6 - Adultery, women, and social control

Summary

The previous chapter described the legal norms and procedures which regulated adultery at Athens. The final section of that discussion, however, suggested that the social practices involving adultery were rather more complex than the prohibitions of the criminal law might imply. Although the law provided that the husband, or the appropriate magistrates, could put to death the adulterer taken in the act, some aggrieved spouses were perceived as responding with silence, extortion, or complicity. Although social norms of honor and shame linked the woman's sexual modesty to the honor of her husband and other male relatives, some women were thought to buy the favors of young men, and some men to acquiesce in the financial advantage they might gain from their wives' infidelity. Rather than inquiring what such practices tell us about the normative evaluation of sexual relations, a positivistic, instrumental approach to social control would dismiss all such conduct as “violations” of social and legal rules, as deviations from the norm. As Chapters 2–4 suggested, however, such rules represent but one facet of social control in “face-to-face” societies: they influence, but do not determine, the social practices through which they, and the social order, are reproduced. Further, though they may reflect the norms of ethical and legal ideals, they may vary widely from other normative expectations which play a central role in patterns of social conduct.