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Background and History 5 Demosthenes lauded the practice, asserting “wherever slaves and free men are present and facts have to be found, you do not use the statements of the free witnesses, but you seek to discover the truth by applying torture [basanos] to the slaves. Quite properly, men of the jury, since witnesses have sometimes found not to have given true evidence, whereas no statements made as a result of torture have ever been proved untrue” (Wis- newski 2010: 17). As we’ll see throughout this work, advocates of torture, from Demosthenes to Alan Dershowitz (2011), fre- quently assert that torture can be relied upon to elicit accurate testimony. Unfortunately for the backers of the use of the rack, the weight of historical evidence over the last several thousand years supports the opposite conclusion. Indeed, a brief examination of how basanos worked in most cases exposes the defi ciencies in the process. “Th e owner would normally hand over his slave to his opponent, who would administer the [ basanos] usually in the form of whipping or beating, though the rack is also mentioned-while asking the question that had been agreed to. Th ere was no limit to the duration of the beating or the number of blows rather, the interrogation was supposed to continue ‘until the slave seemed to tell the truth,’ and at any time the owner could object to the severity or to other aspects of the interrogation and withdraw his slave” (Gagarin 1996, 1–18 ). In other words, whether a slave was testifying truthfully or not, their owner always had the ability to terminate the interro- gation, since the slaves were, after all, the owner’s property. Th is may have been one of the reasons why the Greeks—and later, the Romans—had their doubts about the effi cacy of torture as a means for compelling testimony or eliciting information (Peters 1985, 34). The Roman Republic In contrast to Greek practice, at fi rst the Romans restricted the application of torture to slaves who were defendants in 4148-1156f-Printer Pdf-001-r01.indd 5 4148-1156f-Printer Pdf-001-r01.indd 5 12/24/2019 11:33:54 AM 12/24/2019 11:33:54 AM