Note 11 — Chapter X · Ancient Punishments.
Reading edition
John’s “Babylonian Laws,” etc., Josephus; Matthew, XVIII., 6.
The Emperor Tiberius, after torturing the victims of his wrath, cast them into the sea, where they were drowned. Sueton. Tiberii, lxii; Lea, “Superstition and Force,” (3 ed.) p. 377.
In France, death by drowning was inflicted upon the incontinent, as late as the sixteenth century and it was revived again during the revolution by the infamous Carrier, at Nantes, in the eighteenth century.
Ninety priests were loaded into the gabare and sunk in the river Seine. Then a hundred and thirty-eight persons were similarly drowned, but the gabare was soon done away with and men, women and children were stripped naked and thrown into the river, in broad daylight and not even under the cover of darkness. They were tied together, feet and feet and hands and hands, and in their hideous death struggles they churned the water, for the edification of the cruel crowd, until the last poor struggler had sunk to his final rest. (See article by W. H. Davenport Adams, “Pains and Penalties,” in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 46, p. 362.)