Five executions: vivid accounts from Plato to Flaubert

Public executions by poison, axe, guillotine and protracted torture have been used throughout history for social and political control.  Plato in Athens and Lord Byron in Rome witnessed executions.  Horace Walpole in London and Jack London in Tahiti were told about them.  Flaubert, writing about ancient Carthage, recreated them from a historical source.  These authors, fascinated by executions, dramatised how victims died and portrayed the shocking end of life.  Plato, a comrade of Socrates, is emotionally involved in his death.  Walpole is objective, even witty.  Byron, caught up in his own feelings, enjoys making the morbid experience come alive for his publisher.  London is outraged by the injustice and cruelty, by the belief that human life is expendable.  Flaubert combines the barbarism of foreigners with the operatic self-sacrifice for love.

In ancient Greece (399 BCE), Socrates was convicted of impiety and intellectually corrupting the youth of Athens.  He was sentenced to be poisoned by hemlock, which causes fatal seizures and respiratory failure.  Plato described the death of his beloved teacher and friend in Phaedo, in which Socrates has mastered the ars moriendi, the stoical acceptance of the inevitable.  He also hastens the procedure and willingly participates in his own extinction.  Addressing his companion and observer, he impatiently and insouciantly says, “Come, Crito, let us do as he says.  Someone had better bring in the poison, if it is already prepared; if not, tell the man to prepare it. . . . I should only make myself ridiculous in my own eyes if I clung to life and hugged it when it has no more to offer.”

When the executioner returns with the cup of poison, Socrates asks with good cheer, what next?  “Just drink it,” he said, “and then walk about until you feel a weight in your legs, and then lie down.”  When the poison circulates throughout his body, “it will act of its own accord.”  After praying for a prosperous removal from one world to the next, “quite calmly and with no sign of distaste, he drained the cup in one breath,” as if he were toasting a friend at a convivial banquet.  Crito and other witnesses, burst into uncontrollable tears that contrast to Socrates’ impressive self-control and are admonished by their master: “ ‘Really, my friends, what a way to behave.’  Socrates walked about, and presently saying that his legs were heavy, lay down on his back,” and gradually got cold and numb.  His last famous words to Crito were, “we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius,” the god of healing, a witty and ironic remark that suggests death is the best cure for life.  As the poison reached his heart, his eyes grew fixed and he was gone.

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In 18th-century England, Horace Walpole witnessed another political execution.  Though he had little sympathy for the two condemned men, he was (like Plato) fascinated by the procedure and the conduct of the victims.  The Lords Kilmarnock and Balmerino, enemies of King George II, were beheaded on Tower Hill in London on August 18, 1746.  They had played a leading role in the disastrous 1745 Jacobite Rising to restore the “Old Pretender” James Stuart, the Catholic son of the deposed King James II, to the English throne.

Walpole’s biographer R.W. Ketton-Cremer writes that “the stately ceremonial of a trial for high treason by the House of Lords, Kilmarnock’s good looks and Balmerino’s gallant bearing, the unfamiliar and almost medieval spectacle of their execution, stirred the imagination of the whole country.  Walpole excelled in these accounts, with their perfect ease of narrative, their exquisite selection and presentation of detail, their masterly balance between the solemnity and the triviality of which he was always so vividly conscious on these great occasions.”

Three days after the execution, Walpole described the event in a letter to Sir Horace Mann in Florence: “Just before they came out of the Tower, Lord Balmerino drank a bumper to King James’s health.  As they parted Balmerino embraced the other and said, ‘My Lord, I wish I could suffer for both!’ ”  Captured at the battle of Culloden, the 41-year-old Kilmarnock displayed dignity and contrition before a large somber crowd.  Walpole shows Kilmarnock’s mood changing from terrified to composed to reluctance to die, and the recantation of his Jacobite political views that had led him to the gallows.  He enhances his account with vivid details as the executioner tactfully hides the axe and the victim’s severed head hangs only by a shred of skin:

At last he came to the scaffold, certainly much terrified but with a resolution that prevented his behaving in the least meanly or unlike a gentleman.  He took no notice of the crowd, only to desire that the baize might be lifted up from the rails, that the mob might see the spectacle.  With a noble manliness stuck to the recantation he had made at his trial; declaring he wished that all who embarked in the same cause might meet the same fate.  He then tried the block, the executioner out of tenderness concealing the axe behind himself.  At last the Earl knelt down, with a visible unwillingness to depart, and after five minutes dropped his handkerchief, the signal, and his head was cut off at once, only hanging by a bit of skin, and was received in a scarlet cloth.

Walpole contrasts the dress and behaviour of the two noble lords.  Kilmarnock, frightened and contrite, is dressed in black, ignores the crowd, prays with the priest, kneels down properly and waits five long minutes.  The 58-year-old Balmerino, acting with defiant bravado and amazing indifference, defends the beliefs he’s prepared to die for.  He wears his colourful military uniform, scorns the crowd, refuses to pray, jumps around the block and immediately signals his death.  Like a bullring prepared for a second corrida,

the scaffold was immediately new-strewed with saw-dust, the block new-covered, the executioner new dressed, and a new axe brought.  Then came old Balmerino, treading with the air of a general.  As he walked from his prison to execution, seeing every window and top of house filled with spectators, he cried out, “Look, look, how they are all piled up like rotten oranges!”  He then surveyed the spectators, who were in amazing numbers, even upon masts of ships in the river.  Lying down to try the block, he said, “If I had a thousand lives, I would lay them all down here in the same cause.”  He said, if he had not taken the sacrament the day before, he would have knocked down Williamson, the lieutenant of the Tower, for his ill usage of him.

Walpole records the vivid details of the process and focuses on Balmerino’s bold character.  He tests the sharpness of the axe, questions the axe man and tips him to make a clean job of it.  He wears patriotic Scottish plaid, jumps energetically from one side of the block to another and orders his own execution:

He took the axe and felt it, and asked the headsman, how many blows he had given Lord Kilmarnock; and gave him three guineas.  Two clergymen, who attended him, coming up, he said, “No, gentlemen, I believe you have already done me all the service you can.”  Then he went to the corner of the scaffold, and lay down; but being told he was on the wrong side, vaulted round, and immediately gave the sign by tossing up his arm, as if he were giving the signal for battle.  He received three blows, but the first certainly took away all sensation.

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Lord Byron

In a letter from Venice to his publisher John Murray in London on May 30,1817, Byron relates how he witnessed public executions by guillotine in Rome, and tells the story as if it were a theatrical spectacle.  His lively style includes the bizarre appearance of the actors and horrific details of axe, blood and severed heads, and favorably compares the quick clean cut of the guillotine to the more protracted and painful English hangings.  His biographer Leslie Marchand writes that Byron, “irresistibly drawn by the macabre and the horrific, provided frank and excruciating details about the Roman drama.”  Walpole’s Scottish lords were required to act in a dignified manner; Byron’s Italian common criminal could freely express his terror.  Byron’s telegraphic bulletins read like dispatches from a war zone:

The day before I left Rome I saw three robbers guillotined—the ceremony—including the masqued priests—the half-naked executioners—the soldiery—the slow procession—& the quick rattle and heavy fall of the axe—the splash of the blood–& the ghastliness of the exposed heads.

Byron, with the Romantic poet’s interest in his own emotions, then moves on to contrasting the calm and the terror of the three criminals, the difficulty of placing the struggling subject and of getting his soon-to-be-separated head into the sacrificial position:

Two of these men—behaved calmly enough—but the first of the three—died with great terror and reluctance—which was very horrible—he would not lie down—then his neck was too large for the aperture—and the priest [who provided no comfort] was obliged to drown his exclamations by still louder exhortations—the head was off before the eye could trace the blow—but from an attempt to draw back the head—notwithstanding it was held forward by the hair—the first head was cut off close to the ears—the other two were taken off more cleanly.

Byron concludes by describing the effect of the execution on himself.   Quickly accustomed to the horrors, he was shamed by his surprising inhuman indifference:

The pain seems little–& yet the effect to the spectator–& the preparation of the criminal–is very striking & chilling.—The first turned me quite hot and thirsty–& made me shake so that I could hardly hold the opera-glass (I was close—but was determined to see—as one should see everything once—with attention) the second and third (which shows how dreadfully soon things grow indifferent) I am ashamed to say had no effect on me—as a horror—though I would have saved them if I could.

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Jack London’s “The Chinago ” (1911), the Tahitian name for the enslaved Chinese coolies who work in the cotton fields, is narrated from the character Ah Cho’s point of view.  He witnesses the murder of another coolie who is stabbed to death, insists he is innocent, but doesn’t understand his trial, which is conducted in French.  The authorities commit several mistakes: they make a clerical error in the death warrant that confuses him with the real murderer who has a similar name; they don’t care about the fatal error, assume he is guilty, eagerly execute the wrong man and close the case.  Ah Cho vainly protests, but passively complies with and even accepts the sentence.  He thinks, “It is quick—like that.  It is not like hanging on the end of a rope and kicking and making faces for five minutes.”

London describes the details of the execution, the victim’s thoughts and regrets as he closes and opens and again closes his eyes to lessen the sharp pain:

“Ah Cho allowed himself to be lashed to the vertical board that was the same size as his

body.  He felt the board tilting over in the air toward the horizontal, and closed his eyes.  And in that moment he caught the last glimpse of his garden of meditation and repose [where he had hoped to retire]. . . . He opened his eyes.  Straight above him he saw the suspended knife blazing in the sunshine.  Then he heard the sergeant’s voice in sharp command.  Ah Cho closed his eyes hastily.  He did not want to see that knife descend.  But he felt it—for one great fleeting instant.”

London portrays the indifference to human, especially Chinese, lives, and the brutal injustice of French colonialism in Polynesia.  The French have unjust laws, botch the investigation and don’t care which man is killed.

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Flaubert’s historical novel Salammbo (1862), set in 3rd-century BCE Carthage, describes a horrific execution that allows the public to participate in collective vengeance.  Matho, the defeated Libyan leader of barbarian rebels, is slowly tortured to death in a long series of cruel and ghastly details adopted from the Greek historian Polybius.  Flaubert seemed to take sadistic pleasure in recounting them.  The final chapter of the novel begins with an ingenious selection of the fiendish tortures available to prolong Matho’s agony and keep him sentient for as long as possible.  The authorities could flay him alive, pour molten lead into his entrails, starve him to death or have a trained ape beat him on the head with a stone.

The vengeful crowd, encouraged to take part in the public torture as Matho passes through the streets, have let their fingernails grow into claws so they can dig deeper into his flesh.  When he emerges from his dungeon, the mob reacts with orgasmic frenzy and fury:

“They felt with an almost religious fervour that this man’s body was essentially theirs, that by their hands alone he must suffer and die. Their curiosity had an almost sexual urge, and the shame they felt from this served only to increase their hatred.”

Matho remembers his past glory as he is dying, and his heroic capacity to sustain torture foreshadows Christ’s suffering on the Via Dolorosa: “They squirted drops of boiling oil at him through tubes; broken glass was strewn “under his feet, but still he walked.  The tendons of his wrists were now quite bare of flesh.  His mouth was wide open; flames seemed to dart from the sockets of his eyes and lick his hair—and still the poor wretch walked on.”

Just before his death the priestess Salammbo, his forbidden lover, appears and remembers the tender words she once spoke as he embraced her.  She longs to hold him once more and does not want him to die.  But at that moment he shudders for the last time, falls backwards and expires.  Then vengeance of the crowd and Matho’s heroic endurance of torture arouse our pity and sympathy, and he becomes the victim of illicit love.  Salammbo, losing her desire to live without him, dies right after Matho.  Two centuries later, in 146 BCE, Carthage was destroyed by Rome.

The descriptions by Plato, Horace Walpole, Lord Byron, Jack London and Gustave Flaubert express a range of emotions from fascination and fear and to outrage and horrified revulsion.  The reactions of these six authors vary according to their time and place, but all agree that watching the executions have a profound effect on their thoughts and feelings.  These writers portray the pointless cruelty and horror of the event.  Using morbid details, they emphasise their own emotional response, the victims’ brave or craven behaviour, the setting and the crowd, the slow build-up and the sudden extinction of life.

Sources: Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick (London: Penguin,1954), 181-183; Horace Walpole, Selected Letters, ed. W. S. Lewis (New Haven: Yale UP, 1973), 19-21; Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976), 229-230; Jack London, “The Chinago,” Short Stories (NY: Hill and Wang, 1960), 55-58; Gustave Flaubert, Salammbo, trans. Goodyear and Wright (New English Library, 1962), 241-247.

The Iranian film The Stoning of Sorya (2008) shows a woman buried vertically up to her neck and then stoned to death by a raging mob.

Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath in 2024.  Forty-Three Ways to Look at Hemingway  appeared in 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest will be out with Mercer University Press in April 2026.

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