With the setting of her titulus at the top of her cross, Sabina's executioners have completed the work of crucifying her and she has begun the slow agonized struggle that will wring her life out, drop by drop. Now all of her weight hangs by the cold iron nails driven through her wrists and feet; her only possibility of any rest will come when she is desperate enough to fit the horn of the cornu between her legs either into her rectum or vagina; and the final humiliation is the sign above her head that tells everyone who she is and what she did to deserve this punishment.
Julia Lepida remarks on how many have died on this cross, and how the nail holes from their crucifixions are all beyond her fingertips and below her feet. She is the smallest of all of the victims who have agonized their lives away on this cross.
These timbers had held many tortured criminals and slaves before her; the gods only knew how many, but there were at least a dozen nail holes in the broad patches of dried blood beyond her fingertips and twice that many in the blood-soaked wood below her toes. Those who had struggled their lives out on this cross had all been much larger than either of us.
She and I had watched many crucifixions back in Pompeii, but those were all slaves and criminals that meant nothing to us, a morning’s entertainment. As horrible as the cross was, everyone accepted its torture as the fitting punishment for slaves, the slower the better, with death merely being the end of their punishment. A victim who died after suffering only two days on the cross was said to have died rather quickly.
Is it just me,
or does the presence of another nude and suffering victim nearby somehow increase the eroticism?