Decimation: From Crassus's Lottery to Cadorna's Firing Squads in 1917

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Decimation, from the Latin for the removal of a tenth, was described by Polybius as a lottery in which one in ten men of a disgraced unit was clubbed to death by his own comrades, while the survivors ate barley and slept outside the camp walls. Historians doubt it was ever routine in the early Republic. Livy's case from 471 BC under Appius Claudius contains anachronisms, maniples of 120 to 200 men could not spare the losses, and provocatio gave citizen soldiers the right of appeal. The practice likely survived as an aristocratic myth until Marcus Licinius Crassus revived it in 72 BC against men who fled from Spartacus.

Once Crassus broke the seal, Caesar, Mark Antony, Octavian and Galba all used versions of it, until the professional army made it untenable and Emperor Maurice banned it in the Strategikon. Early modern generals reading the same classics brought it back: royalist officials decimated the Huguenot garrison of Brouage in 1577, Wallenstein hanged one in ten of a fleeing regiment after Lützen in 1632, and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm had 90 of Madlo's men chosen by dice after Breitenfeld in 1642. In the First World War Luigi Cadorna used lotteries and firing squads until he was sacked after Caporetto.

Antony's decimation after defeats against Parthia and Media in 36 BC killed around 80 men.
Emperor Macrinus tried a diluted version that executed one man in every hundred.
For Madlo's regiment, an executioner from Prague did the killing instead of the soldiers themselves.
In July 1917, 16 men of the Catanzaro Brigade were chosen by lot and shot after a night revolt.
Leon Trotsky twice ordered every tenth man killed in units that retreated on the Volga front.

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