Prof. Ledbetter:	Welcome everyone and thanks for being here. I'd like to welcome you to our annual Helen North Memorial Lecture. I want to begin by saying just a little bit about Helen North, the lectureship and the person. As many of you know, this annual was instituted by the late Charles Ruff and his wife Susan Willis Ruff, both class of 1960, and supported by many others, mostly Swarthmore alumni and former students of Helen North. 
	Helen North, whose 95th birthday would have been on January 31 of this year, was Centennial Professor of Classics and taught at Swarthmore from 1948 to 1991. She was an authority in the field, a former president of the American Philological Association, the Institution formerly known as the American Philological Association, among other accomplishments, and the author of several works, but especially the important book Sophrosyne, on the ancient concept of self-control, published in 1966 and still cited everywhere. It's probably because of this book, this very important book, that we as a department have been so focused on teaching you not only Greek and Latin, but virtue as well. 
	Helen worked continuously throughout her career for the good of the field of classics, of the humanities, and of higher education generally. Deeply influencing generations of devoted of students at Swarthmore and elsewhere, and stimulating many to enter upon careers as scholars and educators. As an educator of broad vision, she was singularly affected and persisted in strengthening several of the most important organizations that keep the classical tradition alive and that also allow us to experience this tradition at its sources. She has been instrumental in shaping the Swarthmore department and the program of Classics to have the rigor and reputation that it has today, and for that we are extremely grateful to her.
	Helen would have been proud to welcome today's speaker, Marilyn Skinner, Professor of Classics Emerita at the University of Arizona. Professor Skinner is a pioneering and highly influential scholar in the fields of women in antiquity, ancient sexuality, feminist theory, and republican and augustan poetry. We're all familiar with her far ranging work, which has done so much to establish and move forward the study of gender and sexuality in the ancient world. I'll just mention some of her books, which include Roman Sexualities, a Companion to Catullus, The New Sappho on Old Age, Clodia Metilli: The Tribune's Sister, and Narrating Desire: Eros, Sex and Gender in the Ancient Novel. The book I would like to mention in particular, is her 2005 Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, which was named as Book of the Year in Classical Studies by Peter Green and the Times Literary Supplement.
	My students here are very familiar with this book, because it played such an important part in the Honor's Seminar last fall, on Plato's Symposium and Early Greek Conceptions of Eros. So much more than a typical textbook, in this book, Professor Skinner manages to synthesize gracefully contemporary theory, primary texts, and cultural historical context for every period in Ancient Greek and Roman history in a way that is helpful and stimulating for students at all levels, as well as for scholars in the field. No mean feat. The product of her many years of teaching, this book is a scholarly and pedagogical masterpiece that only someone with Skinner's deep knowledge and experience could have produced. It is the book that now allows the rest of us to teach courses in ancient sexuality and by connecting the field of classics to contemporary theory, allows classicists to understand one of the most important ways that our field intersects with postmodern thought. 
	For this reason we're particularly excited and pleased that Professor Skinner accepted our invitation to speak today. So, thank you, Marilyn, for being here today and for speaking to us about Augustus and the economics of adultery. 
Marilyn Skinner:	Okay, thank you Professor Ledbetter, for that wonderful introduction, I feel very humbled and thankful, and thank you all for coming, it's a great treat to be here. In fact, I feel quite privileged delivering Swarthmore's Annual Helen North Lecture. I regret that I met Helen North only once or twice in passing, and did not have a chance to get to know her well. But the many tributes to her I have recently read give me a vivid sense of her delightful and engaging personality and her intense commitment to teaching and learning. Of course, her scholarly work is familiar to me, particularly her Godwin Award-winning monograph Sophrosyne. When I was writing my textbook, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, and needed to deal with notions of temperates and self control in classical Athens, Sophrosyne was the first study I turned to, and the one that most influenced my discussion of sexual themes in Greek tragedy. 
	Through her scholarship, Helen North's profound understanding of Greek Empirical thoughts continue to shape the [inaudible 00:05:17] of students, undergraduates and graduates, with the classical world. Tonight, honoring Helen North's interest in Ancient ethical ideas, I would like to examine female morality, or the alleged absence of it, in Republican and Augustan Rome. Together with the steps taken by the first Emperor Augustus, put a stop to women's misbehavior. This is a subject that has been heavily investigated by experts on Roman political and legal history, gender relations and ancient sexuality, and numerous important volumes have appeared over the past 20 years. Contributions by Catherine Edwards, Rebecca Langlands, Thomas McGinn, Christina Milnorth, and Beth [Sevry 00:06:07], to mention but a few. 
	But, perhaps there is room for another discussion of the topic. What I am particularly interested in is the relationship between allegations of adultery on the part of elite married women and concerns about family property in the hands of women. To borrow a phrase from Lord Byron, "The issue may have been not quite adultery, but adulteration, or, to be more precise, alienation." As two seasons of HBO's Rome have memorably informed us ...
Speaker 3:	[inaudible 00:06:54]
Marilyn Skinner:	Let me see if that will do it, there we go, okay. All right, as two seasons of HBO's Rome have memorably informed us, the elite family, by the final decade of the Republic, was in total disarray, with adultery, incest and murder running rampant. Sons plotting their fathers deaths, or vice versa, and the resources of the state handed over to ruthless females, unbridled in their rivalry for pleasure and control, and there is one of them. That is not a scenario the stroll runners made up of whole cloth as it comes, supposedly, from the Roman's themselves. 
	In the closing lines of this short narrative epic, the Wedding of Helios and Titus, the Poet [Patelus 00:07:43] laments the dismal moral conditions of the late '50s BCE, "But after the land was wrenched in sacrilegious crime, and all had but banished justice from wrath of hearts, brothers soaked their hands in brothers blood, sons seized to mourn their deceased parents. A father wished for the death of his first born son, so that he might freely possess his son's new bride, an ungodly mother spreading herself for her ignorant son, enviously did not fear to offend the household deities. All things good and evil mixed up with wicked manners purred for us, the righteous minds of the gods." 
	[inaudible 00:08:30], violence and breaches of trust within the family are the vices most characteristic of his age. Scarcely a decade later, the historian Salus adds the final touches, presenting a picture of gender upheaval in which, encourage by affluence and licentiousness to abandon all social constraints, the sexes had exchanged roles and compete in degradation. Quote, "But the appetite for sexual offenses, bludgeoning and other refinements, had advanced with equal degree. Men played the woman's role, women made their chastity available. For dining they sought out all the products of land and sea and slept before they felt a desire to sleep. They did not wake upon hunger or thirst or cold or fatigue, but by soft living anticipated all of these things." 
	It practically, according to Salus, manifests itself to perversion, not just of those urges attached to sex, but in every natural desire, life sustaining or not, and all forms of indulgence, culminated in unrestrained orgies. Such apparent eyewitness testimony has long been a boon for filmmakers seeking to titillate movie going audiences. And thus, in Sandal movies, the orgy is the Hollywood trope, par excellence. Yet, when dealing with ancient moralizing discourses, no less the modern media presentations, we need to ask, to what extent the facts, as we can determine them, have been sensationalized? And so, we turn now to the historical situation. 
	Undoubtedly, the middle years of the first century, from the outbreak of hostilities between Caesar and Pompey in 49, BCE, through the Pre-Imperial period, to the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra, and Alexandria in 30 BCE, an era of recurrent civil strife, prescriptions, confiscations, conspiracies, and assassinations, for which the Poet Horace bleakly remarks, "The Romans could blame only themselves." According to myth, a horde original sin, the murder of Remus by his brother, Romulus, had laid a curse on the descendants of its founder, successive generations where succumbing to a growing madness for Rome, driving citizens to turn swords against each other and causing Rome to fall through her own strength. [Sui said "Ipso romo wearies ruid." 00:11:25] that's from his Emeral XVI. 
	Spread of internal conflicts was heightened at this thought by the brazen immorality of the Aristocracy, whose disdain of religion, hunger for power, resistance to marriage and reproduction, and toleration of promiscuity, had angered the gods and endangered the Empire. Rome, on this line of reasoning, ruled other nations as an agent of divine justice, and if she no longer possessed the moral capacity to govern well, her sovereignty was doomed. Portents of disaster were already received in the 50s and 40s BCE. The free born population was falling to reproduce itself, temples were falling into decay. In 53, the Parthians had annihilated a Roman army at Carrhae. From 49 on, struggles between Caesar's and Pompey's partisans disrupted the functioning of local and provincial governments. 
	Under Caesar's dictatorship, manpower shortages continued to allow contemporaries and, at times, among easy peace, resettlement of veterans caused mass dislocations. While Magistrates and Generals were blamed for ambition and greed, and male heads of households condemned for inability to assert their authority, women's inherent weakness of character, [inaudible 00:12:59] what had made them especially prone to charges of sexual self indulgence. 
	Elite population decline was attributed to the reliance on abortion, motivated by vanity and desire to hide the consequences of illicit affairs. Female sexual offenses, especially adultery, therefore become an overriding preoccupation of primary sources, ranging from history and oratory, to legal and epistolary text, and even to fictional genres, novels and [inaudible 00:13:35] poetry, satire and epigraph. Adultery had a precise meaning in Roman law, it was defined by the status of the woman, and consisted of sexual activity between a validly married female citizen and a man not her spouse. Illegitimate sex with an unmarried woman or a citizen boy was a different kind of sexual offense, stupor or criminal fornication. The marital status of the man for the law was irrelevant, whether or not he could legally have sex with whomever he pleased as long as he refrained from persons who were off limits. 
	Though an apprehended lover could be physically abused, the underlying culpability for the adulteress act belonged to the female partner who had consented to it. In the late Republic, the responsibility for overseeing and, if necessary, punishing a woman's behavior rested with her family. Cases of adultery were normally privately deliberated in a family council, involving the innocent husband and the kinfolk of the offending wife and settled through divorce and the award of a portion of the dowry to the husband, 1/6th, according the the jurist Ulpian. Legal action, conducted before a magistrate, might result in an alternative disposition of dowry property, depending on the husbands overall character or the claims made on behalf of children who remained in their father's custody. This process appears to have been a civilized and efficient way to ward off scandal. 
	While in all ancient Mediterranean cultures, male honor was compromised by a woman's misconduct, public stigma in Rome was far less pronounced than in Greece. "Yet, the surprising fact," as Amy Richlin notes, is that, "In a society where divorce was easy and acceptable to both parties, and men themselves had other permitted sexual outlets, female infidelity remains such a cultural obsession." This was not because adultery necessarily constituted a personal betrayal, while husbands and wives were expected to feel respect and affection for each other, elite marriages were arranged with little consideration for sentiment, and spouses may have been more emotionally invested in their children and natal kin then in their marriages. 
	Fear of suppositious children contaminating the bloodline seems not to have been a key factor either. Under Roman law every child born in a legal marriage was automatically considered legitimate, unless the head of household refused to recognize it as his own, and there are relatively few surviving jokes about dubious paternity. To understand what adultery meant to the Romans then, we cannot consider only its concrete results, we need to discover what it represented, what free floating anxieties crystallized around it. What features of the Roman mentality lead Romans themselves to construe adultery as a practice so potentially destructive, so symptomatic of the failings of their culture, that it called for public remedies? 
	Catherine Edwards has proposed one plausible answer to that question, "In a society that prided itself on virtus, meaning both its morality and its manliness, rectitude could be displayed as symbolic capital. Compliments, which require the firm exercise of reason over bodily impulse, was the equivalent of nerve on the battlefield. Charges of debauchery were a tool of exclusion, keeping undesirable parties out of privileged circles by rejecting their behavioral credentials. They were also a strategy for controlling excessive spending, ensuring that nobles caused less spending through conspicuous consumption." 
	Along with their reported lack of inhibition, women's punitive craving for luxury goods put them, as we will see, at a moral disadvantage. More over, women were not by nature, virile, and could not easily be virtuous in a manly way. Their integrity was gendered differently. The chief virtue of the married woman, pudicitia, or chastity, was, like a mans self control, expected to be prominently on display. Roman sources tell us that pudicitia, although an internal disposition, was evident to an observer. The younger sentiment indeed pronounces it women's greatest adornment. Ritual processions at female cult festivals were a prime opportunity for pious matrons to call attention to their modest deportment, which brought honor to their families. Unchaste women, conversely, were thought to scorn such rites.
	Originally restricted to matrons of proven virtue, married only once, the Alter of Phibian Chastity, as Livy tells us, was later open to women of all sorts, including those, he terms, [plutae 00:19:20], contaminated and at last, no surprise, forgotten. 
	As we have noted, that close association between female impurity and neglect of religion was seen, in turn, to lead to social upheaval and ultimately to civil war, the greatest crime against both gods and men. Rampant and uncontrolled female sexuality thus became a senectity for a host of other anxieties surrounding domestic and foreign instability and fear of divine displeasure. "But, the root cause of all those ills," Salas emphasizes, "was the increasing wealth that flowed into Rome as her empire expanded." Money and the luxury that accompanied it, had a softening affect on character. Here again, women were to blame, because there public theorists, whether on religious occasions or for other reasons, demanded more and ostentatious trappings, gold, jewels, expensive dresses, carriages, slaves as escorts. Dowry's too rose in amount as leading families competed to place their girls in advantageous marriages. 
	During the course of the Punic wars, mothers, sisters, and wives inherited money from fallen family members, and rich fathers without surviving male heirs bestowed whole estates upon daughters. What would like minded women do with all those resources? From the second century BCE onward, wealth in female hands became a nagging problem for elite males in some households. Culturally, the Romans engaged in a certain amount of double think regarding woman's ability to own and manage property. On the one hand, the law of the twelve tables, Romes own legal code, stipulated that in the absence of a valid will the patrimony would be divided equally among the children who were his immediate heirs. Though a woman's capacity for ownership was therefore recognized in law, her management decisions regarding real property, such as disposal of land or buildings, were subject to the approval of a male guardian, a tutor, charged with insuring that his assets destined for blood relatives were not prematurely alienated through sale, gift or bequest. In practical terms, this meant that women could not endower daughter's or make wills without the permission of their tutor. In one form of marriage, 'cum manu' or free marriage, tutelage severely limited their testamentary freedom to provide even for their own children. 
	In the increased importance of women's holdings came a change in the legal position of the wife within a marriage. Roman family law was grounded upon 'patria potestas', the life and death authority of the 'pater familias', the oldest representative of the paternal line over all members of his household, including his children. From the beginning, however, the law allowed for two kinds of marriage, 'cum manu' and 'sine manu'. 
	In a 'cum manu' marriage, control over the wife or 'manus', was transferred from her father to her new husband. Her dowry passed into the bridegrooms ownership, and he was responsible for paying her personal expenses out of its proceeds. The bride became a member of her husbands family and, for inheritance purposes, was legally treated the same as one of her own children. If the husband died 'in testate', without a will, she received a share of equal to each of theirs. Upon his death she became legally independent, 'sui iuris', but still required to have a tutor. However, the husband could name a sympathetic tutor in his will or even allow her to choose her own tutor. Less anxiety surrounded the women's possession and management of property because it was assumed she would use it for the benefit of her children who, like her, belonged to their father's family and were her natural heirs. 
	Larger and larger dowry's however created an issue for the brides clan. Under 'cum manu' marriage, a sizable amount of the patrimony became the irrevocable property of another household, depriving the brides siblings of their eventual claim on it. As a result, the second kind of marriage, marriage 'sine manu' gradually became more popular. Under this arrangement, the father of the bride retained 'manus', and she remained a member of her natal family. While the groom had the use of dowry income, the principal had to be returned to her family if the marriage ended in death or divorce, although a share was retained for the children. 
	In a patriarch culture, the subversive legal and social ramifications of free marriage were considerable. Husbands could not punish their wives for wrong doing, the father alone possessed that right. Since the wife lived with her husband in another house, it was comparatively easy to escape paternal supervision. When a father died, his power over his daughter terminated and she became legally independent with full ownership of her own property. Under law, the holdings of a wife and husband in a 'sine manu' situation, were separate. He had no say over what she did with her money. To prevent one party enriching the other at their own expense, gifts between husband and wife were forbidden. All this, obviously, worked to the wife's personal advantage. 
	On the other hand, a women's children were regarded as belonging for custody purposes solely to their father, who exercised 'patria potestas' over them. A 'pater familias' could thus arrange a marriage or disinherit a child without the mothers consent, and if the mother died intestate, possibly because her tutor refused to approve her will, her property passed to her siblings, not to her husband or children, who are members of a different family. Sibling 'manus' marriage ensured that ancestral land and buildings remained with the clan at the cost of the marital bond, which was slackened because husband and wife no longer had financial interests in common. Yet, the despite its adverse affects on spousal relationships and the greater autonomy it allowed women, which was seen as especially problematic, 'sine manu' unions were the norm by the end of the Republic. Divorce, easily available to either partner under those conditions, was likewise common as marriage alliances created to forge strategic ties fell to victim to shifting political curves. 
	To conclude the concern about this destabilizing impact of legalizing changes on individual families took the form of free floating anxiety over women's adultery was speculative of course, but it seems highly probable, the less commitment a wife felt to her husbands household, the more likely she was to form attachments elsewhere. Already in the second century BCE, the state may have reacted to those social trends. The Lex Voconia passed by the senate in 169 BCE, stipulated that testators of the highest property classes could not name a women, not even an only daughter, heir to an estate. It also restricted to no more than half of the value of an estate the amount of wealth that could be left as a legacy to anyone, male or female. Taken together, the two provisions guaranteed that a women would receive, at most, 50% of the inheritance bestowed by will upon a male citizen. 
	Women's right to contest it's succession  was not affected, but since Roman's preferred to make wills, female capacity as both legatees and testators was reduced. Formerly, a husband might institute his wife as sole heir to manage the property for his children's benefit. That is now prohibited in view of the limitations on how much a legatee could receive, preferring a daughter's interest to both of his son was also discouraged. Wealthy women, already subject to tutorial oversight in the matter of wills, would be even less likely to pass down possessions along to daughters. Since, in the absence of a valid will, the estate of a woman married 'sine manu' reverted to her blood relatives, the privacy of natal family succession was reaffirmed. 
	We have no ancient testimony about the intentions of the legislators who passed the Lex Voconia. There is less considerable scholarly debate over what this was meant to achieve. While one widespread claim is that it directly aimed at controlling access to wealth, experts on Roman law and economic history propose other explanations. Perhaps it sought to prevent a daughter from taking more than her fair share of the estate by receiving part of it as dowry on her marriage, a form of pre-mortuary inheritance, and another part after her parents death. In an increasingly competitive political arena, it may also have freed up more assets, enabling men to seek office. "Wealth in the hands of women," Jane Gardner remarks, "without circulation for such purposes, and would remain so if women made other women their heirs." In any case, the Romans themselves perceived the law of worthy for the benefit of men but full of injustice to women, as Cicero's speaker complained in Re Publica book three. It was also thought unfair because some women, for example vestal virgins, were exempt from it, and because it was ineffective. 
	Numerous legal dodges were employed to get around it's restrictions, I'll list a few on the slide. Lastly, it utterly clashed with popular sentiment regarding property transference. In spite of parental or spousal wishes in individual cases though, the law bolstered a certain general underlying premise, property in the hands of women was not absolutely theirs, it belonged to families and should ultimately go to promising male heirs to support them in the pursuit of political and military honors. However, much of women's new wealth was in the form of liquid assets, which, unlike real estate, were not subject to tutorial control, and were viewed as highly vulnerable to misuse. 
	Thus, wives who spent to please themselves, particularly on luxuries, were valuing their own pleasures above the ambitions of their male kin. By definition, they were out of control and so was the money they squandered. Such was the legal position of the affluent women when, in the wake of the successful victories over Antony and Cleopatra, and his two administrative settlements of the state in 27 and 24 BCE, the [inaudible 00:32:19] Augustus embarked on a campaign of religious and moral reform. In the 30s, as [inaudible 00:32:26], he had already initiated an ambitious program of chemical restoration, including rebuilding the shrines of the Christian and Phlebian Chastity, a task delegated to his wife, Livia, and followed it by constructing and dedicating a number of sacred and public spaces. Now in 18 BCE, Augustus confronted head on the issue of population decline among upper class families and the accompanying problem of adultery. 
	That year, as part of an extensive package of social legislation, he enacted two famous laws, the Lex Julia de Maritandis Ordinibus, which was later modified by the Lex Papia Poppaea, 9 BCE, and it's companion piece, the Lex Iulia de Adulteriis Coercendis. The first strengthened class boundaries by prohibiting marriages between members of the senatorial class and former slaves, and between all free born citizens and [inbonites 00:33:35], morally disgraced persons, like pimps, actresses, and criminals, including those convicted of adultery. It also encouraged procreation by offering rewards to parents of several children, career advantages for men, and freedom from tutelage for women. While single, childless individuals were penalized by being prohibited from accepting bequests from anyone other than close relatives. Since leading substantial legacies to friends and allies, possibly with long term political and familial objectives in mind was an established custom in senatorial circles, that sanction was not a trivial one. 
	Meanwhile, the second law repressed adultery and stupor by making them civil offenses to be tried in a standing criminal court. Procedures for prosecution were spelled out in detail. A husband who became aware of his wife's adultery had to divorce her immediately, since under law a women still married could not be accused. Either he or her father, as 'patrias familias' was then obligated to bring a charge against her within 60 days. If he failed to divorce her, he himself could be prosecuted for 'lenocinium', conventionally labeled pandering, but more accurately defined as being an accessory to her crime. Should neither husband nor father exercise his responsibility to prosecute, a third party might do so, in the hope of receiving a portion of the confiscated goods if she was convicted. 
	The law proscribed that the two parties involved could not be tried simultaneously and one had to be convicted before the other could be indicted. Provisions allowed the father or, with certain restrictions, a husband, to kill transgressors caught in the act in the fathers or husbands house. Those points of law were much discussed by ancient jurists, who wrote [inaudible 00:35:53] on them, and they still aroused considerable scholarly debate. In the interest of time I will not go into the parts of the statute that dealt with persons that defended the adultery, as my focus is on the [inaudible 00:36:07] piece, chiefly financial, in post after trial upon someone convicted in criminal court. The punishments ordained were not merely determined, but arguably had as a [inaudible 00:36:20] the reclamation of patrimonial assets from those proven unworthy possessed them. Legal provisions suggest that condemned women may have been the primary intended targets. 
	Our information about fiscal penalties comes from a late but presumably reliable source, the 3rd century CE opinions [inaudible 00:36:45] falsely ascribed to famous [inaudible 00:36:49] period lawyer, Julius [Paulus 00:36:50] quote, "It has been held, women convicted of adultery shall be punished with the laws of half of their dowry and a third of their estates and by relegation to an island. The adulterer, however, shall be deprived of half his property and shall also be punished by relegation to an island, provided both parties are exiled to different islands." Roman law had to spell it out. 
	We do not know whether deportation to an island was permanent or temporary, perhaps that was left to the discretion of the court. In any case, all though both parties to the crime are punished, the financial harm brought upon the adulteress, as stipulated by the law, was considerably greater. The amount of dowry confiscated went far beyond the 1/6th granted to the injured husband before the law was put in place, in addition, she lost a sizable portion of her private property. What dowry remained was useless for practical purposes, because from other sources we learned that she was forbidden to remarry. If she did, her new husband was liable to a charge of 'lenocinium', and if adulteress lovers, having escaped from their separate islands, married each other, the union was null and void, exposing them to prohibitions on inheritance visited upon unmarried persons.
	The convicted woman was also punished by a loss of rank. Stripped of the symbolic dress of a matron, and branded with [infalia 00:38:30], lack of respectability. She was obliged to wear the toga, the professional garb of a prostitute. The social affect of this last regulation was to draw a strictly defined line between two classes of women, the respectable 'mater familias' and the non-respectable prostitute, who, as a woman with no where to lose, was exempt from the adultery law, and permanently to isolate the adulteress, by conflating her with the latter group. Public shaming reinforced the class degradation imposed by depriving her of property. 
	Now, what happened to a confiscated wealth? In the late Republic, the assets of persons condemned for crimes against the state were seized and sold at auction. We have no precise evidence for the disposition of adulterer's estates under Augustus. But the emperor seems to have taken charge of auction profits and employed them at his own discretion. For example, by offering limited term, interest free loans to borrowers with solid collateral, from surplus funds realized through sales of impounded property. We learned that from Suetonius, Life of Augustus, chapter 41. That policy benefited the senatorial class whose holdings, while large, were not readily converted into cash if needed. Casitus meanwhile, indicates that the belongings of those who died 'in testate', without kin, were also 'patita in fiscum', claimed for the fiscus, that is, for the Emperors private account, as opposed to the aerarium, the public treasury. 
	The same historian later paints a sinister picture of an oppressive government policing the private lives of citizens, forcing compliance with it's objectives, through a system of informants and enriching itself by confiscations. Finally, in his 6th consulate, Caesar Augustus secured his power, abolished what he had ordered during his pre-emperate, and laid down laws by which we might availed ourselves of peace and [inaudible 00:40:58]. From that time on, our bonds were tighter, spies were introduced, and induced by rewards under the Lex Papia Poppaea, so that it then balked at assuming the privileges of parents, the state of parent of all. My lay to claim of their vacant estates. 
	On the strength of this testimony, some might suppose that in addition to the laudable gains of promoting family life and increasing manpower, Augustus' motives for introducing his legislation included the less logical goal of lining his own pockets. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill however, not only dismisses text to snide hints at extortion, but also regards military recruitment as merely an ideological justification for the marriage law. "It's practical intent," he argues, "was to stabilize the transfer of patrimonies within elite families from one generation to the next, and thus to ensure continuity of rank and status." 
	Through restrictions upon inheritance, bequests outside a direct or failed event, a lateral line of descent, were made problematic. Legacy hunted by the childless was discouraged and established families assured the adequate resources. We see these goals operating on the occasion mentioned earlier, when Augustus' successor Tiberius, this is the passage, the first passage on this slide, instead of appropriating the vacant estates of citizens dying without wills or immediate heirs, passes them on to remoter kin. This is termed act of generosity, [inaudible 00:42:45] implying that the Emperor had no obligation to do so. Tiberius' explanations of his reasons of it is instructed, "The good birth of each man," he says, "ought to be bolstered by wealth." Augustus would agree, after he raised the property qualifications of a senatorial order, he personally made up deficiencies for current members of the senate whose holdings were insufficient. 
	If we assume that the adultery law had corollary objectives, we may hazard a guess that some part of the property taken from offenders was restored to family members avoiding the unintended consequences that could befall blameless children or relatives. We remember, for example, that under the old system, it was a practice termed, 'retentio proctor moras', were by the [inaudible 00:43:39] husband was awarded reparations from the dowry for the wrongs he had suffered. Similar compensation deducted from the share taken by the privy purse could induce men to comply with the law by divorcing and prosecuting a suspected wife. This concession would lessen the amount of dowry husbands were obligated to repay, a legal expectation that imposed financial hardship upon the victimized party. 
	Similarly, the natural heirs of a condemned individual, whose own capacity to preserve rank and status was put at risk by government seizure of assets, would be logical for persons to assist if they themselves were parents of at least one child. While the jurist do not tell us explicitly that repayments took place, it is certainly possible then that the law facilitated the transfer of family property which had fallen into punitively irresponsible hands, into the possession of recipients more deserving. For reasons I have already touched on, it's likely that the irresponsible hands were largely female and the deserving ones male. Whether or not that suggestion seems plausible, the relevant question is whether Augustus moral legislation had a successful outcome? In the absence of demographic data, or judicial records, that is a much debated issue. 
	Historical sources tell us the marriage law was widely resented, and Casitus flatly says that it did not work. Those biases, obviously. At the opening of this histories, which record advanced following, the deposition [inaudible 00:45:23], the same historian speaks further of adulteries in high places and islands filled with exiles. But again, in the context of a rhetorically embellished account of Rome's troubles. It does seem that the adultery law for its part, proved difficult to enforce. However, women who behaved indiscreetly in public, whether or not they were really involved in an affair, no doubt endangered themselves, all the more so if their riches made them tempting targets. Indeed, [inaudible 00:46:01] surmises that a woman who divorced a husband unilaterally, for any reason, might regret it if she remains single, she would be subject to the inheritance restrictions imposed on the unmarried and if she remarried she laid herself open to charges of prior adultery. Thus, the law encouraged women to remain in less than ideal marriages so as to avoid potential prosecution. 
	Husbands, too, needed to monitor their wives behavior, to ensure they stayed above suspicion, otherwise the man could be accused by a third party of knowing collusion in adultery. Far from bringing stability to married life, [inaudible 00:46:46] concludes, Augustus' legislation made relations between spouses more insecure. On the other hand, if the Younger Pliny's famous portrait of Ummidia Quadratilla is anything to go by, some women under the empire seemed to have incurred public disapproval for indulging their caprices while avoiding reprises. In [inaudible 00:47:12] 24 book seven, Pliny is attesting to the merits of his protégé, her grandson [Clemidius 00:47:19], a virtuous young man, despite having been raised by his grandmother, whose fondness for her troupe of freed man, pantomime actors had made her notorious. 
	With the delicate appreciation [inaudible 00:47:35] of the need to keep his reputation unblemished, says Pliny, she sent Clemidius away to study whenever she watched them perform. While Pliny represents her interest in pantomime as merely a regrettable extravagance, unworthy of her station, [inaudible 00:47:53]. It has been viewed as a shrewd business venture, because sponsoring entertainers could bring a substantial return on investment. Be that as it may, the loose associations of pantomime, both the risque nature of the genre and the close link in the public mind between all actors and prostitution, might blemish a widowed matrons character irrevocably. 
	Yet, Ummidia lived to be almost 80, sound in mind and body, with appearing indifference to her own good name, however careful she might have been about those of her descendens. In the end, all seems to be forgiven, since Pliny explains that she made an exemplary will, leaving 2/3rds of her estate to her grandson and the remaining 1/3 to her granddaughter, with only a small gratuity, [inaudible 00:48:53] to her pantomimes. Consequently he delights in the piotous of the dead woman, the honor paid to an excellent young man. Property insured is back where it belongs, unalienated and unadulterated, ready to advance another distinguished masculine career. For that, Pliny, like every right thinking Roman male, is grateful, and if Augustus had anything to do with it, so much the better. Thank you.