utricide

Maintenance of Empire

How many homicides are necessary on the periphery to ensure the free flow of wine to the center?

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“That I after the slaughter of so many enemies..might embrace..not an homicide but an Utricide.”

— Apuleius, 'Metamorphoses, The Golden Ass' (trans. William Adlington, 1566)

† utricide, n. Obsolete. One who stabs an inflated vessel of skin.