Episode 31 - The Adultery Laws of Augustus

After a century of civil war marked by perceived moral decay, the emperor Augustus embarked on an ambitious program of social and legal reform. Central to his vision was the restoration of traditional Roman family values. In 18 BCE, he passed the Lex Julia de Adulteriis, a controversial law that for the first time made adultery a public crime.

This episode investigates Augustus's radical intervention into the private lives of Roman citizens. Under the new law, a guilty wife and her lover could be exiled to separate islands, and a father was legally permitted to kill his daughter and her partner if he caught them in the act in his own home. The law also required a husband to divorce and prosecute his adulterous wife or face charges of pimping himself.

Augustus's moral legislation was deeply unpopular and notoriously difficult to enforce. In a bitter twist of irony, the emperor was later forced to use his own law to exile his only daughter, Julia, for her promiscuous behavior. The Julian Laws represent a dramatic shift in Roman legal thinking, where the state claimed the authority to regulate private morality for the good of the public.