In the ancient societies of Egypt, Greece and Rome, torture was an accepted aspect of the legal system. Gillian Clark says violence was taken for granted in the fourth century as part of both war and punishment; torture from the "carnifex," the professional torturer of the Roman legal system, was an accepted part of that system. Except for a few rare exceptions, such as the Persian empire under Cyrus and Darius, Denis Lacorne says that examples of religious tolerance in ancient societies, "from ancient Greece to the Roman empire, medieval Spain to the Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Republic", are not examples of tolerance in the modern sense of the term.