IV. Company

Extract

But life with the slaves and the children might be very dull without other company, especially before the children came. Women could not entertain or visit whom they chose: domesticity was a safeguard as well as a restriction, and marriageable girls or married women were protected from rape, seduction, or just hostile comment (from both sexes) by being home-based and carefully chaperoned when they did go out. Reasonable concern for their safety and respectability was reinforced by the need to show that their children were legitimate. Greek moicheia and Latin stuprum do not mean just any instance of infidelity or sexual assault, but intercourse with a woman who was married or capable of marriage, or who was quasi-married as an acknowledged concubine. Rape, in a sense, was preferable to seduction, since the woman had not assented to her loss of chastity. Menander can envisage a relationship which begins with rape and pregnancy ending in happy marriage, but other authors are less sentimental. Euripides, in Ion (935ff) makes it clear that rape could be detestable even if the rapist was a god begetting a splendid son. Apollo’s victim there was out picking flowers, like Persephone when Hades seized her; the usual setting for rape was a festival crowd (and Christian martyr-feasts, according to Jerome, Letter 107.9, were not much better). Going out was asking for trouble.