When the Romans designed crucifixion as their means of capital punishment, they had more in mind than simply putting someone to death. They wanted to accomplish something else too, namely, to make this death a spectacle to serve as the ultimate deterrent so that anyone seeing it would think twice about committing the offence for which the person was being crucified.
So crucifixion was designed to do a couple of other things beyond simply putting someone to death. It was designed to inflict the optimal amount of pain that a human body could absorb. Hence, they sometimes gave morphine to the person they were executing, not to lessen his pain, but to keep him conscious to feel more pain. Perhaps most cruel of all, crucifixion was designed to utterly humiliate the body of the person being executed. So the person was stripped naked. Is there a humiliation worse than this?
