The Ancient Roots of Doing Time

Tales of past incarceration, which mightiness erstwhile person seemed the worldly of legend, crook out, again and again, to person an archeological foundation. Plutarch, the first-century Greek historian, described the misery of a captive successful the Greek municipality of Messene; modern excavations person confirmed his relationship down to the details. A communicative by the Greco-Roman satirist Lucian, meanwhile, assumes the beingness of established protocols for seeing prisoners, including fixed visiting hours—assumptions that marque consciousness lone if specified routines were portion of civic life. The rules of Roman sentencing whitethorn person been imprecise, but beingness sentences surely existed, and the prisons were genuinely residential, not simply meant for holding radical earlier execution.

People knew astir incarceration. Seneca, the Roman philosopher and dramatist (and tribunal counsellor), argued that punishment should beryllium proportionate to the crime, and resisted the conception that each discourtesy required execution. Some crimes, helium claimed, called for small much than “a backstage rebuke followed by nationalist disgrace”; others warranted exile, chains, and imprisonment. In an inscription from the 3rd period C.E., a captive named Theodorus acknowledgment the gods aft having served a word of twenty-two months successful a civic prison—proof that “doing time” was not an invention of the modern era. Graduated, reform-minded incarceration, Larsen and Letteney insist, was contiguous much than a millennium earlier the Foucauldian exemplary says it was born.

Indeed, immoderate of the astir enduring myths of antiquity—often retold, adjacent much often depicted—make consciousness lone against the backdrop of semipermanent imprisonment. The communicative of Pero and Cimon, for instance, is arsenic potent arsenic it is oddly Freudian: Pero, a young woman, visits her starving father, Cimon, successful a situation and sustains him with her ain bosom milk. The country appears successful Roman frescoes, including a surviving illustration successful Pompeii, and aft the Renaissance it became a staple of Western art—Rubens, naturally, offered his ain disturbingly fleshy version. The communicative continued to beryllium cited and pictured arsenic an exemplar of Roman charity, but the fable couldn’t person taken basal if the thought of Cimon’s agelong condemnation hadn’t resonated with an past audience. (The celebrated Gospel occurrence featuring Barabbas—the captive whom Pilate offers to speech for Jesus—depends connected the plausibility, for a second-century audience, of prolonged imprisonment with the anticipation of parole.)

Ancient prisons, of course, had their ain distinctive character. Most were underground, similar the Tullian successful Rome—buried chambers with small airy oregon air, and lone the astir rudimentary latrines. (One imagines a Foucauldian past of sewage and sanitation, which mightiness beryllium much pivotal successful the shaping of civilization than instrumentality oregon punishment.) Certainly, the stench of antique prisons is the ascendant enactment successful the past reporting. And, though the microbial mechanisms of illness were unknown, it was evident that these circumstances were insalubrious successful the extreme; a acceptable condemnation could easy go a decease sentence.

“No. Have you tried crossed the street?”

Cartoon by Edward Steed

Even that condition, though, is acquainted from the debtors’ prisons successful Dickens, depicted successful the midst of Victorian prosperity. The ambiance of past prisons recalls the ones successful “Little Dorrit” and “The Pickwick Papers”: situated successful the mediate of the city, with a comparatively transparent membrane betwixt the streets and the cells, allowing affluent missive writers and provisioners casual entree to those inside. There was a benignant of changeless civic bargaining betwixt guards and prisoners, depending connected societal presumption or, much to the point, the wealth that 1 had for bribes and favors.

In the end, Larsen and Letteney marque their polemical constituent unambiguously plain. “The modern prison,” they write, “is not a caller operation but an aged and haunted house.” For each the differences betwixt past and modern practice, they conclude, “some aspects of incarceration person appeared successful each Mediterranean nine for which we person humanities data.” Turning decisively against Foucault, they constitute that incarceration whitethorn beryllium “a facet of each hierarchical, analyzable society.” In different words, it’s ever been with us.

What’s astatine involvement successful this survey is much than the information oregon falsity of Foucault’s relationship of modern incarceration. It is our representation of past itself, and of however incommensurable 1 play genuinely is with another. Under the power of Foucault and his contemporaries, galore scholars dainty the alleged dialog of the dead—the imagined transition backmost and distant betwixt eras—as a benignant of pious fiction. Where the 3rd Annales schoolhouse spoke of mentalités, a shared formed of caput oregon sensibility, Foucault projected a much extremist concept: the episteme, a substance not of shared science but of the governing rules and structures that find what tin beryllium thought oregon said astatine immoderate fixed moment. We are arsenic closed disconnected from the ancients’ mind-set arsenic firmly arsenic they are from ours; their assumptions and tacit expectations astir the bid of things are mislaid to us.

It seems imaginable that prisons existed astir arsenic an afterthought to Roman theories of law. In Andrew M. Riggsby’s “Crime and Community successful Ciceronian Rome,” for instance, we are fixed elaborate studies of immoderate of Cicero’s surviving ineligible arguments successful defence of Romans accused usually of precocious crimes, similar extortion and conspiracy. There seems tremendous and striking contemporaneity successful the benignant of reasoning Cicero uses—sometimes appealing to the missive of the law, sometimes to a larger model of societal good, truthful that an accused who tin beryllium shown to person done overmuch bully successful the past ought to beryllium acquitted of a presented misdeed. But determination are fewer references to what volition hap to the accused aft they are convicted oregon acquitted. The supple flexibility of Cicero’s arguments is immensely impressive, and truthful is the consciousness that the jury—albeit a selective one, of high-ranking Romans—will truly perceive to the arguments arsenic arguments, and that the inactive animating enactment thought of the regularisation of law, alternatively than the diktat of the emperor, genuinely matters to the outcome. But the aftermath is blurred. Capital crimes entail execution oregon exile, presumably, but the conception of authorities retribution seems absent from the sermon of idiosyncratic defense. (Cicero himself, of course, yet ended up executed, headless and handless, a unfortunate of the caller imperial perfect of justice.)