Throughout history Man has shown extraordinary imagination in inventing penalties and sentences for crimes committed by fellow man. The Romans in particular had an almost theatrical quality in the way these punishments were dolled out. One of the worst was reserved for parricide—the killing of a parent— in which the prisoner was placed in a sack with several live animals and thrown into the water: the poena cullei, or “penalty of the sack”.
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The German philosopher Erich Fromm said that we are "the only animal that enjoys doing evil to its own kind without any rational biological or social benefit". But sometimes there was, and still is, a moral pretext: the defense of society. Aristotle himself affirms in his work Politics that the most necessary public position is that of a jailer, while Pío Baroja, through the mouth of a character in his novel La lucha por la vida, equated the office of executioner with those of priest, military and magistrate, as supports of society.
In this sense, patricide was considered a particularly infamous crime in ancient Rome (and earlier in Greece, as evidenced by the myth of Oedipus or the harshness with which Solon treated it), where the character of Tulia the Less was a figure of unfortunate memory. As almost everything in the monarchical stage, history and legend intertwine and there remains a mixed narrative of how the youngest daughter of the sixth king, Servius Tullius, not only participated in the conspiracy to assassinate her father and get her second husband, the future Tarquinius the Superb, to ascend the throne, but also desecrated his corpse by driving over it with a chariot.
It must be understood that the Roman family was the basic cell of society; it was a vast institution that grouped the members of the family, but also those adopted and even servants, and was under the absolute authority of the pater familias, whose patria potestas allowed him to dispose of the lives of all those dependent on him. Therefore, to kill him was revealed as an atrocious act in the personal but also in the social sphere and the state had to act accordingly. The Lex duodecim tabularum (Law of the XII of Tables) defined parricide as the voluntary homicide of parents by their children.