Public torture and displays of power constituted Roman imperial sovereignty

Evidence

Historians of late antiquity have made us familiar with the fact that sovereignty in the early Roman empire was realized to a great degree through public demonstrations of the emperor’s power and munificence. The theatrical torture of certain categories of criminal was part of this necessary display of power. Famously, among those so tortured were the early Christian martyrs. Judith Perkins in her book The Suffering Self states that early Christian martyrologies “refuse to read the martyrs’ broken bodies as defeat, but reverse the reading, insisting on interpreting them as symbols of victory over society’s power.” Far from shunning physical suffering, the martyrs actively sought to live it. Like Christ’s passion on the cross, the martyrs’ passivity was an act of triumph. That openness to pain was precisely part of the structure of their agency as Christians. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 417

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s sacrificial-death and power-display interests; the theatrical public torture as sovereignty display parallels the spectacular violence dynamics in Rejali-style histories of torture.