This book offers the first analysis of the rape of women of marriageable age (raptus virginum) in ancient Rome. This is a subject about which the legal sources preserved in Justinian's Digest provide us with very little, and not unequivocal, information. The aim is to reveal the intellectual and argumentative practices that led to the emergence of the crime of rape (crimen raptus) in Pseudo-Quintilian's school of rhetoric (turn of the first century AD), prior to its normalisation as a violent crime (crimen vis) by the jurisprudence of the Severan age (beginning of the third century AD). To this end, the author examines in depth the most salient aspects of the system of principles and rules into which Pseudo-Quintilian places the concept of sexual violence: the definition of the unlawful act, the application of the procedure, the function of penalties, the meaning of the law, the notion of criminal responsibility and the controversial issue of the victim's consent. Drawing on a diversified epistemological framework, the book achieves a critical synthesis between the traditional dogmatic approach and the anthropology of law, providing innovative answers to questions regarded by historians who have dealt with the subject-matter of rape in Rome as closed or futile.
Néphélé Papakonstantinou, JMU Würzburg, Deutschland.
