LEX IULIA ON CURBING ADULTERY

From various legal sources, collected in Acta divi Augusti, Regia Academia Italia, Rome 1945  pp. 1I2-28 (abridged) as translated in Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold, Roman Civilization, Volume 1, The Republic and the Augustan Age, 3^rd Edition, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990, pp. 603-604.

"No one shall hereafter commit debauchery or adultery knowingly and with malice aforethought." These words of the law apply to him who abets as well as to him who commits debauchery or adultery.

Lex Iulia on Curbing Adultery punishes not only defilers of the marriages of others . . . but also the crime of debauchery when anyone without the use of force violates either a virgin or a widow of respectable character.

By the second section [of the law] a father, if he catches an adulterer of his daughter. . . in his own home or that of his son-in-law, or if the latter summons him in such an affair, is permitted to kill that adulterer with impunity, just as he may forthwith kill his daughter.

A husband also is permitted to kill an adulterer of his wife, but not anyone at all as is the father's right. For this law provides that a husband is permitted to kill [a procurer, actor, gladiator, convicted criminal, freedman, or slave] caught in the act of adultery with his wife in his own home (but not in that of his father-in-law). And it directs a husband who has killed anyone of these to divorce his wife without delay. Moreover, he must make a report to the official who has jurisdiction in the place where the killing has occurred and he must divorce his wife; if he does not do this, he does not slay with impunity.

The law punishes as a procurer a husband who retains his wife after she has been caught in adultery and lets the adulterer go (for he ought to be enraged at his wife, who violated his marriage). In such a case the husband should be punished since he cannot claim the excuse of ignorance or feign patience on the pretext of not believing it.

He by whose aid or advice with malice aforethought it is made possible for a man or woman caught in adultery to evade punishment through bribe or any other collusion is condemned to the same penalty as is fixed for those who are convicted of the crime of procuring.

He who makes a profit from the adultery of his wife is scourged. . . .

If a wife receives any profit from the adultery of her husband she is liable under the lex Iulia as if she were an adultress. . . . Anyone who marries a woman convicted of adultery is liable under this law.

The law prescribes that when notice of divorce has been sent on suspicion of the crime of adultery, the emancipation of slaves who belong to the wife or husband or their parents is to be delayed for a space of two months, reckoned from the date of the divorce, to allow for employing examination under torture if the need arises.

It was enacted that women convicted of adultery be punished by confiscation of half of their dowry and a third of their property and by relegation to an island, and that the male adulterers be punished by like relegation to an island and by confiscation of half of their property, with the provision that they be relegated to different islands.