Sisamnes

Sisamnes, according to Herodotus's Histories, book 5, chapter 25, was a corrupt royal judge active in the Persian empire during the reign of Cambyses II. When Cambyses learned that Sisamnes had accepted a bribe to influence a verdict, he had him arrested and sentenced to be flayed alive, then had the flayed skin cut into leather strips. Cambyses appointed Sisamnes's own son Otanes as his father's judicial successor and ordered the new judge's chair draped in the strips of his father's skin, so that Otanes would continually be reminded, while seated to deliberate and deliver judgment, of what happened to corrupt judges. Otanes later became a satrap in Ionia. The story was retold by the first-century Latin author Valerius Maximus in his Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, with the detail that the skin was stretched across the chair rather than cut into strips, and it became a canonical exemplum of judicial integrity referenced by later writers and artists.