"Get the Sack"

Anyone who killed his father, mother, or another relative was subjected to the “punishment of the sack” (poena cullei in Latin). This allegedly involved the criminal being sewn into a leather sack together with four animals – a snake, a monkey, a rooster, and a dog – then being thrown into a river.  The epitome of Livy’s History from the Foundation of the City records that in 101 B.C.:

"Publicius Malleolus, who had killed his mother, was the first to be sewn into a sack and thrown into the sea."

There is no mention here of any animals in the sack, nor do they appear in contemporary evidence for legal procedure in the late Roman Republic. The animals are attested in a passage from the writings of the jurist Modestinus, who lived in the mid-third century A.D.:

The penalty of parricide, as prescribed by our ancestors, is that the culprit shall be beaten with rods stained with his blood, and then shall be sewed up in a sack with a dog, a rooster, a snake, and a monkey, and the bag cast into the depth of the sea, that is to say, if the sea is near at hand; otherwise, he shall be thrown to wild beasts, according to the constitution of the Deified Hadrian.