‘Start with the cage’: coercive control and the Roman husband

ABSTRACT

A woman wears the same outfit every day, rarely goes out, and continually paces back and forth in a small space. Imagine how hard it would be to explain her behavior if you were unable to reveal that the woman is confined in a jail cell. The domestic violence field faces a similar predicament when it tries to account for how battered women behave without identifying their ‘cage’. The literature documents violent acts and the harms they cause in agonizing detail. But this work suffers the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: no matter how many punches or injuries or instances of depression are catalogued, the cage remains invisible as long as we omit the strategic intelligence that complements these acts with structural constraints and organizes them into the pattern of oppression that gives them political meaning. We see the effects of dominance, anger, depression, dependence, fear, substance use, multiple medical problems or suicide attempts, calls to the police or visits to the ER or shelter, but not domination itself. Given the abstraction of these effects from their context, it is unsurprising that more attention is paid to the personality and behavior of victims than to what perpetrators do. Start with the cage, and everything changes.¹

Evan Stark’s Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life was instrumental in developing the concept of ‘coercive control’, which is sometimes termed ‘intimate terrorism’.² Earlier studies, in particular the work of Lenore Walker on battered woman syndrome, had drawn attention to the emphasis placed by victims themselves on the impact of pervasive controlling behaviour over and above incidents of physical violence when describing their relationship with the perpetrator.³ Coercive control describes a pattern of behaviour which may include acts of physical violence, but also non-physical emotional, psychological, and financial abuse.⁴ Coercive control pervades a victim’s life and exposes her to manipulation and control which is ongoing.⁵ The aim of coercive control is for the perpetrator to dominate and control; to intimidate or humiliate the victim; to isolate her from others; to undermine her independence. Coercive control is a highly gendered experience of abuse: the perpetrator is male, the victim is female.⁶ Coercive control can continue even after a relationship has ended. Indeed, fear of—or actual loss of—the ability to continue to control may lead a perpetrator to escalate his abuse.⁷ Coercive control is widely recognized as the most reliable predictor of intimate partner homicide that we possess.⁸

Behaviours which could constitute coercive control include: threatening or abusing a victim online or via other technological means (phone or social media); stalking (online or in person); constantly insulting a victim in order to humiliate her; shouting at or verbally abusing a victim in order to intimidate her; damaging, destroying, or stealing a victim’s property; threatening to hurt the victim’s family, friends, children, or pets; the perpetrator threatening to hurt him/themselves; monitoring the victim’s time; making her account for her whereabouts; using the victim’s money or shared money in order to make important financial decisions without consultation; being jealous or suspicious of the victim’s friends; accusing the victim of having an affair; interfering with the victim’s relationships with other family members; preventing the victim from doing things which would help her (such as attending a doctor’s appointment or taking medication); restricting the victim’s use of the phone, internet, or family car.⁹ Above all, coercive control represents a pattern of behaviour in which the perpetrator continually abuses imbalances of power within the relationship. Campaigners advocating the recognition and criminalization or coercive control have argued that looking for a pattern of behaviour rather than an individual act or incident better explains the lived experience of victims of domestic violence and may help to prevent the distressing phenomenon whereby victim–survivors who report an incidence of domestic violence are sometimes misidentified as perpetrators of violence.¹⁰ In Australia, coercive control has been criminalized in Tasmania (2004) and the criminalization of coercive control is under discussion in both New South Wales and Queensland. Coercive control has recently been criminalized in England and Wales (2015), Ireland (2018), and Scotland (2018).

This article is intended as an encouragement to investigate domestic violence in the ancient world by making use of the much more expansive understanding of the abusive relationship between perpetrator and victim offered by the concept of coercive control rather than looking only or primarily for a single act of physical violence. In other words, this article is an attempt to begin to draw the outline of the ‘cage’ in which some/many/most women and girls in the Roman world found themselves. In order to do this, I offer four case studies, each of which takes as its starting point a behaviour associated with coercive control: (1) patriarchal entitlement; (2) patterns of abuse; (3) intimate partner homicide; and (4) non-physical abuse.

1. HUSBAND, WIFE, AND PATER: COERCIVE CONTROL EMBEDDED IN ENTITLEMENT

‘She’s pissed me off, and she won’t stop. I’ve grabbed her arm, squeezed her, and slapped her. I’ve punched her after she put me down in front of my friends … It’s like I know what I should be as a man, I mean—strong, lots of money, a good job, and a beautiful wife. But my life isn’t like that. I’m not really much of a man without a good job and lots of money. She makes me so angry when she won’t do what I want her to do. It’s not supposed to be that way. A girl is supposed to get along with a man. She’s supposed to respect him and listen to him. But that never happens to me. I feel like a piece of shit around my girlfriends. Sometimes it’s them who has to pay for things because they’ve got the job. It’s like they’re more important than me and they think they can make the decisions because they’ve got the money. It’s not right. It makes me feel like a wimp or a pussy. That’s not the way things are supposed to be.’¹¹

Husband/Menaechmus: ‘Whenever I want to go out you hold me back, call me back, and ask me where I’m going, what I’m doing, what business I’m carrying out, what I’m seeking, what I’m up to, what I’ve done outside. I’ve married a customs officer: I have to state everything, whatever I’ve done and am doing.’¹²

Wife’s Father/Senex: ‘How often did I teach you to obey your husband, not to observe what he’s doing, where he’s going, and what he’s up to! … Do you demand that men should be your slaves? By the same token you could demand to give him something to spin, to tell him to sit among the slave girls, and to card the wool.’¹³

‘It’s not supposed to be that way.’ A Roman wife was not expected to control her husband, however much she may have been expected to control others, including children and slaves.¹⁴ A particular version of the stereotype of the inappropriately controlling wife attached to the dowry-rich wife, the uxor dotata, who was able effectively to emasculate (and enslave) her husband through a combination of her own economic independence and his dependence upon her wealth.¹⁵ A good example of the uxor dotata may be found in Plautus’ Menaechmi.¹⁶

Plautus’ Menaechmi is, as Susannah Morton Braund has observed, unusual within the corpus of Roman comedy because it is not about a happily-ever-after marriage but rather about divorce and the end of a marriage.¹⁷ The play contains several elements of physical and non-physical abuse experienced by Wife, but also by Menaechmus (Husband): threatened and actual violence; insults intended to humiliate the victim; stalking and surveillance; stealing a victim’s property; gaslighting; behaviour intended to degrade the victim and the marriage relationship; as well as an observable close connection between the victim’s decision to leave the relationship and an escalation of abuse. Does this constitute a picture of coercive control?¹⁸ Menaechmus (Husband) certainly depicts himself as the victim of Wife’s controlling behaviour. In doing so, he asserts that her surveillance of his actions is not acceptable behaviour on the part of a wife. This view is supported by Wife’s Father (Senex), who likewise accuses Wife of behaving incorrectly when she watches her husband and demands explanations of his actions. But Menaechmi also explores the idea that a victim could be misidentified as a perpetrator. Plautus invites the audience to listen to Menaechmus’ allegations of ongoing abuse at the same time as they watch Wife’s lived experience of ongoing abuse unfold during the course of the play. In a world in which one party to the marriage was expected to exercise control and the other to model obedience, Plautus and his audience also knew that controlling behaviour could damage the marriage relationship. Menaechmi both explores and challenges ‘the way things are supposed to be’.

We meet this couple (Menaechmus-the-Husband and Wife) at a point when their relationship has deteriorated to the extent that (again unusually) Menaechmus verbally abuses Wife to her face (rather than to a third party) and threatens her with divorce.¹⁹ He contrasts her ‘unrestrained’ behaviour and inability to ‘control your mind’ with the control that she seeks to exercise over his movements and actions. He begins by calling her both bad and stupid and concludes by saying he has ‘spoiled’ her too much and warning her to watch out in future if she does not stop spying on her husband (109–122a):

If you weren’t bad, if you weren’t stupid, if you weren’t unrestrained and unable to control your mind, you yourself would hate what you can see your husband hates. If after this day you do something further of this sort to me, I’ll pack you off to your father as a divorced woman … I’ve spoiled you far too much. Now I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Since I’m providing you well with slave girls, food, wool, gold, clothes, and purple, and you don’t lack anything, you’ll watch out for a hard time if you’re wise and you’ll stop spying on your husband.²⁰

Menaechmus represents himself as the victim of Wife’s controlling behaviour. In particular, he accuses her of surveillance over his comings and goings—of spying on him. The play invites us to think carefully about this. Menaechmus’ complaints about Wife’s surveillance begin in general terms (‘Whenever I want to go out you hold me back … I have to state everything, whatever I’ve done and am doing’), but, in the course of the play, we witness Menaechmus wishing to be unobserved so that he may visit his prostitute mistress and so that he may steal Wife’s possessions. His charge of general surveillance of all his actions is undermined—or at least problematized—by the fact that the actions that he takes within the play are intended to humiliate Wife and steal her property.

Is this a case in which the victim has been misidentified as perpetrator? Wife’s Father (Senex) models the way in which the audience should/could/might think this through. He begins, like Menaechmus (Husband), by admonishing Wife for her unwifely behaviour. In a bitter exchange between father and daughter, Wife protests that her husband is humiliating and mistreating her by his affair with the prostitute next door. Her father responds by defending Menaechmus-the-Husband’s affair, claiming it as a consequence of her (the Wife’s) over-controlling behaviour. In the course of his defence he articulates the core concern of the husband of a dowry-rich wife—that her behaviour humiliates and emasculates him. Wife pleads with her Father to help her, citing as her husband’s next offence the fact that he steals her property and gives it to his prostitute mistress. It is at this point—when Wife’s own garments and jewellery (her property) are introduced—that her father can see a cause for him to investigate further (805–06): ‘He behaves badly if he behaves like this. If he doesn’t behave like this, you are behaving badly by accusing an innocent man.’²¹ Father’s language is that of forensic oratory. The audience is invited to make a judgement. Even if they had no sympathy for Wife’s humiliation (and this is not a given), on the theft charge at least, a Roman audience (made up in part of other fathers and husbands), could find Menaechmus’ behaviour unacceptable. Father himself notes that ‘there’s a limit to what a wife ought to put up with’ (769).²²

How does Wife experience this relationship? Menaechmus states (both to Wife and to his prostitute) that he hates Wife (120; 189–90). He threatens her with divorce in their opening exchange and depicts their relationship as an ongoing battle—a battle which he is currently winning (127–34) and for which he deserves medals.²³ He routinely humiliates her by spending time with prostitutes and threatens her financial stability by stealing from her. When Wife speaks, she is articulate about the psychological/emotional and financial abuse that she is suffering (559–60). ‘Should I tolerate being treated like an idiot here in my marriage, where my husband’s furtively stealing everything that’s at home and taking it to his mistress?’²⁴ In one extended exchange between Wife and Menaechmus, we watch as she attempts to confront him with the truth of his most recent abuse (stealing her dress) and he counters with evasion and deceit (602–45), intended to undermine her confidence in the version of events that she has been told (and which she has believed). Wife’s persistent interjections (‘you’re joking/talking rubbish’; ‘now you’re not joking’) reveal her attempts to sort lies from truth in the exchange. Her attempts are abetted by Peniculus, who directly accuses Menaechmus of lying (604), and rendered comically complicated by the fact that Menaechmus (the Husband) stole the dress and gave it to his prostitute, but Menaechmus (the eponymous Brother) took the dress to be embroidered. Wife’s ability to know what really happened is thus undermined both by Menaechmus’ evasions and by the complications of the plot itself. After Wife has sought the help of her Father to end her marriage (by taking her home to the paternal house), both Wife and Father face threats of physical violence (from Menaechmus-the-Brother, feigning madness). The connection between her decision to leave and the threat of consequences is a direct one, but one which the playwright complicates by having the threats delivered by Menaechmus-the-Brother. Wife and Father nevertheless both believe these threats to be delivered by her husband (851): ‘Run off home as fast as possible so that he doesn’t beat you.’²⁵ Wife believes her life to be in danger in this exchange (842): ‘I’m dead! My dear father, he’s threatening to burn out my eyes.’²⁶ Father also believes himself to be in real danger (861, ‘I’m horribly afraid, given the nature of his threats, that he could do me some harm’²⁷), whilst, at the same time, believing that Menaechmus is mad and needs medical treatment. The play closes with one final humiliation for Wife: she is to be divorced by her husband via abandonment and auctioned off along with the household goods (1160).²⁸

Within the play, Wife suffers ongoing humiliations and non-physical abuse constituted of financial abuse, name-calling, aggressive characterizations of her marriage as a battle, undermining of her version of events (gaslighting), threats of actual violence. She responds by lamenting her position and complaining about how difficult it is to be a good wife in this situation as well as by seeking to end her relationship by returning to her father’s house. Menaechmus, too, complains of his treatment at the hands of his wife. He represents himself as a good husband because he has provided ‘slave girls, food, wool, gold, clothes, and purple’ for his wife. His claims are supported (up to a point) by Wife’s Father, who also challenges Wife’s representation of herself as a victim (766–70; 785–98). At the heart of their conflict is Menaechmus’ sense of entitlement to power over Wife that has been thwarted (‘That’s not the way things are supposed to be’) and a recognition of the fact that a desire to control the behaviour of another perverts, distorts, and damages the marriage relationship. But whilst Wife is accused of being controlling and of lacking control over herself, the action of the play bears witness to Menaechmus’ attempts to threaten and humiliate Wife, and it is Menaechmus-the-Brother (whom Wife believes to be her husband) who feigns madness as a means of unleashing unreasonable (threatened and actual) physical violence in the world of the play.

2. HUSBAND AND WIFE: COERCIVE CONTROL AS A PATTERN OF ABUSE

Coercive control is characterized by a pattern of abuse which may, but does not always, include incidents of physical violence. Patterns of abuse may be difficult to observe in ancient evidence, which rarely allows us to picture an ongoing relationship between a couple. Saint Augustine’s description of the experience of Monica’s (his mother’s) abuse at the hands of her husband (Augustine’s father) and two cases from Roman Egypt do, nevertheless, offer an opportunity to examine a pattern of behaviour and also to glimpse the experience and the mindset of a woman undergoing ongoing abuse. Monica’s case is a well-known example of ancient domestic violence.²⁹ Augustine’s description of her experience highlights not only the particular abuse suffered by his mother, but also the prevalence of domestic abuse among her friends. It is worth citing in full (Confessions 9.9 (19)):

She put up with marital infidelities, because she did not want any acrimony with her husband on such a topic. She was waiting for your mercy to come upon him so that he would turn to you and reform his adulterous ways. Besides this, he was a distinctly generous man, but quick-tempered too. She knew she must not oppose him when he was angry, not by action, not even by a word. Whenever he had become unreasonably angry, she used to wait for the moment when he became calm and peaceable once more, and then explain the reason for her action. Indeed many women married to more gentle husbands appeared with faces disfigured by bruising, and criticized the conduct of their menfolk in conversation. Then my mother would tell them playfully but seriously to hold their tongues, because from the moment they heard the marriage contract (as it is called) formally read aloud, they should think of it as a deed of purchase which consigned them to the category of slaves. From that moment they should be mindful of their married status and not be disdainful toward their masters. The wives were amazed at this because they knew what a hotheaded husband she had to put up with. Even so it was unheard of—and there was never any sign—to suggest that Patricius had beaten his wife, or that they had fallen out at home and disagreed with one another even for a single day. So they asked her privately, and she told them of her method, which I have just mentioned. Those who then began to practice it thanked her once they had tried it for themselves. Those who did not start practicing it continued to be subjugated and abused.³⁰

There are elements of this description which suggest a relationship characterized by coercive control: Augustine describes his mother’s attempt to manage her husband’s anger over a long period of time; his anger is described as ‘unreasonable’;³¹ her own everyday behaviour is dictated by her need to respond to his mood; she feels that she has to explain her actions (and that she can only do so once her husband has calmed down); she considers herself to be both lowly and humiliated by her husband in that she has come to think of herself as her husband’s slave and her husband as her master; he was a serial adulterer and she bore this in order to avoid ‘marital acrimony’. Her advice to her friends, to copy her example in order to avoid being physically abused by their own husbands, also points to her sense that she could not escape her relationship, that it would not improve, and that her husband would not take responsibility for his behaviour. She must learn to endure as best she could. Augustine’s observation about the possibility that his mother also suffered physical abuse is carefully phrased: no one hears of or sees any evidence that she has been physically harmed. They do not even suspect that the couple has argued. Augustine himself chooses to represent his mother’s management (endurance) of her abuser as laudatory, even exemplary.³²

Two papyri from Roman Egypt also offer glimpses of the experience of ongoing abuse. The female litigant in P.Oxy. VI 903 (= C. Pap. Jud. III 457d Oxyrhynchus, fourth century ce) describes domestic abuse which includes non-physical violence (intimidation, threats, locking her out of her house, humiliation, and financial abuse) as well as the physical abuse of foster children (who the litigant claims were locked in a basement and set alight) and household slaves (including her personal slave, Zoe, who was beaten almost to death) as a means of terrorizing the woman herself. The female litigant describes these actions as occurring and recurring despite (in the case of taking her keys) a public promise to stop this behaviour. The very terms of the husband’s promise (‘nor will I do violence to her again’) point to ongoing nature of this abuse:

He swore in the presence of bishops and his brothers that ‘From now on, I will not hide all of my keys from her’—he trusted his own slaves, but he didn’t trust me—‘and I will even stay away from her, nor will I do violence to her again.’ We made a marriage agreement, and after these agreements and the oaths, once again he hid the keys from me. When I went to church on the Sabbath he locked the outside doors, and yelled down at me, ‘Why have you gone to the church?’ He said many foul things to my face, even speaking through his nose.³³

The wife goes on to describe financial abuse:

As for the 100 artabas of grain due in taxes under my name, he has given not the first artaba. He locked up his account books and kept them from me, saying ‘Pay the bill of the 100 artabas’, since as I said, he had not paid it.

She concludes her petition by reiterating two of his threats: that he will continue to take her property in order to meet his debts and that he will take a concubine. At the heart of her complaint is concern about her property, but the complaint itself describes an ongoing pattern of non-physical abuse which was intended to intimidate and control.

The female litigant in P.Oxy. L 3581 (Oxyrhynchus, fourth to fifth century ce), Aurelia Attiaina, also describes ongoing abuse. She explains that she has experienced forced abduction and forced marriage followed by abandonment when her husband left her and their baby for another woman. She then explains that her husband subsequently tricked her into taking him back home, promising that he would pay a fine if he behaved badly to her in this way again:

He made a contract with me in which he stated that the marriage would abide and if he wished to engage in such disgusting practices that he would pay a fine of two ounces of gold. His father provided a written guarantee of this. And so I brought him into our home, where he tried to do things worse than his previous actions.

At this time, the wife states, the husband also engaged in financial abuse, stealing from her and from the soldiers billeted in their house before fleeing and leaving her to face punishment. Aurelia Attiaina attempted to divorce her husband, upon which he abducted and imprisoned her in his house, raped and then abandoned her again in order to return to the other woman. Now pregnant again, Aurelia was seeking financial reparation on the ground of the contract signed by her husband and witnessed by his father, for the two ounces of gold.

Each of the cases above demonstrates patterns of abusive behaviour that were intended to control, humiliate, and intimidate an intimate partner. By adopting a broad definition of domestic abuse, which includes coercive control, we can investigate the impact of both physical and non-physical intimate partner abuse in the ancient world. Augustine’s picture of his mother’s relationship with her angry and adulterous husband highlights the ways in which one victim–survivor sought to manage her relationship by seeking to regulate or adapt her own behaviour and self-presentation in order to placate her husband. The women plaintiffs in the papyri demonstrate another approach. By concentrating on financial reparation and holding their partners to account for financial losses which they had suffered, they sought a means to achieve limited redress for financial abuse which, in each case, represented only part of the abuse suffered, but the part most likely to be compensated in a legal system which prioritized property rights.³⁴

3. HUSBAND, PATER PATRIAE, AND WIFE: DOMESTIC TYRANNY AND INTIMATE PARTNER HOMICIDE

Nurse: ‘you should use submissiveness to win over your unkind husband … so you yourself can be safe’.³⁵

‘When I started to, you know, wriggle out from his control, that’s a very, very dangerous time and that’s when domestic violence is about power and control and when you start to change that dynamic, you know you can really, really raise a lot of problems. So you have to be very, very careful.’ (Kay Schubach, victim–survivor)³⁶

Poppaea Sabina, the emperor Nero’s wife, was kicked to death by her husband whilst she was pregnant. Suetonius describes her death as follows (Nero 35.3): ‘He [Nero] killed her, too, by kicking her when she was pregnant and ill, because she had scolded him when he came home late from the chariot-races.’³⁷ We now know that, for many couples, domestic violence begins or increases during pregnancy.³⁸ The allegation that Poppaea was kicked because she was scolding (‘nagging’) her husband points to a key, ongoing issue in the interpretation and reporting of cases of domestic violence. The stereotype of the ‘nagging wife’ persists in modern media (alongside the ‘henpecked husband’) and ‘positions women as triggering violence’ used against them.³⁹ In Suetonius’ text, Nero’s murder of Poppaea is nonetheless placed in a context critical of Nero. Her death at Nero’s hand is listed immediately before a catalogue of Nero’s other abuses (Nero 35.4): ‘his treatment of every one of his relatives was characterized by criminal abuses’.⁴⁰ By listing Nero’s murders, rapes, and exiles of relatives, Suetonius represents Nero as serially abusing his power within his family and as the emperor. This picture of Nero as (domestic and imperial) tyrant signalled his failure as both husband–father and emperor–pater patriae.⁴¹

Two ancient accounts of Nero’s murder of his previous wife, Octavia, explore this idea but do so in a context which also provides an opportunity to explore in the ancient world the strong connection between coercive control, the end of the relationship, and intimate partner homicide which has been observed in the modern world.⁴² Tacitus, in the Annals, and the unknown author of the Octavia both explore the idea of Nero as tyrant by concentrating on the marriage of Nero and Octavia and on Nero’s role as domestic abuser. Both texts establish Nero as a habitual abuser—of power and of people—and seek to contextualize Octavia’s experience within a wider pattern of abuse behaviour which includes the murders of Octavia’s father (the emperor Claudius) and her brother. Coercive control in this relationship is inextricably bound up with control of the state. Nero as husband is also pater patriae—father-of-all—and his abuse of Octavia helps the reader/audience to understand who Nero truly is and why his violence (actual, psychological, and threatened) impacts his whole community. Octavia experiences violence at the hands of her husband and as part of Rome’s particular and specific form of patriarchy (see introduction)—rule by powerful fathers under the all-powerful father-of-all.⁴³

Margherita Carucci has shown that Tacitus introduces Octavia as a victim–survivor of intergenerational domestic violence and family trauma.⁴⁴ She notes the care with which Tacitus draws attention to the psychological and emotional impact of this experience on Octavia (13.16.4: ‘Octavia too, though raw in years, had learned to hide pain, affection, every emotion’) and lists the elements of emotional abuse Octavia suffers.⁴⁵ These include fear, social isolation, public humiliation, and the terror caused by threats of lethal violence:

After many vain attempts to strangle her (threats and fear), Nero divorced Octavia on the pretext of sterility and married his mistress Poppaea twelve days after the separation (humiliation). The emperor then banished Octavia to the island of Pandateria (social isolation) on the false charge of adultery (verbal assault) which caused protests among the citizens of Rome.⁴⁶

Tacitus’ narrative of the events leading to Octavia’s murder emphasizes the interplay of two forces—the demands of Poppaea on the one hand, and the sympathy of the Roman people for Octavia on the other—which, together, drive Nero to ever more extreme abuse. That one of these forces should be located in the domus and the other in the State again underlines the way in which Octavia’s experience of abuse is brought about by her peculiar position as both wife of Nero and wife of the princeps–pater patriae. Tacitus treats at length the ways in which Nero deliberately concocted false allegations (of adultery, of sterility, of abortion) against Octavia (14.60.1–63.2) and shows how these allegations were promulgated by weaponizing the resources of the imperial household (household slaves) and the State (a public edict, the prefect of the fleet at Misenum) against her. Tacitus saw three things clearly. First, he stated that it was Octavia’s marriage to Nero which brought about her death: ‘her wedding day might as well have been her funeral’ (14.63.3).⁴⁷ Second, her divorce and exile (and hence her escape from the abusive marriage) did not end her abuse. Rather (and third), Nero’s decision to kill her followed promptly upon her escape from their marriage (14.64.1): ‘after an interval of a few days, she was ordered to die’.⁴⁸

The author of the pseudo-Senecan Octavia also understood that it was the time at which the relationship was coming to an end which was most dangerous for a victim of domestic abuse. In the Octavia, Octavia herself decides to flee (667–68). She vocalizes both her terror for the future and her decision to leave. And she predicts her own death as she leaves the stage (651–68):

Prior to leaving, Octavia clearly describes her mental state in terms familiar in the study of modern victims of coercive control: she is constantly fearful (65); she wishes she were dead (79); she believes that her husband hates her (104); she feels humiliated by his affair with Poppaea (104); she feels unsafe (109–13). She believes her husband to be brutal and tyrannical and to have been responsible for the abuse of others in the past (121–30). She makes repeated reference to the way in which his anger, and fear of his anger, impacts on her ability to behave as she would like to do (65–57; 84–87). She fears future violence (650–60). She sees their mutual destruction as the result of the abuse she has suffered (174). Octavia can cite Nero’s past behaviour as evidence which corroborates her fears of future violence, suggesting that she herself is thinking about his violence and his anger as a ‘pattern of behaviour’. Again and again, she and her nurse identify Nero as a tyrant (33; 84–87; 109–13; 900; 959; 968).

In the play, Octavia’s decision to leave is the catalyst for the Roman people’s outrage, and this, in turn, escalates Nero’s violence against Octavia. Having been informed of the people’s uprising and their desire for the return of Octavia, Nero declares that these events ‘demand the execution of my sister, demands her loathsome head’ (859). He weaponizes the forces of coercion against her and, like a tyrant, acts in anger and to inspire fear (871–76):

Octavia’s abuse is represented in both the Annals and the Octavia as stemming from, and facilitated by, the central ideological idea around which the Principate was built—the idea of princeps as pater of all. Octavia’s repeated naming of Nero as a tyrant underlines this fact—he is not simply an abusive husband; his status as abusive husband is intrinsically political: he is a tyrant—the opposite (in Rome’s particular formulation of the Good King) of the pater patriae. In exploring the deterioration of this marriage, both Tacitus and the author of the Octavia closely associate the end of the relationship and Nero’s decision to murder his wife. In doing so, both texts provide evidence for the connection between relationships characterized by coercive control and intimate partner homicide.

4. HUSBANDS, WIVES, AND THE DOMUS: RECOGNIZING AND REGULATING NON-PHYSICAL COERCIVE CONTROL

Read together, these three statements of the law offer a glimpse of circumstances ripe for abuse. A slave woman was amongst the most powerless and vulnerable members of the Roman domus. Yet marrying one’s own freedwoman seems to have been, if not common, then not unusual.⁵² That a law should be necessary in order to try to prevent patrons from forcibly marrying a former slave against her will suggests that this, too, was sufficiently common to require regulation by the law. How did she express her unwillingness?⁵³ How did he respond? Under what circumstances might a patron have manumitted a slave in order to marry her (and thus be excluded from the provisions of the law)? In a situation in which all of the power resided with him, in which slaves were sexually available to and exploited by their patrons, and in which her freedom (manumission) was at issue, did she become his wife willingly? Was the law preventing a freedwoman manumitted in order to be a wife from initiating divorce prompted by her desire to try to leave him (in a sufficient number of instances or a sufficiently important instance to warrant the attention of the law)? Unable to leave a husband who refused a divorce, did she feel trapped, helpless, humiliated, controlled?

Studies of domestic violence in the Roman world have tended to concentrate on women’s experience of physical violence. But women’s experience of domestic abuse is much broader than this. Modern jurisdictions such as Scotland, England, Wales and some states in Australia are currently investigating ways in which to recognize and criminalize not only a much wider range of behaviours than previously considered, but also an overall pattern of behaviour which constitutes ongoing coercive control. Looking for ‘patterns of behaviour’ in the Roman past is difficult since, with notable exceptions, we are rarely in a position to examine evidence for ongoing relationships between intimate partners. At the same time, looking for patterns of behaviour is imaginatively liberating in a way that can inform our reading of our ancient legal material. The copious case law on dowries suggests a need to protect a woman’s dowry from interference or misuse by her husband. Laws forbidding the exchange of gifts between spouses have been interpreted as attempts to prevent husbands pressuring their wives (physically, psychologically, emotionally) to part with property (financial abuse).⁵⁴ Attempts to discourage divorce via abandonment, paint a bleak picture of women’s vulnerability.⁵⁵

In a global context within which one in three women experiences physical and/or sexual violence and in which domestic violence has been described by the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres as an epidemic, the broader definition of domestic violence for which I advocate in this chapter allows us better to understand the abuse (physical and non-physical) experienced by victims in the ancient world. It also plays a role in encouraging greater sensitivity to the diverse experience of domestic abuse which those of our students, colleagues, and readers who are themselves victim–survivors (or perpetrators) of coercive control bring to their interpretation of ancient evidence.

REFERENCES

Footnotes