Wikimedia Commons
Iran executes two men convicted of passing coordinates of military sites to Israel's Mossad, as executions mount during the war with Israel and the US Iran hanged Omid Behzad and Pouria Safvat after convicting them of espionage and collaboration with Israel, its judiciary said, accusing them of transmitting the coordinates of sensitive military and security sites to Mossad. Executions on spying charges have accelerated since the war with Israel and the United States began in February. The judiciary did not say when the two were arrested or tried. Analogies The Catilinarian conspirators, betrayed by intercepted letters, strangled in the Tullianum There is a place in the prison, which is called the Tullian dungeon, and which, after a slight ascent to the left, is sunk about twelve feet under ground. Walls secure it on every side, and over it is a vaulted roof connected with stone arches; but its appearance is disgusting and horrible, by reason of the filth, darkness, and stench. When Lentulus had been let down into this place, certain men, to whom orders had been given, strangled him with a cord. ... On Cethegus, Statilius, Gabinius, and Cæparius, punishment was inflicted in a similar manner.
Sallust, The Conspiracy of Catiline, chapter 55, trans. John Selby Watson (1899). Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University. (The conspirators were undone when their letters to the Allobrogian envoys of a foreign power were intercepted at the Mulvian Bridge.) → The Rosenbergs, executed for passing atomic secrets to a foreign power Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for allegedly transmitting United States atomic-weapon secrets to the Soviet Union, and were sent to the electric chair at Sing Sing prison on June 19, 1953, despite worldwide clemency appeals. As in Iran's spy trials, the charge was that ordinary citizens had handed a hostile power the most sensitive coordinates of national security, here the workings of the atomic bomb. The National Archives holds the trial evidence and the once-secret grand jury transcripts that document the case.
The Rosenberg Grand Jury Records and trial evidence, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg espionage case (1951–1953). U.S. National Archives (Records held at the National Archives at New York). → Thirty pieces of silver: the betrayer's wages and end Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, And said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him. ... Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.
The Gospel According to Saint Matthew 26:14–16, 27:3–5, King James Version (1611). Wikisource. → "Yet each man kills the thing he loves": the condemned awaiting the rope The man had killed the thing he loved
And so he had to die.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.
Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). Project Gutenberg, ebook #301. → Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey Delaroche's vast 1833 canvas freezes the instant before the axe falls: the blindfolded seventeen-year-old queen, condemned for treason after only nine days on the throne, gropes for the block in luminous white satin while an attendant guides her hands and the executioner waits with his axe. By turning a state execution into an intimate, almost unbearable human moment, the painting makes the political victim into a trembling body, much as accounts of prisoners led to the gallows compress a whole apparatus of power into one condemned figure.
Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833), National Gallery, London. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. → Callot, The Hanging, from Les Grandes Misères de la guerre In this 1633 etching, the eleventh plate of Jacques Callot's series on the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, a great tree becomes a mass gallows: dozens of condemned men dangle from its branches while soldiers, a priest, and dice-throwing onlookers cluster below. The tiny, teeming figures make wartime execution look industrial and routine, punishment meted out by armies far from any courtroom, an image that resonates with a surge of hangings carried out amid a nation at war.
Jacques Callot, "La pendaison" (The Hanging), plate 11 of Les Misères et les malheurs de la guerre (1633). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. → 
.jpg)
