When I was just a little girl, I was a polite and tactiful one, so when I must walk under the crosses, lifted near the city gates, I always had been lowering my head and I focused on watching carefully my sandals. Of course, I couldn't forget the painful cries and groans of the crucified slaves, which filled me with fear and detestation.
When I was sixteen and still a modest and nice teenager myself, for the first time I saw the crucified man. It was one of the foreign small traders, a swarthy Jewish guy who killed one of his countrymen with a knife and was sentenced as a criminal. I saw him naked, covered with sweat and dirt, trembling and shaking his body like a man suffering chorea. He was extremely disgusting, but I cannot forget his sight, with mouth opened wide and absolutly crazy facial expression.
For the next few years I tried to not pass through the Southern Gate when the executions were held there in order to avoid such unpleasant and inaesthetic view.
The following years made me less shy and timid, and few times I watched the convicts dying on their crosses, sometimes with curiosity, however without any pleasure. Nearly every month our authorities sentenced some disobedient slave or two, or sometimes a highwayman caught in act, to be crucified, so as the years passed it became more and more routine to me and my curiosity vanished.
Later I left my city and moved to the provincional oppidum near the Gaelic borders, inhabited by some two thousands people, where the crucifixions were very rare due to the small community, in spite of it's international scent.
Of course, all the crucified I had been seeing were men. I heard about the mass executions somewhere and sometimes I wondered if it is possible to nail females to the crosses, and how could the woman like me look and feel beeing crucified, but I preferred not to use my imagination to its extents in this case. The idea of the woman being hammered to the wooden beams looked to me twice disgusting and more cruel than possible, so I was sure I'd never meet one. I never wondered if they would scourged her before and I never imagined that she wouldn't be given at least a loincloth or a piece of rug to cover her lower belly. It seemed to me that I would never met a crucified woman in my life and I found this assumption satisfying.
I was right and I was wrong in the same time, however. Literally, I never MET a woman hanged on the cross. I BECAME the very first crucified woman in this town myself!
Now I know that they scourge women the same as they scourge men, and that they abuse them and rape if possible, and that they hammer them to the wood with nails as they hammer men, and finally that they hang the women in the nude and in public, and that the crucified women are covered with sweat, dirt and blood and that they are nasty, disgusting and stinking, that they squeak and cry with heir mouths open wide, wild eyes and crazy facial expression.
But the price I paid for this wisdom was the highest possible. I experienced it all on myself...!