Book contents
- Social Control in Late Antiquity
- Social Control in Late Antiquity
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Women and Children First
- Chapter 1 Female Crime and Female Confinement in Late Antiquity
- Chapter 2 Holy Beatings
- Chapter 3 Power, Faith, and Reciprocity in a Slave Society
- Chapter 4 A Predator and a Gentleman
- Part II ‘Slaves, be subject to your masters’
- Part III Knowledge, Power, and Symbolic Violence
- Part IV Vulnerability and Power
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - A Predator and a Gentleman
Augustine, Autobiography, and the Ethics of Christian Marriage
from Part I - Women and Children First
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2020
- Social Control in Late Antiquity
- Social Control in Late Antiquity
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Women and Children First
- Chapter 1 Female Crime and Female Confinement in Late Antiquity
- Chapter 2 Holy Beatings
- Chapter 3 Power, Faith, and Reciprocity in a Slave Society
- Chapter 4 A Predator and a Gentleman
- Part II ‘Slaves, be subject to your masters’
- Part III Knowledge, Power, and Symbolic Violence
- Part IV Vulnerability and Power
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter asks what light the well-known but little understood story of Augustine’s relationship to the mother of his first child can shed on our understanding of marriage as an asymmetrical institution in the Roman period. Reviewing the evidence that both pagans and Christians in late antiquity expected a ‘double standard’ for men and women where marital fidelity was concerned, we suggest that Augustine’s On the Good of Marriage argued for a new marriage ethics based on sexual symmetry, capturing a new spirit of criticism for the double standard in fourth-century preaching, and that Augustine invoked his own experiences (as recounted in the Confessions) in order to drive home his argument.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social Control in Late AntiquityThe Violence of Small Worlds, pp. 76 - 102Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020