Note 298 — Chapter LVIII · FROM THE RESOLUTION OF THE ATHENIANS TO ATTACK SYRACUSE, DOWN TO THE FIRST WINTER AFTER THEIR ARRIVAL IN SICILY.

Considering the extreme alarm which then pervaded the Athenian mind, and their conviction that there were traitors among themselves whom yet they could not identify, it is to be noted as remarkable that they resisted the proposition of their commissioners for applying torture. We must recollect that the Athenians admitted the principle of the torture, as a good mode of eliciting truth as well as of testing depositions,—for they applied it often to the testimony of slaves,—sometimes apparently to that of metics. Their attachment to the established law, which forbade the application of it to citizens, must have been very great, to enable them to resist the great special and immediate temptation to apply it in this case to Mantitheus and Aphepsion, if only by way of exception.

The application of torture to witnesses and suspected persons, handed down from the Roman law, was in like manner recognized, and pervaded nearly all the criminal jurisprudence of Europe until the last century. I hope that the reader, after having gone through the painful narrative of the proceedings of the Athenians after the mutilation of the Hermæ, will take the trouble to peruse by way of comparison the Storia della Colonna Infame, by the eminent Alexander Manzoni, author of “I Promessi Sposi.” This little volume, including a republication of Verri’s “Osservazioni sulla Tortura,” is full both of interest and instruction. It lays open the judicial enormities committed at Milan in 1630, while the terrible pestilence was raging there, by the examining judges and the senate, in order to get evidence against certain suspected persons called Untori; that is, men who were firmly believed by the whole population, with very few exceptions, to be causing and propagating the pestilence by means of certain ointment which they applied to the doors and walls of houses. Manzoni recounts with simple, eloquent, and impressive detail, the incredible barbarity with which the official lawyers at Milan, under the authority of the senate, extorted, by force of torture, evidence against several persons, of having committed this imaginary and impossible crime. The persons thus convicted were executed under horrible torments: the house of one of them, a barber named Mora, was pulled down, and a pillar with an inscription erected upon the site, to commemorate the deed. This pillar, the Colonna Infame, remained standing in Milan until the close of the 18th century. The reader will understand, from Manzoni’s narrative, the degree to which public excitement and alarm can operate to poison and barbarize the course of justice in a Christian city, without a taint of democracy, and with professional lawyers and judges to guide the whole procedure secretly, as compared with a pagan city, ultra-democratical, where judicial procedure as well as decision was all oral, public, and multitudinous.