The lex Iulia de adulteriis of 18 BCE, which for the first time made adultery a
criminal offence and created a standing court, was touted by the Augustan regime as a
return to the moral customs of the Republican past. However, the new reform in fact
represented a significant shift away from the traditional authority of the Roman
paterfamilias to punish transgressions privately at his discretion and towards the legal
power of the emperor and Senate to define and regulate morality on a public scale. Using
a variety of primary source evidence, I explore the provisions of the adultery law and
place the resulting criminal trials within the context of public staging of the Roman
aristocracy. In this way, the adultery law forms part of a larger trend of elite moral
regulation becoming public spectacle. / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/3341 |
| Date | 02 June 2011 |
| Creators | Deminion, Mary Alana |
| Contributors | Rowe, Greg |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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