Was adultery acceptable throughout ancient Rome's history?

Alex Mann

There’s actually an interesting tidbit of history relating to Augustus with this question.

So Augustus’s big social concern was the declining birthrates. He looked into things and came away with a solution.

You see sex had become easier and easier to find in Rome. Not only were there brothels on every corner but young people were having sex out of wedlock.

Meanwhile, adultery had become a serious problem and divorces were becoming a more common occurrence.

Augustus believed that young people were not getting married because they saw that as a path to get cheated on and since they were able to get laid without getting married, who needs it?

So Augustus would pass a series of laws trying to curb this problem and fix “traditional Roman family values” (sound familiar at all?).

1. Adultery was not a SERIOUS crime. You could be executed or exiled if you were caught cheating….. and were female. Men were still punished brutally but not nearly as bad as women
2. You’d basically be paid by the state per kid via tax benefits (it’s rather complex).

Now part 2 of his plan kinda worked. People did start having a few extra kids for monetary reasons. Part 1 though was a total failure.

Nobody in Rome took Augustus\"s ban on adultery seriously. The biggest problem was Augustus himself who was known to be a serial adulterer despite being married. Additionally, Augustus’s daughter Julia had the reputation of being a “whore”. Now I won’t dive into this whole can of worms around the word “whore” and why women are treated poorly when they sleep around. But in this case, Julia fits the traditional (if sexist) definition. Julia was married to Tiberius and she was also screwing every important Roman man she could find.

Don’t get it twisted- people were brought up on charges of adultery and punished. It’s just that few people would rat out their spouses and everyone considered the laws hypocritical and stupid.

This whole debacle served as Augustus’s chief mistake during his reign domestically. It’s a black mark on his otherwise sterling reign as Emperoer