Ajax and Hercules finish tying Lucilla's right foot to the cross, and with that, she is crucified. Naked and utterly humiliated, she hangs on her cross, working harder and harder for breath as the minutes drag slowly by. The rough end of the sedile prodding her bare buttocks is a reminder of her nakedness and its presence as her only hope for a way to relieve the strain on her arms and legs.
Sabina describes what she saw:
In a few moments they were done; she was crucified. Hercules nailed the titulus with her name and sentence on it to the post below her, since there was no good place to hang it above her head.
Groans and occasional screams of agony came from the throats of the men crucified on either side of Lucilla. Having exhausted himself with his frenzied struggles, Publius fainted from the pain when the cornu rammed into his podex.
Albanus, no longer pleading his innocence, was begging anyone who would listen for the mercy of a dagger to end his suffering. Someone in the crowd shouted to him that he didn’t bring his blade with him, but he’d be back in three or four days and he’d be sure to bring it if Albanus still wanted it then.
For what seemed like a long time, Lucilla simply hung there, resting her head on one shoulder or the other as the pain of hanging by her wrists slowly got worse. Even though she had not been nailed to her cross as were the two men, the cramping in her arms, shoulders and chest must have been fierce. I could only guess that having spent so many agonizing days on the cross already – certainly more than any living person, she had learned the futility of struggling against the torture and exhausting herself.
The crowd characters in the previous scene were actual 3D figures that would look ok from any angle; the ones in this scene don't. These are essentially 2D figures like cardboard cut-outs, something I created to save storage and enable these scenes to render in a reasonable time on the PC I had up until the end of 2012. The one I have now, which I built in early 2013, can easily handle very large scenes, so later renders usually have decent-looking crowd figures in them.
Also note Lucilla's titulus. which is readable in this picture:
The Latin says "Lucilla condemned to be crucified twelve times," and below that is a series of marks which actually indicate how many times she has been crucified. These markings are what is known as "tally marks." In the US and maybe in a lot of western countries, we use "stick counting" where we make four vertical marks and then a diagonal across those to indicate a set of five items.
But in Roman times, it was done a bit differently. Romans, and many other ancient cultures, used tally sticks to keep count of numbers of livestock, slaves, sacks of grain, amphorae of wine, etc. They made cuts across the stick to mark each item they were counting, and made an upside-down "V" for every fifth one, an "X" for every tenth one. Some theorize that this was the basis for Roman numerals.
I figured that her executioners would use this system on Lucilla's titulus rather than trying to show the number of times she'd been crucified in Roman numerals. So her titulus shows that she's already been crucified five times; this is her sixth time. Yes, I know I'm anal but I tend to think of details like this.
