From The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society, ed. P. Du Plessis, C. Ando, & K. Tuori (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp.322-32. Crimes against the Individual: Violence and Sexual Crimes Ari Z. Bryen Assistant Professor of History, West Virginia University Department of History 220 Woodburn Hall, PO Box 6303 West Virginia University Morgantown, WV 26506 Abstract: This chapter addresses two "crimes" against the individual: violation of his public face (iniuria), and violation of his household (stuprum and adulterium). More than mere prohibited offenses, these two types of harm came, during the crises of sovereignty of the late Republic and early Principate, to be potent loci for thinking about the ideal citizen, his political relationships, and the nature of the Roman state. Though these categories were linked together through doctrinal law, their impact is evident in a variety of texts from this period, and so demonstrate the ways in which "law" and "society" were deeply linked at the levels of the fundamental cognitive structures that enabled the Romans to make sense of their lived and historical experience. Keywords: violence, iniuria, adultery, stuprum, degradation, crime, personhood, existimatio 1. Introduction 1
One of the great joys of paging through Justinian's Digest is the wealth of detail it provides on the Roman world at work, in towns, cities, and countryside; like a Juvenalian satire, the jurists provide us with precious descriptions of bustle, shipping, and building; of buying, selling, and deal-making; and of the world of characters (some well-intentioned, others not) who populated this busy landscape. The corollary of this frenzy of activity was that the potential for harm abounded. At a particular horizon in Roman history, however, a distinct class of harmful acts began to emerge. These acts were understood not to inflict loss, but rather to wound a person's existimatio-his public face.1 The term alerts us that these special types of harm were held to affect more than a person's private subjectivity, but affected rather a person's place in society; if left unavenged or at least without rectification, they were understood to degrade not the perpetrator but the victim. It is therefore unsurprising that, in a society in which slavery was endemic, these were harms that could be felt primarily by free people; slaves and the slavish were generally denied the "ordinary luxury of negative reciprocity"-the ability to avenge these offenses and mark themselves as being redeemed from degradation.2 Intentional, degrading treatment of the person and his household (especially in the form of adultery or illicit sexual liaisons with his other family members) emerged as an intellectual and political problem in Roman legal thought starting at the end of the Republic, pari passu with the crises of sovereignty that paralyzed the Roman state. Starting in this period Romans of the literate class took a new interest in personal harms, and the concepts of citizenship and membership that underwrote them, producing a view of the citizen that in some aspects very much resembled his sovereign, and vice-versa: an intact representative of his