Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (16 page)

Vistilia blew it for everyone: Her ploy in court failed, and she was exiled to an island and most likely stripped of her citizenship. Her husband, the latest of six, was also called into court to explain why he had let her cheat on him without divorcing and prosecuting her. He barely escaped a pimping charge. The Senate also decreed that all women whose fathers, grandfathers, or husbands were knights were barred from trying to register as prostitutes. If the shame of being a prostitute were not enough to keep women from downgrading themselves, the law would have to do it for them.
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While women were trying to expand their sexual opportunities by becoming prostitutes, wellborn men were taking up acting and gladiator fighting. Regulations were in place as early as 38 BC to keep them off the stage and out of the arena, but the laws were unevenly enforced. In 11 AD, the restriction was lifted for a short time, at least with regard to the equestrian class:

The knights—a fact which may cause surprise—were allowed to fight as gladiators. The reason for this was that some were making light of the disfranchisement imposed as the penalty for such conduct. For inasmuch as there proved to be no use in forbidding it, and the guilty seemed to require a greater punishment, or else because it seemed possible that they might even be turned aside from this course, they were granted permission to take part in such contests. In this way they incurred death instead of disfranchisement; for they fought just as much as ever, especially since their contests were eagerly witnessed, so that even Augustus used to watch them.

When they weren’t granted special exemptions, some nobles tried to avoid restrictions on participating by downgrading themselves through morality convictions. In 19 AD—the same year the temple of Isis was destroyed and Vistilia exiled—this practice was also banned.

The degradation of the upper ranks wasn’t always voluntary. Messalina forced matrons to work in her bawdy house, and the emperor Nero made compulsory prostitution for elite women and children into feature attractions for public amusement. He also forced one thousand senators and knights of “unblemished reputation” to fight in the arena. The emperor Caligula famously opened a brothel in his palace, in which he required the wives and daughters of Rome’s foremost families to work. The attraction of such spectacles for the public was the sight of high-ranking people brought low. It was a turn-on for some aristocrats; for the rest, it was the worst kind of humiliation.

Caligula did not set up the brothel just to amuse people. He also used the entire prostitution trade to bulk up tax revenues. Under his rule, a novel prostitution tax was imposed (in 40 AD). The tariff was based on what an average prostitute would charge for sex, probably on a per-day basis. All prostitutes were charged the tax regardless of how many clients they saw. For those working constantly or at high rates, the tax was just another cost of doing business. A little more work or a price boost could meet the government’s demands. For part-time prostitutes, on the other hand, or for those at the tail end of their earning power, the tariff was crushing. Even those who had left the business were charged. At first, professional tax farmers made collections, but soon too much money was being lost along the way from the bed to the treasury. The military picked up the effort with brutal efficiency: Soldiers could be depended upon to know where all the prostitutes near their posts were located, even the part-timers, and to keep the money safe.

Rome’s early Christian emperors also depended on the prostitution tax, even as they were embarrassed by it. The levy was collected until 498 AD. Prostitution was a direct violation of the Christian ban on fornication, among other things, but the emperors chose to make small tweaks rather than frontal assaults on the trade. Male prostitution was supposed to be forbidden in the third century AD after the emperor Marcus Julius Philippus saw a hustler who resembled his son, but the practice continued, and was taxed for a long time afterward. In the fourth century, Constantine ruled it illegal for nuns to be put in brothels. He also denied honors to upper-class men who produced children with prostitutes. At the same time, he treated prostitution mostly as an urban zoning issue, creating a special red-light district in Constantinople and forcing all harlots to stay within its confines.

It was not until the deeply religious sixth-century Byzantine emperor Justinian that prostitution was forbidden, when brothels were banned in Constantinople and brothel-keepers fined. The money was used to help prostitutes start new lives. Pimps were flogged and expelled from the city, slave prostitutes were freed, and freeborn women were released from brothels. Justinian took a special interest in the subject at the insistence of his wife Theodora, a reformed prostitute herself. She urged him to give Christian mercy to fallen women—whether they wanted it or not. Justinian and Theodora converted a palace high on the bluffs above the Sea of Marmara into the Convent of Repentance (
Metanoia
), where about five hundred former marketplace prostitutes were forced to live chaste Christian lives. Many of them were so unnerved by this mandatory conversion into nuns that they threw themselves off the cliffs and into the water below.
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FAMILY VALUES, ROMAN-STYLE

Before Christianity arrived with its odd notions of penance and salvation, there was no need for the law to “reform” anyone for his or her sexual misdeeds. People did what their social positions allowed. If they went too far, they stood to be punished, not changed. Slaves, actors, and prostitutes were there to be used. Male citizens could take whoever was available to them, and married women were to be protected from themselves. Messalina, Julia, and Vistilia notwithstanding, most freeborn women saw themselves as the opposite of prostitutes. If they did not always stick close to their husbands, they at least reached a sexual accommodation with them.

There was no abundance of love between husbands and wives. Marriage and family didn’t exactly fall out of fashion as the Republic gave way to the empire in the last century BC, but neither were they always seen as necessary. When people did marry, sensual affection often had nothing to do with it. Married men and women shared the same bed only when required to get the business of procreation done. Divorce was easy, families were small, and spouses pursued sexual affairs with little hesitation. Much of what we would now call adultery happened in the household, with men taking advantage of slaves of both genders and generating a confusing muddle of offspring. The man of the house might take his pleasure with his servant woman, her daughter, and her son at the same time—all of whom might technically be his children. Such complications didn’t matter, legally or morally, because slaves and the children produced with them were beneath concern: That was what they were there for.

As in ancient Greece, with all of this sex available to Rome’s men, wives were just one choice among many. By the time Augustus put forth his landmark “family values” legislation, the population of Rome’s upper classes was on a troubling downward trajectory. No one could stop high infant mortality rates or short life spans, but Augustus believed the state could at least influence the production of more freeborn children.

In a collection of laws first enacted in 18 BC, Augustus encouraged the “right” kind of reproduction between the “right” sorts of people. First, he provided a powerful incentive for freeborn men to find and keep acceptable wives: Men older than twenty-five who did not stay married until they were sixty, or married too far beneath them, lost their inheritances and were heavily taxed. Those who married and did not have children only received a fraction of their legacies. Couples with children who survived infancy were rewarded. The laws also freed up the ranks of ex-slaves as acceptable mates for most upper-class people, which made it much easier to find a husband or wife.

Augustus’s plans received a cool reaction from senators, who had no interest in being told whom or when to marry or in losing any part of their inheritances. Augustus’s marriage to his second wife, Livia, with whom he had no children, was itself a violation of the laws he was advocating, and no example of righteous living, for when Livia wasn’t procuring girls for Augustus he took them himself, even if they were married and from the upper orders. (Mark Antony accused him of taking a woman from her husband at a banquet and returning her, some time later, with “red ears” and her hair in “great disorder.”) The difference between Augustus’s personal habits and the ones he imposed on the upper classes earned him a lot of gibes. He took them in his stride, letting senators say their piece and then appealing to their practical natures:

If we could survive without a wife, all of us would do without that nuisance; but since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather than for our temporary pleasure.

The laws went further than encouraging marriage and children. They also laid out a fearsome set of punishments for upper-class Romans who had sex outside prescribed channels. Traditionally, that was governed by custom and enforced by the (male) head of a household. Lucretia’s father, for example, consulted no law books before he killed his unchaste daughter. It was his right to do it. The women arrested in the bacchanalia scandal were sent to their families for punishment. Now, adultery and transclass sex were made public crimes, punished by the state in special courts.

Men were still allowed to sate themselves with prostitutes, actresses, and long-term concubines, but the new laws explicitly barred them from having sex with other men’s wives or daughters. If they did so, they risked being brought to court on adultery charges, losing much of their property, and being banished to an island.

As always, men who seduced protected women risked violence by the women’s men, but the new laws limited the scope of revenge. If the woman’s father caught the adulterous couple in the act, he could still kill the lover on the spot, but the father also had to kill his daughter. The seducer had a better chance of keeping his life if the husband caught him. Unless the woman’s lover was an actor, prostitute, or pimp, the husband was not allowed to kill him. However, the husband could still do the man harm by raping him, serving him up to his slaves for rape, or shoving a foreign object in his anus. The husband could also castrate the seducer if he wished, and send him out of his house a bloody eunuch with no trace of manliness left.

Most Roman men were not as cruel as this, and many seem to have made their peace with their wives’ affairs, but the new laws brooked no tolerance. Husbands were forced to renounce and prosecute their wives when they discovered adultery, or face charges themselves. A man who overlooked his wife’s dalliances was worse than a cuckold; he would now be considered a pimp. One senator who did bring adultery charges against his wife was still charged with procuring, because he did not formally divorce her. The laws left men who traveled for a living at an obvious disadvantage, which is why the Senate later rejected a proposal barring wives from accompanying their husbands on provincial assignments. Women were distractions on the road, but because “it is the husband’s fault if the wife transgresses propriety,” argued the consul Valerius Messalinus, a husband should at least have the opportunity to keep his wife close by and prevent trouble.

The Augustinian adultery restrictions were marketed as an effort to rebuild the strict morality of Rome’s rustic early days. Augustus drew a bright line between good and bad behavior, especially for married women. Once a wife was branded as an adulteress, she would be forever downgraded to the rank of prostitute, regardless of whether or not she had ever charged money for sex. From that point forward, she was forced to wear the prostitute’s toga and was barred from remarrying within her former social class. Like the actors and other
infames
—who were now her equals—she would henceforth be sexually available to all, and subject to physical abuse. That may have been a kick for Vistilia and her ilk, but it was not for the majority of wellborn Roman women, who did not want to be robbed of their money or their inheritances. There is evidence that some adulteresses were forced to work as prostitutes until as late as 394 AD, but even if they were not compelled to earn their living selling sex, they had few other practical choices.

MORAL REFORMS ALWAYS generate victims, but they rarely change the public’s day-to-day behavior. The Augustinian rules, like other sexual dictates from above, merely highlighted the differences between what people do and what they are
supposed
to do. The laws generated thousands of adultery lawsuits, but they neither raised birthrates nor renewed a sense of sexual honor among the upper classes. Augustus set no lasting example by banishing his daughter and granddaughter for engaging in “every form of vice.” Indeed, the excesses of Messalina, Caligula, Nero, and the rest occurred in the decades after Augustus’s laws were passed. Tiberius banished Vistilia and crucified the priests of Isis, but his own habits during his retirement on the island of Capri were probably more influential. Not only did he pay to have boys nibble his thighs while he swam, he also developed a fetish for debasing highborn women—even driving one to kill herself rather than submit to his adulterous demands.

It took the adoption of Christianity in Rome, centuries after Augustus, for men to feel tangible restrictions on their sexual freedoms. Saint Augustine’s injunction to married women against allowing their husbands to fornicate would have been laughed at in pre-Christian Rome, but starting with Constantine, who converted the empire to Christianity, such sentiments resonated. The emperor tried (with limited success) to forbid married men from taking concubines, and tightened rules on male adultery. By the following century, a husband’s adultery would become grounds for a woman to divorce him and take back her dowry.