Hell Hath No Fury is an extraordinary and rich book. In it, Henning touches upon the extent to which across early Christian literature, damnation is described using particularly, and sometimes peculiarly carceral language.[1] For my part, I want to examine some of the evidence for the material realities of punishment in the Roman world, exploring a few spaces that bring archaeological and affective texture to the penal and carceral language informing tours of hell to which Henning so insightfully points in her book. Rather than reviewing the book, then, I will use Hell Hath No Fury as a jumping off point, and present something of an appendix. My thesis is this: Henning has impeccable historical intuition. Even without detailed archaeological knowledge of ancient prisons, she managed to divine that early Christians used what they knew of prison architecture to imagine what hell looked like, and what it was like for people inside.

Throughout the book, we find important statements about the relationship between discursive realities, social realities, and facts on the ground. For instance, in the introduction, Henning offers that “Imaginary spaces and otherworldly beings are precisely what gives apocalyptic literature the ability to critique and transform real social spaces and figures in the contemporary world… The tours of hell, then, lie at the intersection of ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ spaces and bodies in antiquity… The texts that describe hell are grounded in the spaces of everyday life, and at the same time seek to creatively transform those spaces” (12–13). Henning argues persuasively that when ancient Christians imagined hell, they imagined it as a form of incarceration, using stereotyped images of the prison as a set for scenes of infernal torment. This is undoubtedly true, and given that it is true, paying close attention to the material realities of ancient prison facilities may help us to spot the stock images, and separate them from purely imaginative or discursive productions. Noxious gases and worms make a hell of lot more sense as features of hell if hell is something like an ancient prison, as I will argue below.

If I have a complaint, it is that the book does not explore those “spaces” themselves. Books can not do everything, and it would be unreasonable to expect an already expansive work to push further, into the world of archaeology. But that is what these forums are for, so that is what I intend to do with my short contribution: to explore some of those spaces of punishment that serve as the material backdrop for the literary productions engaged by Henning’s book. In the end, I will suggest that carceral facilities do not merely stand as the evocative stage on which an infernal drama played out in late ancient apocalypses, but that the production of apocalypses may have actually inflected carceral practices themselves when Christians went from the position of carceral subject to leading a carceral state. Here I want to talk about three things: outer darkness, blindness, and care for the poor.

To start: Henning points rightly and cleverly to the fact that brugmos in Matthew 8:12, while an uncommon word, is probably best translated as “chattering” teeth rather than the typical translation of “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” This is a rather plainly a carceral image. On this reading, Jesus’s conversation with a Roman centurion in Capernaum ends in a scene of eschatological inversion: the soldier representing an occupying force is held up as a model of exemplary faith — faith of the sort held by people “from east and west,” who “will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” Jews lacking such faith, Jesus predicts, will be subject to the carceral condition that the centurion himself escaped through faith: they “will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and chattering of teeth.” It will not have escaped an ancient audience that one of the chief tasks of the Roman army in occupied lands was precisely building, maintaining, and staffing the prison. Henning is right to point out that image presented by Matthew’s gospel, where there is “weeping and chattering teeth,” is an image evoking the material realities of the ancient prison — and indeed from the Ptolemaic period forward, one of the most common complaints that we hear in prisoner letters is that the prisoners are cold. (There is, in fact, a single source for the idea that ancient prisons are hot: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity.)

Rather than Matthew’s chattering teeth, I want to talk about to skotos to exōteron “the outer darkness.” Because, as best we can tell, typical civic prisons across the Roman world had a space that could be described in precisely this way. The figure above presents a floorplan of the civic prison of the ancient city of Cuicul, built in the mid-second century CE (Modern-day Djemila, Algeria). At the top of the figure you can see a bit of the decumanus — one of two main roads through the heart of the city — which opens through a gate to a small antechamber. Another gated threshold separates the antechamber, likely a guard post, with a large vaulted chamber visible at the bottom right of the figure. Another gated door connects this first cell of the prison with the second cell, lush with vegetation today because the ceiling has fallen in, but which in antiquity would have received almost no light whatsoever. The first chamber, on the other hand, would have received only as much light as seeped in through the prison’s single entrance.

Viewed from the position of the incarcerator, then, the prison has two parts: one closer, “inner” cell which received some light from the street, and a second “outer” cell, in which prisoners languished in total darkness while they awaited trial in the civic basilica above. An “outer darkness,” if you will. Henning is right to point out that the people in the outer darkness are cold — their teeth chatter — and an architectural understanding of Roman carceral practices demonstrates that the “outer darkness” itself is another heavy-handed hint that the Gospel of Matthew presents a rather unimaginative vision of hell as eschatological prison.

As Henning persuasively argues, “…the outer darkness of hell makes the tormented bodies there blind, thereby concretizing and intensifying the ancient links between light, cognition, and the soul. Physical blindness is the eternal artifact of spiritual blindness” (89). To this I would add that, often, physical blindness is the immediate artifact of incarceration — and ancient doctors and architects knew it. To start with the doctors: in the second century CE, Galen discusses the use of light to torture and blind prisoners who had been kept in the dark for extended periods. In his second century CE On the Usefulness of the Parts, he remarks:

And I dare say have you never heard that Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily, built a chamber above his prison — a chamber that was completely covered with shining chalk and very bright in other respects too — that he brought his prisoners up into this chamber after a protracted stay below and that they, coming into bright light from deep, long-continued gloom would of course gladly look up to the light and as they did so, would be blinded, unable to endure the sudden, instantaneous onslaught of brilliance (10.3, Translation Margaret Tallmadge May).

The cruelty of prolonged time in darkness even animates the law of Constantine from 320 CE on the treatment of civic prisoners, where the emperor decrees:

…Nor indeed ought he to suffer, while shut up, the darkness of a windowless room but be invigorated by resort to sunlight. And when night doubles the needs of detention, he ought to be brought to the prison entrance and placed in a healthy spot. When day returns, at sunrise, he ought to be immediately led back to the sunlight. The idea is that he not perish from the punishments in prison, which is regarded as pitiable for the innocent, but not sufficiently severe for the guilty (CJ 9.4.1, translation Blume/Freier).

Galen’s story and Constantine’s legislation not only assume that prisons were typically dark underground spaces, but they indicate that this material reality was common knowledge. The doctor deploys his story to highlight the Sicilian tyrant’s cruelty, but one securely identified Roman prison appears to have architectural elements designed precisely to allow prisoner eyes to adjust slowly as they moved from the dark underground of the prison to the light of day. Which brings me to another “outer darkness” — this one darker and outer-er than the civic prison of Cuicul.

The civic amphitheater of Carales (modern-day Cagliari, Sardinia) includes two prisons: one for the gladiators who battled beasts, convicts, and each other in the amphitheater’s central cavea, and one for the people condemned to die in those fights. The gladiator prison is cut directly into the bedrock and includes anchors along three of its four outer walls, used affix people to the space with ropes or chains attached to their fetters. A small trough runs the length of the gladiator prison and attaches to two pits used as latrines for the fighters who sat in this space, deep underground lit only by a skylight some five meters above their heads, waiting for their turn in the arena while their fecal matter festered. Noxious gases and worms (intestinal, rather than earth) would not be the most surprising feature to hear of in such a space — as common in hell as prison, it seems.

There is another prison in this complex, one built in a disused cistern attached to the amphitheater’s central cavea by a 100-meter-long aqueduct. It is the breathtakingly cavernous prison for the condemned—50 meters in length, with ceilings 12 meters high. The walls of this space boast dozens of small anchors for passing chains or ropes through, post holes for seating platforms, and dozens of small inscriptions underneath these anchors: inscriptions left by prisoners who sat in the dark, underground chamber waiting for their turn to battle the gladiators or the beasts incarcerated elsewhere in the facility.

As scholars often attest, literary and juristic sources want us to believe that, by the fourth century, such spectacular punishments as public execution in the amphitheater had largely been phased out. This rosy ideal of a reformed Christian empire, however, runs into problems when we include non-literary evidence. Evidence like this faint graffito, scratched into the wall with poor tools and little light by someone attached to the anchor that is directly above it.

Image courtesy Mauro Dadea. Published in Dadea, Mauro. *L’anfiteatro romano di Cagliari.* Sardegna archeologica Guide e itinerari 38. Sassari: Delfino, 2006, 85 fig. 37.

While the graffito is difficult to make out in person, the drawing makes clear that it was in fact left by a Christian, who scratched the outline of a boat into the wall, with alpha and omega dripping off a mast topped with a Christogram, and twelve oars reaching out from the inside, perhaps one for each of the canonical apostles. The graffito includes a small Greek inscription reading ιαν, and a number of other interesting features that we unfortunately do not have space to treat here.

The presence of a Christogram renders rather unequivocal that this is at least a fourth century graffito, and probably from the middle of that century. This is perhaps the last evidence of a Christian condemned to die in the amphitheater. They may have been held there for only a few days, in preparation for games, or they may have been there for months or years — we do not know. What we can know, however, is that they had an approximately 100-meter walk from the prison in which they were apparently chained up to the amphitheater cavea where they, in all likelihood, met their death. And crucially, that 100-meter walk includes an architectural feature with the effect, and perhaps also the intention, of allowing a prisoner’s eyes to adjust slowly from the outer darkness of the prison to the light of the amphitheater’s cavea — avoiding precisely the blinding effect to which Galen speaks.

Here is a video of this walk, lit by a small light attached to my camera. You will see some settling tanks for silting, leftovers from the time when this passageway was an aqueduct transporting rainwater from the amphitheater to the cistern at its end. As we walk through, you can see two skylights which let light filter in from above, with the effect of allowing a prisoner’s eyes to adjust as they transit from the prison to the amphitheater. Seeing these spaces helps bring affective texture to ancient literary depictions of prison and hell, and the apparently real experiences which underly both. It is even possible that influence flows not only from the social and material to the literary and discursive, but the other way around — at least by the Theodosian Age, when virulently Nicene Christians took the reins of power as a ruling elite for the first time.

The prison was a site of social contestation across the ancient world, and we catch glimpses of local efforts at prison reform in the second and third centuries CE, along with as more centralized packages of legislation aimed at curbing the prison’s worst excesses. The peculiar lumpiness of the archive, however, means that our first full view of prison reform legislation comes from late fourth and early fifth centuries, collected in the Theodosian Code of 438 CE and amended in several Novellae thereafter. As Henning notes, among infernal tour literature, the single most common rationale for torment in a carceral hell is failure to care for the poor. In the Theodosian Age, we see legislation related to care for the incarcerated: not the first legislation of that sort, but the first legislation of that sort which explicitly connects state-based care for the incarcerated body as a mandate stemming precisely from the Christian duty to care for the poor. In a law of 409, the emperors Honorius in the West and Theodosius II in the East decreed:

On every Lord’s day, judges…shall cause food to be supplied to prisoners who do not have it, since two or three libellae a day, or whatever the prison registrars estimate at decreed, by the expenditure of which they shall provide sustenance for the poor… For there shall not be lacking the laudable care of the bishops of the Christian religion which shall suggest this admonition for observance by the judge (CTh 9.3.7, Translation Pharr).

In the early 6th century, the Breviary of Alaric added a gloss (interpretatio) for readers in the west, adding that food should be provided to prisoners specifically by Christians, and “in consideration of religion (religionis contemplatione).” There is much to say about this passage — about the increasingly visible and effective control over the prison by the prison commentarienses (prison registrars) in Late Antiquity, about the interimplication of ecclesiastical and judicial duties implied by the last line of the 409 law, and above all about the assumption that people in prison do not have food because they are destitute—an emic logic which bears out a social phenomenon visible across the documentary archive. It was poverty, above all, that rendered ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean victims of the prison.

Matthew Larsen and I write more about each of these aspects, and all the examples above, in our forthcoming Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (University of California Press, 2024). Here I want simply to flag that notions concerning the relationship between poverty, Christian duty, and incarceration do not necessarily flow in one direction only; in Theodosian Code 9.3.7 we may have evidence that these otherworldly narratives did something in this world, too — they reflected a social imaginary in which failure to care for the poor in this life resulted in carceral hell in the next. This is a different sense of the common refrain in Henning’s book, that apocalyptic texts “both reflect and construct lived reality” (83). It is possible that they did more than just construct a lived reality narrated in literature — it is possible that they inflected lived reality at the level of legislation and daily life.

[1] This topic is covered well in Matthew Larsen’s forthcoming Early Christians and Incarceration (Oxford University Press, 2023), so I will not reduplicate his efforts here.

Mark Letteney is an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.