Did Paul Blame Victims of Sexual Assault? (Part One)

Consent, Culpability, and Coercion in a Roman Context

In 1 Corinthians, Paul spends a lot of time talking about sex.

He chastises the Corinthian church for tolerating a case of sexual misconduct so bad that even their Roman neighbors would’ve gasped in horror (1 Corinthians 5). He blasts a group of churchgoing men for frequenting prostitutes (1 Corinthians 6:12-20). He takes almost a whole chapter to talk about issues related to marriage (1 Corinthians 7).

I wrote my MA thesis on sex and slavery in 1 Corinthians. And I’ve written here about the brutality of Roman slavery. As a rule, the enslaved experienced sexual abuse. That means that the Corinthian church almost certainly included sexual abuse victims facing ongoing violation—today, we would classify them as victims of sex trafficking.

In my research, I had to face searing questions: Did Paul blame these victims? Did he view them as complicit in their own violation? Or did he understand them as both victims of violence and honored members of the body of Christ?

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

We’re starting a series—I think four posts, though it may turn into five—on Paul’s understanding of sexual consent. This week and next, we’ll set the table by looking at Paul’s cultural context: Is it historically plausible that Paul could have distinguished between coercive violation and consensual sex?

To answer that question, we’ll look at consent, coercion, and culpability in both the Roman and Jewish worlds, the two cultural streams that most influenced Paul’s worldview. Today, we’ll examine what the Romans thought.

Why is this background information important? Well, we can’t read our modern-day notions of consent back into the ancient world. The ancients asked fundamentally different questions about sex than we do. Exploring this context will tell us about the cultural water that Paul swam in. From there, we’ll be better positioned to interpret what he says in 1 Corinthians.

So, let’s dive into the murky water of the ancient world.

So … What Did the Romans Think?

When the Romans talked about sex, they cared far more about honor, status, and power than they did about consent.

In our world today, the existence of any power dynamic raises suspicions about the possibility of full and free consent—in most corporate workplaces, a supervisor can get fired for engaging in a sexual relationship with a subordinate, for example.

But for the Romans, moral sex required a power dynamic. They treated sex, in a sense, as a picture of proper social order. I can’t be clear here without being a bit crass: The “real man” was always the penetrating partner, never the passive one; he always sexually penetrated someone less powerful than himself—usually a woman or a slave.¹ Structuring sex in this way reinforced the Romans’ hierarchical social order.

At the same time, we cannot imagine that the Romans were ignorant of distinctions between consensual and coerced sex—their laws and stories demonstrate that they were well aware of the difference.

Roman Law

In Paul’s day, rape was a crime—sometimes.

Several laws addressed sexual violence against women,² but the identities of perpetrator and victim (rather than the details of the assault) dictated the severity of the offense. Of utmost importance was the relationship between the perpetrator and victim—did the perpetrator have a “right” to the woman’s sexuality? A woman’s husband or enslaver couldn’t be prosecuted for forcing himself on her.³ (But free Roman women controlled their own money—if they had any—and could initiate divorce for any reason, which gave them some leverage.)

The Romans divided women into two categories: honorable and honorless.⁴ Honorable women (which, in this context, means free Roman citizens of good reputation) had more protection under the law, but they could be criminally prosecuted for engaging in adultery or premarital sex. Honorless women (especially prostitutes and the enslaved) lacked these basic protections but couldn’t face criminal prosecution for their sexual conduct.

A man who raped an honorable woman committed a criminal offense—and the rape was prosecuted as a form of violence rather than as a form of sexual immorality.⁵ Rape victims were not legally or morally blamed⁶—which is to say that they weren’t prosecuted for engaging in illicit sex. But they still faced social consequences—the loss of their reputation as honorable women and a sharp drop in their status. Even experiencing street harassment could damage a woman’s reputation—so she (or her male guardian) could sue a man for harassing her.⁷

But enslaved women had no reputation to defend—and the law didn’t care about their well-being. For the most part, the rape of an enslaved woman was treated as a household matter—the family patriarch had a “right” to her body and could offer her to others. The law only got involved if someone from outside the household raped or seduced her—and rape and seduction, in this case, were treated equivalently under the law.⁸ The rapist couldn’t be criminally prosecuted, but the woman’s enslaver could sue him for property damages in a civil case.⁹

Now, the Romans obviously knew that slaves could be coerced or forced into unwanted sexual activity—but consent wasn’t the lens they used for determining whether a sexual act was moral or immoral. It only came into play when determining culpability for illicit sexual activity. In short, if a sexual act was deemed immoral, a lack of consent meant the victim had not acted immorally and was not to blame.

Roman Stories

Rape victims—and would-be victims who narrowly escape—figure prominently in Roman stories, from the sexual exploits of their predatory gods to the rapes that precede major developments in the history of Rome, to plays and romance novels.¹⁰ Taken together, these stories demonstrate that the Romans absolutely understood the difference between consensual and coercive sex.

Zeus (or Jupiter), king of the gods, is famously a rapey sex pest. The Rape of Io remains a particularly vivid example.

The mythical founder of Rome is conceived when the vestal virgin Rhea Silvia is raped by the god Mars. Several writers—including Ovid and Ennius—recount Rhea’s trauma in moving language, with deep compassion for her plight.¹¹

Of Rhea, Ovid writes:

… unsightly in her garb, bearing the marks of her nails on her locks, the marks of her nails on her cheeks. Bewailing both the crimes of her uncle, and the fault of Mars …

… she casting on the ground her modest eyes, as she wept, besprinkled her warm breast with her tears. Thrice did she attempt to fly; thrice did she stop short at the deep waves, as fear deprived her of the power of running. Still, at last, as with hostile fingers she tore her hair, with quivering lips she uttered these bitter words; “Oh! would that my bones had been gathered up, and hidden in the tomb of my fathers, while yet they could be gathered, belonging to me a virgin! Why now, am I courted for any nuptials, a Vestal disgraced, and to be driven from the altars of Ilium? Why do I hesitate? See! by the fingers of the multitude am I pointed at as unchaste. Let this disgrace be ended, which marks my features.”

Thus far did she speak, and before her swollen eyes she extended her robe; and so, in her despair, did she throw herself into the rapid waters.

The semi-mythical story of the rape of Lucretia goes further, explicitly affirming the victim’s innocence. A group of elite men, drunkenly boasting about their wives, decide to pay each woman a visit to test her character. (What could go wrong?)

Most of the wives are found feasting with their friends, but one woman, Lucretia, is up late, working at the loom with her maids—the very picture of wifely industry and virtue.

The king’s son, enraptured by her beauty and purity, is inflamed with lust and plots to have her. Some nights later, he enters Lucretia’s bedchamber with his sword drawn. But she says she would rather die than yield her body to him.

After all manner of threats and pleas, he threatens to disgrace Lucretia by laying a slave’s naked corpse alongside hers, so that it will be said she was killed in the act of adultery with a slave—a reputation-destroying disgrace. At this, Lucretia’s resolve falters, and she yields.

The next day, she summons her father and husband to tell them through tears what has happened. They try to console her by assigning all blame to the king’s son, for “where there has been no consent there is no guilt.”¹² The coercion makes it a rape rather than an act of adultery, even without physical force. Lucretia concedes that she is innocent of the sin. Yet, she declares she will still bear the penalty rather than live with the shame. (Remember how Roman rape victims suffered social shame even when they weren’t considered legally or morally guilty?) Then she plunges a concealed knife into her heart. With Lucretia as a rallying cry, the people overthrow the wicked king and establish the Roman Republic.

Lucretia’s story shows that the Romans could explicitly call a woman innocent, even if that woman was coerced rather than physically overpowered. Her story also suggests that innocence/guilt and honor/dishonor are mapped on different (though perhaps overlapping) axes—that a woman can be both innocent and dishonored.

The historian Livy describes a mass rape of prostitutes in the early Roman Republic. A group of prostitutes are “carried off” amid a festival atmosphere during an athletic competition. Here, Livy deploys the same language that he used earlier in this same text to describe a mass rape of respectable women. This episode of sexual violence against prostitutes almost provokes a war, and the citizens begin discussing the creation of a dictatorship that will prevent such things from happening again.¹³ The inclusion of this event suggests that Livy understood that honorless women—prostitutes had absolutely no honor to preserve—can experience rape, and that this violation can have broader social consequences.

The Bottom Line

So, let’s put all of this together. The Romans could distinguish between consensual and coercive sex. They could classify coercive sex as violence, even when the victim was honorless or of low status.

(Of course, that recognition didn’t yield broad moral condemnation of coercive sex. Even when the Romans recognized something to be violent, they couldn’t interpret the moral or legal meaning of that violence without knowing the identities of the involved parties.)

A raped woman was not considered morally guilty, but the status of the victim and perpetrator came into play when determining the rapist’s level of guilt. If an enslaved man raped a free woman, he was guilty and she was innocent but dishonored. If a free man raped an enslaved woman, no one was guilty—and, well, she didn’t have honor to begin with. But if she belonged to someone else, he might have to pay her enslaver for property damages.

(Are you feeling glad that you don’t live in the first century? Because I definitely am!)

Let’s return to the question I asked toward the beginning: Is it historically plausible that Paul could have distinguished between coercive violation and consensual sex?

Yes, it is plausible.

Our survey of ancient history doesn’t, yet, tell us anything definitive about Paul’s views. But it does tell us that these categories existed in his cultural context—and so he, too, could have made these distinctions, especially if he viewed the moral innocence/guilt binary as more important than the honor/shame binary. More on that later in this series!

Next week, we’ll look at our next piece of historical context: how the Jews of Paul’s day thought about consent, culpability, and coercion. I hope you’ll join us.

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ICYMI

1. Occasionally, a wife might have more overall status and power—within limits—than her husband. But as a woman, she was at least symbolically inferior in power. As a rule, free men penetrated; women and slaves were penetrated. For more on this dynamic, see Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 163.

2. Enslaved men were also vulnerable to sexual abuse—I speak of women specifically because my thesis looked specifically at enslaved women—I had to keep the scope of my thesis narrow to fit within the required length.

3. Nghiem L. Nguyen, “Roman Rape: An Overview of Roman Rape Laws from the Republican Period to Justinian’s Reign.” Michigan Journal of Gender & Law 13.1 (2006), 85.

4. This oversimplifies a bit, as demonstrated by the more liminal categories of freedwoman and non-citizen. Non-citizen women could be respectable, but they weren’t afforded the same legal protections as citizens.

5. Criminal rapes were prosecuted under the lex Iulia de vi, the laws regarding violence, rather than the lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis, which regulated sex. See Nguyen, “Roman Rape,” 88-89.

6. Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 43.

7. Perry, Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman, 12.

8. Perry, Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman, 22-28.

9. Nguyen, “Rome Rape,” 92-94.

10. James A. Arieti, “Rape and Livy’s View of Roman History,” in Rape in Antiquity: Sexual Violence in the Greek and Roman Worlds, eds. Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce, (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 2002; repr., Bristol Classical Press, 2012), 209.

11. Ovid, Amores, 3.6.45-82; Ennius Fr. 52.

12. Livy, The History of Rome, 1.57-58.

13. Arieti, “Rape and Livy’s View of Roman History,” 214.