Sorry for the vagueness, but I was talking to friends about how Crassus died, and we started talking about how cruel the romans were, which reminded me of a story I heard when I was in Rome.
I only remember it vaguely, but it was about how one time the romans massacred a village and in the same night had a very macabre banquet, involving the bodies of the victims? IDK if they burned them for warmth or something like that, does anyone specialized in roman history have an idea what this could be referring to?
This certainly refers to the allegation that the Roman Emperor Nero had Christians burned alive to light his banquet, as a punishment.
The story originated from an apparently genuine account - as Nero claimed Christians were responsible for the Great Fire of Rome.
This allegation is made in Tacitus and Suetonius was that the Great Fire may have been set by Nero, who wanted to clear out central Rome to build his ‘Golden Palace’. Nero then blamed the new sect of Christianity as scapegoats - and, according to Tacitus they were then executed with cruel tortures, including being burned alive to serve as nightly illumination in his gardens.
This later morphed in some accounts into Nero using human torches for banquets. Though the original notion was that it took place in a non-dining situation!
The scene, naturally, became (in)famous and was often depicted in later art as an example of Roman decadence and cruelty;