What Does torture Mean
From the Latin supplicium , torture is a torment or pain, either physical or moral. The term can refer to bodily injury or even death that is inflicted as punishment , or to the place where an inmate suffers this punishment. For example: "The condemned man lived a long torture before he died" , "It was an ordeal to have traveled twenty hours under these conditions" , "I want the torture to end at once" .
The concept usually refers to torture or a bad moment that a person experiences due to some circumstance. An ordeal can be linked to deep pain or discomfort , so its significance, in everyday language, is quite broad.
It can be said that a subject who is going through a severe illness is experiencing torture: "Michael has been hospitalized for eight months and cannot breathe on his own, so we pray every night that his torture ends" , "Luckily the The intervention was a success and the torture is a thing of the past ” .
Suffering a tragedy can also be understood as an ordeal: "I have lived a daily torture since an unconscious ran over my son" , "This ordeal will not end until the body of my niece appears . "
Sometimes the ordeal is nothing more than a bad moment , without actually turning into something truly tragic: “Did you ride the subway first thing in the morning? It is an ordeal that I would like to avoid ” , “ Getting you to be served in this restaurant is an ordeal ” .
The examples presented up to the previous paragraph show that the use of this term is truly broad, since it can be used both to describe an authentic tragedy that generates very deep pain in those who must go through it as an annoying situation but without much importance or significance , such as be the ineptitude of an employee in a store or the delay caused by a traffic jam on a large avenue.
The term torture can also be used as a synonym for the death penalty (also known as execution and capital punishment ), a measure used to cause the death of a person sentenced by the State, as the maximum punishment for having committed a capital crime. With the exception of Belarus, the death penalty has been abolished in Europe and its practice criminalized, and the same is true in much of the world, although it is still allowed in countries such as Japan, Botswana and the United States.
The torture of Tantalus
Tantalus is the name of one of the sons of Zeus, according to Greek mythology, and his story has a truly terrifying ending, as he ended up being sent to Tartarus, the bottom of the Underworld, where the wicked receive terrible punishments for their crimes.
After being invited by Zeus to share the table with the gods of Olympus, Tantalus did not hesitate to tell mortals about his experience or reveal secrets that they should not know. Also, as if he had not shown enough signs of disloyalty, he decided to steal ambrosia and nectar to support his story with irrefutable evidence.
But this is nothing compared to his subsequent crimes , such as having offered his own son as a plate of a feast for the gods, butchering him and serving it himself. Zeus, tired of the atrocities and lies of Tantalus, crushed him with a stone and sentenced him to eternal torture.
The torture of Tantalus consists of spending eternity in a lake, with water up to his chin, under a menacing rock that hangs over him and a fruit tree that moves away every time he tries to eat one of them: to pay for his mistakes You will forever suffer intimidation and the inability to satisfy your hunger and thirst.