their nipples should be, and one-legged people who lie with their feet in the air over their heads for shade.

In fact, Ktesias had such a reputation for unreliability in antiquity that Ploutarchos himself comments in The Life of Artaxerxes that Ktesias can’t completely be trusted; he warns in the very first paragraph of the work that Ktesias “has put into his work a perfect farrago of extravagant and incredible tales.” If Ploutarchos’s story of scaphism comes from him, it is hard to say whether it is just another one of those “extravagant and incredible tales.”

ABOVE: Illustration of a headless man from a map by the Renaissance cartographer Guillaume Le Testu (lived c. 1509 – 1573). The headless men are recorded to have been mentioned by Ktesias.

Conclusion

We can’t say for certain whether the Achaemenid Persians really used scaphism as a method of execution. We don’t have any definite proof that the Persians did not use scaphism, so it is still possible that they may have used it. Nonetheless, given the unreliability of both Ploutarchos and his possible source Ktesias, I am strongly inclined to think that scaphism is most likely the product of some Greek storyteller’s imagination.

As I discuss in this article from January 2019, the ancient Greeks came up with a lot of stories about people dying in bizarre and horrible ways. There’s little evidence to suggest that scaphism is anything more than just another one of those stories.