Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Sexual virtue on display I: the cults of pudicitia and honours for women
- Chapter 2 Traditional narratives and Livy's Roman history
- Chapter 3 Valerius Maximus: the complexities of past as paradigm
- Chapter 4 Subversive genres: testing the limits of pudicitia
- Chapter 5 Declamation: what part of ‘no’ do you understand?
- Chapter 6 Sexual virtue on display II: oratory and the speeches of Cicero
- Chapter 7 Imperial narratives, imperial interventions
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Subject index
- Index locorum
Chapter 7 - Imperial narratives, imperial interventions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Sexual virtue on display I: the cults of pudicitia and honours for women
- Chapter 2 Traditional narratives and Livy's Roman history
- Chapter 3 Valerius Maximus: the complexities of past as paradigm
- Chapter 4 Subversive genres: testing the limits of pudicitia
- Chapter 5 Declamation: what part of ‘no’ do you understand?
- Chapter 6 Sexual virtue on display II: oratory and the speeches of Cicero
- Chapter 7 Imperial narratives, imperial interventions
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Subject index
- Index locorum
Summary
Juvenal's Satires, the novels of Petronius and Apuleius and Phaedrus' Fables have already given us a sense of the tenor of references to pudicitia in texts written during the imperial era. Such works focus on the futility of virtue, the perversion and strategic adaptation of moral values, and the intensification of the relationship between formal legal structures set up and imposed by the state and the personal morality of the individual. A key theme of many of the texts written in or after the first century ce is the articulation of the interaction between various means of moral regulation in Roman society. This chapter will examine in detail two further writers of the imperial era, Tacitus and Suetonius, and explore the way that the concept of pudicitia enters their works as a way of characterising political and social change under the empire. Legislation regarding sexual behaviour increases over the course of the first century ce (especially under Augustus and Domitian), and accusations of impudicitia, a matter of social and political embarrassment under the late Republic, become fatal; this is matched by an intensification of the discourses of depravity in these sources. They portray the degeneration of sexual morals as requiring the intervention of the state, but suggest that at the same time legislation itself is a tool of political manipulation.
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- Information
- Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome , pp. 319 - 363Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006