I remember an afternoon from youth when a bunch of hooligan friends and I roamed a network of stinky ponds behind the local armory. We were traversing a boggy area in search of frogs when one of my less coordinated friends stumbled into a rotted tree trunk. The consequences were immediate. A cloud of wasps and other winged freaks of nature rose up over the pond and descended, in arrow formation, toward the interlopers.

I escaped the wrath of wasps because when it comes to matters of self-preservation, I can move quicker than any of your popular jungle cats. The boy who had caused the calamity in the first place had no such grace. As he fled, he stumbled into the green bog where the army of insects took advantage of his slowed mobility. They stung him on the eyelid, on the lip, several times in the armpit. For days, that kid would avoid bathing until he eventually earned the nickname “Rank,” which somewhat ruined his life.

It was bad out there around the reeking ponds but all things are relative. In ancient Persia, for instance, the stinging agony might have gone on for days or weeks while crowds stood and cheered from the banks.

Woe to anyone who offended the lawmakers back in old Persia. There, they employed a form of punishment called “Scaphism,” where the source of the offense was stripped naked, force fed milk and honey, and bound in a boat or a hollowed out tree trunk. He was then smeared with more honey and set adrift on a stagnant pond, preferably under a hot sun. The ingestion of milk and honey would cause almost immediate diarrhea and soon, the doomed man’s vessel of pain would be filled with an effluvium of stinking body waste.

The honey and feces would attract a good variety of insects, including mosquitoes and wasps which would descend upon the bound man. Some of those bugs would simply feed off the dying man, which would evoke incredible pain and discomfort. Others would breed within his skin, laying eggs in the increasingly gangrenous flesh.

In records of this form of execution, one man was said to have lived 17 days under these conditions. It is hard to compile a list of what types of agony would be involved. The heat of the sun upon sticky flesh. The stingers and proboscis of insects burrowing into all parts of exposed skin. The ever roiling stomach heaving and emptying all contents of the stomach and bowels and then heaving some more. Death would come slowly, the result of starvation, dehydration and septic shock.

Variations of Scaphism included a simpler method of simply immobilizing a man, smearing him with sweetness, and leaving him for colonies of voracious ants. Another involved sewing up a victim inside a dead animal — a donkey or a horse — and placing the carcass in an open field. There, the condemned man would endure searing heat inside the foul smelling animal, and suffer non-stop attacks by carrion eaters such as vultures, wolves and other beasts with sharp talons or fangs.

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