Were there any contemporary critics of decimation? Did fear of it or response to it every spark mutiny?
>>920276
>Did fear of it or response to it every spark mutiny?
If you get decimated it means you've already mutinied, and you were captured, so you're not exactly in a position to revolt again.
>>920303
Wouldn't that still be incentive for the survivors to desert?
>>920338
Well it was a very rare punishment you know, and only reserved for very bad cases.
You'd be surprised to know how harsh your fellow man can be when you really misbehave. Deserters and mutineers threaten and endanger the whole army with their action, they're a threat to fellow soldiers as much as they are to the officers. When it was really warranted, the men (outside of the culpable unit of course) didn't object.
It's pretty common to see soldiers wanting harsh discipline actually. When you look at famous mutinies in other parts of history, you'll see that even when let to their own devices soldiers tend to practice real harsh discipline, like the mutinies of Spithead and the Nore, where british sailors kept to navy discipline in most ships and lashed offenders as harshly as their aristo officers used to.
>>920276
>Were there any contemporary critics of decimation?
I read somewhere that people were quite shocked when Crassus actually used decimation on his troops after that particular unit was routed by Spartacus.
>Did fear of it or response to it every spark mutiny?
Doubtful. Most mutinies that I have read involved the legions killing their commander in favor of a new one. Decimation was mainly reserved for running away in battle, something which the Romans were notoriously resistant to. Let us not forget how horrible decimation actually was: 1/10 soldiers in a unit would be bludgeoned to death by his fellow comrades with sticks, rocks and fists. Not too pretty.
I wouldn't say it was disapproved of, considering Roman military honor was a source of immense importance in their culture, where men would drunkenly sneak out of camp to burn enemy fortifications in order to win a wreath of plants, start wars over lost eagle standards, or crucify those who fell asleep on guard duty.
>>920276
As far as I'm aware decimation was an already arcane form of punishment by the time of the roman expansion outside of italy with only a handful of mentions after that point. All of these mentions IIRC talk about it is as something tremendously harsh and frightfully terrible, which I myself can only liken to how historians now adays talk about the institutional use of torture in ages past.
>>920276
No. Decimation virtually never happened. Fuck, we have one incident where TEN men were put to death because people had forgotten what decimation actually was-the punishment hadn't been used for centuries.
Legionaries were expensive, you didn't piss away 10% of what you had left every time they ran off.
>>920276
Why is that guy so short?
>>924368
He's about to get a lot shorter too.
A good scene of Decimation is from the film "The Fall of the Roman Empire" made in 1964.
52:50
https://youtu.be/CWEzpuuTE_Y?t=52m50s
>>920276
When I look at the face of the kneeling all I can hear is...
STANDING ON EDGE OF THE CRATER...
>>924407
>This video contains content from Paramount Pictures, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.
weak
