Violence against women in ancient Rome
Generally, due to a collective imagination built around Roman sources, series and films, we tend to think of Roman families of happy marriages and loving mothers, or violent emperors, but with everyone. Perhaps we think of family intrigues, or violence against slaves. It is visible violence and, perhaps for this reason, we also tend to forget about more everyday violence, one that seems to only be talked about in recent years, when it is no longer acceptable for your husband to hit you “as normal.” However, when you scratch the surface a little, another reality begins to emerge. One in which cruelty was normalized, although, as in all societies, there was also criticism.The paterfamilias had extensive power over his family unit. He had the power of life and death over whoever was in his charge, although that does not mean that he could murder at will nor that the regulatory BTC Users Number Data framework did not try to limit this authority. An adult child had to be heard before he could be executed, for example, and the reasons had to be minimally justified. Even so, the women who participated in the Bacchanals and were judged for it were executed by their families and not by the State, unless there was no one to take charge.
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A husband could only legally kill his wife on some occasions, for example, if he caught her in adultery , as could a father who caught his daughter in the same situation. Of course, if the husband was the one surprised, the wife had to keep quiet and that was that. Justinian's code (5, 17, 8), which tightened the conditions for divorce, allowed a woman to still ask for a divorce if her husband had tried to kill her, or if he whipped her. However, in the latter case only because the whipping was unworthy of a free woman, not because of the punishment itself.
Now, habitual abuse was not broadly illegal. Saint Augustine, in his Confessions of Him, spoke about her mother and how the other women were surprised that her husband, with the character he had of her, did not beat her more. Monica's advice is a decalogue of what any abused woman does. Not raising complaints openly, getting things by suggesting them only when he was in a good mood, always being alert to his desires... It did not always work, and a papyrus from Oxyrrinchus (6.903) has preserved for us the desperate complaints of a woman who not only cried because her husband beat her, but also because she had stripped and branded her daughters and tortured her slaves. Agustín also commented on the marks of the blows on the faces of his mother's friends; It was his fault, he claimed, putting the words in her mother's mouth, for not serving her husbands well.
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