It was approaching closing time in the library when I happened to pick up the journal that was sitting in the rack directly in front of my nose. “Past and Present”, published by the Oxford University Press, turned out to cover an eclectic range of historical topics. Such as “Wife beating and manliness in late antiquity”.

Now the idea of a beating is rather disturbing: it implies a level of violence and degree of non-consent that’s not at all kinky. LOL I far prefer spanking. But some of the anecdotes in the article could certainly spark the pervy imagination.

Take something as simple as the law passed in 449AD in the eastern Roman empire by Theodosius II:

A wife could divorce her husband with full return of her dowry ‘if she could prove that he has inflicted flogging (verbera) on her’… The term ‘verbera’ imples that the type of beating imagined was with whips or canes, long associated with slaves.

Wannabe slave girls form an orderly queue, please!

But in the next century, Justinian’s legislation…

…rescinded a wife’s right to repudiation, but gave her the recourse of a heavy fine on an abusive husband. Wives whose husbands beat them with ‘whips or sticks” (‘flagellis aut fustibus’) could demand compensation equivalent to a third of their bride gift.

The fine was only to be paid if the beating took place ‘without any of the reasons which we have ordered would suffice for the dissolution of a marriage against wives’. The implication here is that husbands were within their rights to whip or beat wives who had given them serious grounds to suspect infidelity, such as dining or bathing with other men, or spending the night away from home without the husband’s permission.

Spending the night away with the husband’s permission was presumably fine. (Hey, perhaps the Romans tolerated poly relationships!)

Meanwhile, in the western empire, the law was a little stricter. Augustine of Hippo describes how a husband was supposed to deal with misbehaviour:

If he found his wife…looking through the window excessively, he would correct her not only with words but with blows. Yet if she should say to him, “why are you beating me”… then he should consider… how he might deliver just floggings for the correction of his own family.

The wife in this anecdote commits two faults – looking out of her window too often (behaviour associated with prostitutes) and talking back to her husband when he tries to correct her. Here, as elsewhere, Augustine considers such corporal discipline of a wife to be perfectly acceptable, a necessary part of men’s oversight of their households…

Apparently, “Augustine considered corporal discipline, when motivated by the desire for correction, to be a sign of affection”, and quite right too!

OK, hands up who else found the Latin phrases hot!