Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [140]
The princeps felt that this was unsatisfactory. According to his new law, an offended husband was obliged to divorce his wife immediately and then prosecute her for adultery in a special court. Penalties included banishment and confiscation of half the male lover’s property (if the couple were caught in flagrante, the husband was allowed to kill him). The woman was forbidden to marry a freeborn citizen in the future.
The law was not quite so severe in practice as appears at first sight, for unless a husband divorced his wife, she could not be prosecuted. A husband who took no action could be charged with condoning the offense, but only if he had actually caught his wife with another man, or if he could be shown to have profited by her activity—say, by pimping for her.
These were both unlikely circumstances and, in a generally permissive climate, it is uncertain that many husbands took advantage of the new legislation. They may have reflected that they themselves might be caught by it if (as was not uncommon) they were conducting an affair with a married woman. According to Suetonius, this was a situation in which Augustus often found himself. Moral campaigns are most likely to succeed if led by someone who has nothing with which to reproach himself.
Unsurprisingly, the princeps faced skepticism and laughter at his philandering. Unfazed, he advised senators to “guide and command your wives as you see fit,” he said. “That is what I do with mine.”
The amused senators pressed the princeps to tell them exactly what guidance he gave Livia. He uttered a few unwilling words about a modest appearance and seemly behavior, but seemed quite untroubled by the inconsistency between his words and deeds.
On another occasion, when Augustus was sitting as judge, a young man was brought before him who had taken as wife a married woman with whom he had previously committed adultery. This was most embarrassing, for it was exactly how the princeps had behaved when he married Livia in 38 B.C. Uncomfortably aware of the coincidence, he recovered his composure only with difficulty. “Let us turn our minds to the future,” he said, “so that nothing of this kind can happen again.”
A lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus addressed the low birthrate in the upper classes (if Suetonius is to be believed, the general population was rising). It was revised in A.D. 9 as the lex Papia Poppaea; exactly what was in the original legislation cannot now be certainly known, but the general thrust was philoprogenitive.
The legislation set penalties for bachelors and childless couples, mainly limiting their right to inheritance under wills. After divorce or widowhood, women were expected to remarry within a fixed time. There were incentives, too: a father of one child was allowed to stand for public office one year earlier than the age stipulated in the regulations. The siring of three children (four in Italy outside of Rome; five in the provinces) exempted a man from certain legal duties.
How effective were his measures? No statistics survive; we have only anecdotes. The literary record gives the impression that, legislation or no legislation, many men of the ruling class did marry and have children. Perhaps some took their time before doing so, but a glance at the family trees of leading personalities shows that most of them produced two or three children who survived to adulthood, and some had larger families (Agrippa, for example, fathered five children).
On the other side of the account, piquantly, Marcus Papius Mutilus and Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus, the consuls who brought in the lex Papia Poppaea, were both unmarried, as unkind observers noted. Augustus and Livia were childless, albeit involuntarily, and for all his fine words Horace never married.
Over the years the legislation was repeatedly reviewed and amended, which rather suggests that those against whom it was aimed found their way around its prohibitions.
Roman society depended