Conclusions

Regulation of sexual behavior through law was common in all of the ancient societies surveyed here. Ancient sex laws tended to focus on a relatively narrow range of topics. They expressed particular interest in marriage and betrothal, as well as in adultery and concubinage, but took less notice of prostitution, rape, and gay sex.

All of these legal systems seemed more concerned about the impact of sexual relations upon the social order than with limiting or controlling sex acts in themselves. The stress that ancient law laid upon the property consequences of sexual relations is particularly striking. Lawmakers and jurists in antiquity also worried about the effects that extramarital sex might have upon social stability and used legal coercion as a weapon to combat the allures and temptations of nonmarital liaisons. Jurists were thus concerned that parents and elders should monitor the marriages and curb the sexual attachments of young people. Ro­man legislators and jurists displayed a firm resolve to use legal controls on sex­ual behavior in order to preserve the class structure. The law penalized those

^a36Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares 8.12.3; Suetonius, De vita caesarum, Domitian 8; Juvenal, Satires 2.43-47; Paulys Realencyclopadie der Altertumswissenschaft, ed. Georg Wissowa et al., 80 vols. (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler [imprint varies], 1894-1980; cited hereafter as Pauly-Wissowa) 12:2413 and Supplement 7:411; Veyne, “L’homosex- ualite,” pp. 28-29. Boswell, CSTAH, pp. 65-69, asserts that the Lex Scantinia had nothing to do with homosexual activity and attempts to explain away some of the evi­dence that supports the conventional interpretation of the statute, whose text, unfortu­nately, no longer survives.

²³⁷ Dig.

whose sexual adventures across class boundaries threatened the social order. The law likewise discouraged sexual opportunists from alliances with social groups other than the one into which they were born. In accordance with Ro­man social norms, sex laws also helped to reinforce male ascendancy. As Ulpian noted, men customarily demanded from their wives a standard of sexual con­duct that they did not observe themselves.^[238]

Sex law as a means of enforcing ethical standards played only a minor role in the earliest surviving legal texts. Societies in remote antiquity apparently per­ceived morality as the sum of the kinds of behavior that preserved the social order, as defined by their own elite; concern about sexual ethics figures only occasionally in legal regulation of sex in the most ancient sources. The connec­tion between religious norms and the legal regulation of sexuality was likewise weak in the ancient Mediterranean world. While religion might buttress so­ciety’s claims to penalize those whose sexual activities transgressed the ac­cepted standards of the elite groups, religious values had slight impact on the formation of those standards. Indeed, accounts relating the escapades of the deities often ran counter to the policies enunciated in society’s laws about sexual behavior. The gods themselves would have run afoul of the law had they acted out their mythical adventures in.the streets of Periclean Athens or Augustan Rome.

When Christianity emerged as the most favored religion of the Roman Em­pire during the early decades of the fourth century, many characteristic fea­tures of earlier legal regulation of sexual behavior in the Mediterranean world began to undergo profound and radical change.