"There is a place called the Tullianum, about twelve feet below the surface of the ground. It is enclosed on all sides by walls, and above it is a chamber with a vaulted roof of stone. Neglect, darkness, and stench make it hideous and fearsome to behold."
Sallust, War with Catiline (LV)
"Nor are these your only terrors. When your house is shut, when bar and chain have made fast your shop, and all is silent, you will be robbed by a burglar; or perhaps a cut-throat will do for you quickly with cold steel. For whenever the Pontine marshes and the Gallinarian forest are secured by an armed guard, all that tribe flocks into Rome as into a fish-preserve. What furnaces, what anvils, are not groaning with the forging of chains? That is how our iron is mostly used; and you may well fear that ere long none will be left for plough-shares, none for hoes and mattocks. Happy, you would say, were the forbears of our great-grandfathers, happy the days of old which under Kings and Tribunes beheld Rome satisfied with a single gaol!"
Juvenal, Satires III (302–314)
This jail was the Carcer, traditionally thought to have been built by Ancus Marcius, the fourth king of Rome (640–616 BC), to contend with the growing lawlessness of the city (Livy, The History of Rome, I.33) and enlarged by Servius Tullius, the sixth king (578–535 BC), who was said to have added a lower cell or dungeon—the Tullianum. In fact, this subterranean chamber had been built first and originally was used as a cistern, the name deriving from the spring (tullus) that still seeps up from a basin in the floor and was drained by a channel to the city sewer.
The Carcer was not a place of imprisonment (which was not a punishment under Roman law) but where the condemned were incarcerated while awaiting execution. Here were held the enemies of state, especially those foreign kings such as Jugurtha and Vercingetorix who had fought against Rome. Having been paraded through the Forum, they were left at the Carcer while the triumphator proceeded up the Clivus Capitolinus to the Temple of Jupiter to dedicate the spoils of war. In time, the prisoner would be executed in the Tullianum, lowered into the pit through a hole in the ceiling.
Jugurtha, king of Numidia, was starved to death in 104 BC and Vercingetorix, who had tried to free Gaul from Caesar, strangled in 49 BC—as was Sejanus, praetorian prefect under Tiberius in 31 AD, and Lentulus and his accomplices in the Catiline conspiracy of 63 BC.
"But we are told that when he [Jugurtha] had been led in triumph he lost his reason; and that when, after the triumph, he was cast into prison, where some tore his tunic from his body, and others were so eager to snatch away his golden ear-ring that they tore off with it the lobe of his ear, and when he had been thrust down naked into the dungeon pit, in utter bewilderment and with a grin on his lips he said: "Hercules! How cold this Roman bath is!" But the wretch, after struggling with hunger for six days and up to the last moment clinging to the desire of life, paid the penalty which his crimes deserved."
Plutarch, Life of Marius (XII.3–4)
Simon ben Giora, a leader in the Jewish revolt of AD 66, suffered a similar fate. Captured four years later, after the siege and destruction of Jerusalem, he was taken to Rome to be displayed in the triumph of Titus.
"The procession finished at the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, where they came to a halt: it was the custom to wait there till news came that the commander-in-chief of the enemy was dead. This was Simon, son of Gioras, who had been marching in the procession among the prisoners, and now with a noose thrown round him was being dragged to the usual spot in the Forum while his escort knocked him about. That is the spot laid down by the law of Rome for the execution of those condemned to death for their misdeeds. When the news of his end arrived it was received with universal acclamation, and the sacrifices were begun" (Josephus, Jewish War, VII.5.6).
The rhetorician Calpurnius Flaccus provides a vivid description of the horrors of the Tullianum, as a parricide suing for imprisonment declaims—
"I can visualize the state prison, constructed of huge stone blocks, receiving through the narrow chinks just a faint semblance of light. Culprits cast into this prison look forward to the execution cell [robur Tullianumque], and whenever the creaking of the iron-bound door stirs those helpless, sprawled out people, they are terrified, and by viewing someone else's punishment, they learn of their own soon to come. Whip lashes crack, food is delivered in the foul hands of the executioner to those who then refuse it. The hard-hearted doorkeeper sits by, a man whose eyes would remain dry even when his mother weeps. Filth roughen their bodies, chains grip their hands tightly. Why is it that the law keeps me alive for a year?"
Declamations (IV)
The phrase robur Tullianumque may refer to an oak (robur) post in the cell to which the prisoner was chained or to the beams of the ceiling itself (cf. Horace, Odes II.13.18; Tacitus, Annals IV.29).
In the Middle Ages, the site was called Carcer Mamertinus (Mamertine Prison) after the Sabine god Mamers (Mars), who was believed to have had a temple nearby. It was thought to be the place where Peter was imprisoned, the upside down cross in the photograph signifying his desire to be crucified in such a fashion (The Acts of Peter, XXXVII–XXXVIII). Christian tradition has the saint freed from the chains that bound him to the column to the left of the alter and, from the water that then miraculously gushed from the floor, baptizing Processus and Martinianus, who had been charged by Nero to oversee Peter's imprisonment (as depicted on the bronze relief behind the altar) (The Passio of SS. Processus and Martinianus, I–III). The churches of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami ("Saint Joseph of the Carpenters") and San Pietro in Carces ("St. Peter in Prison") now stand over the site.
The trapezoidal shape of the Tullianum conformed to the Scalae Gemoniae, the so-called "Stairs of Mourning" that ran alongside the Carcer from the Forum up to the Capitoline and on which the bodies of traitors and political prisoners, such as Sejanus (and his children), later were thrown (cf. Dio, Roman History, LVIII.5.6, 11.5; Suetonius, Life of Tiberius, LXI.4, LXXV.2). Indeed, Suetonius relates that Tiberius actually prided himself for not having had his daughter-in-law Agrippina strangled and her body displayed on the Stairs, exiling her to Pandataria instead, where she starved herself to death. (LIII.2). Vitellius actually was tortured and killed on the stairs (XVII.2). The steps likely were an extension of the Gradus Monetae, which led from the Temple of Concord to the Temple of Juno Moneta, and may have been replaced altogether by the Scalae Gemoniae when Tiberius reconstructed the Temple of Concord, which he dedicated in AD 10. The name is not mentioned before Tiberius and, rather than derive from gemo, "I groan," as was popularly thought, or from some eponymous criminal, likely was a neologism of the time.
References: Juvenal and Persius (1918) translated by G. G. Ramsay (Loeb Classical Library); Titus Livius: The History of Rome (1912) translated by Rev. Canon Roberts; Sallust: War with Catiline, War with Jugurtha (1921) translated by J. C. Rolfe (Loeb Classical Library); Josephus: The Jewish War (1970) translated by G. A. Williamson, revised by E. Mary Smallwood; The Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus (1994) translated by Lewis A. Sussman; Tiberiana I: Tiberian Neologisms (2006) by Edward Champlin; C. Velleius Paterculus: The Roman History (1924) translated by Frederick W. Shipley (Loeb Classical Library); The Apocryphal New Testament: The Acts of Peter (1924) translated by M. R. James; The Roman Martyrs (2018) translated by Michael Lapidge.
See also Pandataria.
