Apparently, in Ancient Rome, a slap on the wrist wasn’t enough to punish bad behaviour. In the military, a tactic called Decimation was used, whereby every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort - hence the term, which derives from the Latin meaning “removal of a tenth”.

If you were facing Decimation, your greatest hope would be that your commander lost count along the way. Still, that might not be in your favor. The earliest instance of decimation on record occurred in 471 BC when consul Appius Claudius Sabinus Regillensis punished his men for desertion.

But it didn’t end with the downfall of the empire - in fact, decimation happened in the Italian Army as recently as 1916, when one in ten soldiers of a 120-strong company were killed for mutiny.