Adultery in Classical Athens

The act which is usually rendered in English as "adultery" was called moicheia ({{lang|grc|μοιχεία}}) in Greek. Moicheia was defined more broadly than the English "adultery", however, referring to any "seduction of a free woman under the protection of a kyrios".{{cite journal|last=Cole|first=Susan Guettel|title=Greek Sanctions against Sexual Assault|year=1984|journal=Classical Philology|volume=79|issue=2|page=98|doi=10.1086/366842|s2cid=159919756 }} Thus, sex with the wife, daughter, or sister of a free man were all considered to be instances of moicheia. In at least one case, detailed in the speech "Against Neaera", we know that an alleged moichos was imprisoned based on a father's right to punish moicheia committed against his daughter.{{cite journal|last=Carey|first=Christopher|title=Rape and Adultery in Athenian Law|journal=The Classical Quarterly|volume=45|issue=2|year=1995|page=408|doi=10.1017/S0009838800043482|s2cid=159762971 }} In Athenian law, moicheia was always committed by men upon women.

Against this view of moicheia, David Cohen has argued that it was limited to sex with citizens' wives, and that the word moichos was synonymous with the modern English "adulterer", but this view has been largely rejected by other scholars.{{cite journal|last=Johnstone|first=Steve|title=Apology for the Manuscript of Demosthenes 59.67|journal=American Journal of Philology|volume=123|issue=2|year=2002|page=229|doi=10.1353/ajp.2002.0024|s2cid=161461068 }}

Married men were not considered to have committed adultery if they were to have sexual relationships with slaves or prostitutes.{{cn|date=May 2025}}

An Athenian law on adultery (graphe moicheias) is known to have existed, though it has not survived.Forsdyke cites pseudo-Xenophon, Constitution of the Athenians 59.3 for this claim. However, the reference she gives is to Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 59.3. The pseudo-Xenophontic Constitution only has three chapters. Christopher Carey argues that the law cited at §28 of On the Murder of Eratosthenes is an otherwise unknown law on adultery, which prescribed the actions to be taken in cases of moicheia and specified killing the culprit as an option.{{cite journal|last=Carey|first=Christopher|title=Rape and Adultery in Athenian Law|journal=The Classical Quarterly|volume=45|issue=2|year=1995|page=412|doi=10.1017/S0009838800043482|s2cid=159762971 }}

Along with the law on moicheia reconstructed by Carey, three Athenian laws which concerned moicheia have survived, all preserved in the works of fourth-century BC orators.{{cite journal|last=Cole|first=Susan Guettel|title=Greek Sanctions against Sexual Assault|year=1984|journal=Classical Philology|volume=79|issue=2|page=100|doi=10.1086/366842|s2cid=159919756 }} The first of these prohibited a man from living with an adulterous wife, and an adulterous wife from taking part in public religious ceremonies.Demosthenes 59.86–87 The second exempted a kyrios who killed a moichos caught in the act.Demosthenes 23.53Lysias 1.30

The third surviving law concerning moicheia protected an accused adulterer from illegal imprisonment.Demosthenes 59.66 It is cited by Apollodoros in Against Neaera, and modern editors have largely taken it to mean that a man who has sex with a prostitute cannot be indicted for moicheia.{{cite journal|last=Johnstone|first=Steven|title=Apology for the Manuscript of Demosthenes 59.67|journal=American Journal of Philology|volume=123|issue=2|year=2002|page=231|doi=10.1353/ajp.2002.0024|s2cid=161461068 }} Johnstone, however, argues for a different reading of the passage, which protects men from being imprisoned for moicheia in cases where they have been involved in business relationships with women.{{cite journal|last=Johnstone|first=Steve|title=Apology for the Manuscript of Demosthenes 59.67|journal=American Journal of Philology|volume=123|issue=2|year=2002|page=253|doi=10.1353/ajp.2002.0024|s2cid=161461068 }}

According to the Athenian orator Lysias, moicheia was considered to be a more serious crime than rape or sexual assault,{{cite journal|last=Cole|first=Susan Guettel|title=Greek Sanctions against Sexual Assault|year=1984|journal=Classical Philology|volume=79|issue=2|page=101|doi=10.1086/366842|s2cid=159919756 }} because seduction of a woman implied a long-term relationship, where her legitimate family had their place in her affections supplanted.{{cite book|last=Pomeroy|first=Sarah|author-link=Sarah B. Pomeroy |title=Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity|year=1994|location=London|publisher=Pimlico|pages=86–87}}

Historians have generally believed Lysias's claim that seduction was considered to be more serious than rape,{{cite journal|last=Harris|first=Edward M.|title=Did Athenians Regard Seduction as a Worse Crime than Rape?|journal=The Classical Quarterly|year=1990|volume=40|issue=2|page=370|doi=10.1017/s0009838800042956|s2cid=170121080 }} though not all have accepted his explanation for this.

For instance, Christopher Carey argues that this explanation was merely a post-hoc rationalisation, and that in fact the law was more concerned with the possibility of illegitimate children in cases of adultery.{{cite journal|last=Carey|first=Christopher|title=Rape and Adultery in Athenian Law|journal=The Classical Quarterly|volume=45|issue=2|year=1995|pages=415–416|doi=10.1017/S0009838800043482|s2cid=159762971 }}

The view that seduction was considered to be a worse crime than rape has been questioned by more recent scholars, however.

For example, Eva Cantarella, dismisses Lysias's claim as "ingenious but totally inconsistent",{{cite book|last=Cantarella|first=Eva|chapter=Gender, Sexuality, and Law|title=The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law|editor1-last=Gagarin|editor1-first=Michael|editor2-last=Cohen|editor2-first=David|year=2005|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|page=243}} and argues that rape and adultery could both be punished with a range of penalties, of which in both cases the most severe was death.{{cite book|last=Cantarella|first=Eva|chapter=Gender, Sexuality, and Law|title=The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law|editor1-last=Gagarin|editor1-first=Michael|editor2-last=Cohen|editor2-first=David|year=2005|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|page=244}}

Similarly, Edward Harris observes that portraying rape as a less severe crime than adultery is in the interest of the speaker in Lysias's speech,{{cite journal|last=Harris|first=Edward M.|title=Did Athenians Regard Seduction as a Worse Crime than Rape?|journal=The Classical Quarterly|year=1990|volume=40|issue=2|page=371|doi=10.1017/S0009838800042956|s2cid=170121080 }} and argues that rape could be prosecuted as hubris, for which death was a potential penalty.{{cite journal|last=Harris|first=Edward M.|title=Did Athenians Regard Seduction as a Worse Crime than Rape?|journal=The Classical Quarterly|year=1990|volume=40|issue=2|page=373|doi=10.1017/S0009838800042956|s2cid=170121080 }}

The law which allowed the killing of a moichos caught in the act as a justifiable homicide, seems to have been part of the homicide law set down by Draco, while the laws which set down alternative penalties for adulterers were probably Solonian in origin.{{cite journal |last=Kapparis |first=Konstantinos |title=Humiliating the Adulterer: The Law and Practice in Classical Athens |journal=Revue internationale de droit de l'Antiquité |year=1996 |volume=43 |pages=72–73 }} Mistreating and ransoming adulterers seems to have a much longer history, however, with precedents going back to Homeric times. For instance, in Book VIII of the Odyssey, Hephaistos, the husband of Aphrodite, captures Ares and Aphrodite in bed together and displays them in front of the other gods to be ridiculed.{{cite journal|last=Forsdyke|first=Sara|title=Street Theatre and Popular Justice in Ancient Greece: Shaming, Stoning, and Starving Offenders Inside and Outside the Courts|journal=Past and Present|year=2008|issue=201|page=10|doi=10.1093/pastj/gtn014}}

There were at least four possible responses to adultery open to the aggrieved party. Firstly, if the adulterer was caught in the act, they could be summarily executed by the kyrios of the woman they were found with. This was legal both under the Draconian code's provisions for justifiable homicide, and, as Carey believes, under the Solonian law on moicheia. This is what Euphiletos claimed had happened in On the Murder of Eratosthenes. However, this was probably an uncommon response, and modern scholars generally believe that this penalty was only rarely exacted.

Andrew Wolpert lists three alternatives to this course of action: to charge the offender in a court of law, to extract a financial penalty, or to subject the offender to physical abuse.{{cite journal|last=Wolpert|first=Andrew|title=Lysias 1 and the Politics of the Oikos|journal=The Classical Journal|year=2001|volume=96|issue=4|page=418}} The punishment for an offender convicted of moicheia is unknown. However, in many public actions the jury had the responsibility for selecting the punishment, and Eva Cantarella suggests that this could have been the case for the graphe moicheias.{{cite book|last=Cantarella|first=Eva|chapter=Gender, Sexuality, and Law|title=The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law|editor1-last=Gagarin|editor1-first=Michael|editor2-last=Cohen|editor2-first=David|year=2005|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|pages=243–244}}

The most common means of punishing adulterers probably involved the last of these options: physical abuse with the aim of humiliating the offender.{{cite journal|last=Forsdyke|first=Sara|title=Street Theatre and Popular Justice in Ancient Greece: Shaming, Stoning, and Starving Offenders Inside and Outside the Courts|journal=Past and Present|year=2008|issue=201|page=8|doi=10.1093/pastj/gtn014}} Christopher Carey believes that this maltreatment of a moichos was explicitly permitted in law. However, Sara Forsdyke has disagreed, arguing that it was in fact a form of extra-legal collective punishment.{{cite journal|last=Forsdyke|first=Sara|title=Street Theatre and Popular Justice in Ancient Greece: Shaming, Stoning, and Starving Offenders Inside and Outside the Courts|journal=Past and Present|year=2008|issue=201|page=9|doi=10.1093/pastj/gtn014}}

Comic sources describe the abuse and humiliation of those guilty of moicheia, including a scene in the Clouds where Aristophanes refers to an adulterer being punished by the insertion of a radish into his anus.{{cite journal|last=Cohen|first=David|title=Sexuality, Violence, and the Athenian Law of Hubris|journal=Greece & Rome|year=1991|volume=38|issue=2|page=176|doi=10.1017/S001738350002355X|s2cid=145301133 }} Other comic punishments for adulterers include the removal of pubic hair. Konstantinos Kapparis has argued that both of these punishments were intended to humiliate the adulterer by feminising them, because depilation was a standard part of a female beauty regimen in Classical Athens, and because being penetrated was associated with femininity.{{cite journal |last=Kapparis |first=Konstantinos |title=Humiliating the Adulterer: The Law and Practice in Classical Athens |journal=Revue internationale de droit de l'Antiquité |year=1996 |volume=43 |page=76 }} The historian David Cohen has questioned the idea that these comic forms of abuse were carried out in reality, but Konstantinos Kapparis and Christopher Carey have argued that the reason that these jokes had such longevity in comedy was precisely because they were a reflection of reality.{{cite journal |last=Kapparis |first=Konstantinos |title=Humiliating the Adulterer: The Law and Practice in Classical Athens |journal=Revue internationale de droit de l'Antiquité |year=1996 |volume=43 |pages=66–67 }}

A married woman who was discovered committing adultery would be divorced and prohibited from participating in public religion. If her husband did not wish to divorce her, he might lose his citizen rights.{{cite journal|last=Roy|first=J.|title=An Alternative Sexual Morality for Classical Athenians|journal=Greece & Rome|volume=44|issue=1|year=1997|page=13|doi=10.1093/gr/44.1.11}} Jim Roy suggests that a husband might have risked this, however, either to keep the dowry or to avoid scandal.{{cite journal|last=Roy|first=J.|title=An Alternative Sexual Morality for Classical Athenians|journal=Greece & Rome|volume=44|issue=1|year=1997|page=14|doi=10.1093/gr/44.1.11}}

An unmarried woman caught in adultery by her kyrios could be sold into slavery, though there is no known instance of this penalty in fact being carried out.

In his dialogue Hieron, Xenophon claims that the right to kill a moichos was enshrined in law not just in Athens but throughout the cities of Greece.{{cite journal|last=Carey|first=Christopher|title=Rape and Adultery in Athenian Law|journal=The Classical Quarterly|volume=45|issue=2|year=1995|page=415|doi=10.1017/S0009838800043482|s2cid=159762971 }} However, the adultery laws which we know of through other sources from elsewhere in Greece tend to enforce either financial penalty or abuse and humiliation, rather than death, as a punishment.

In ancient Gortyn, the penalty for seduction was a fine of up to 200 staters.{{cite journal|last=Harris|first=Edward M.|title=Did Athenians Regard Seduction as a Worse Crime than Rape?|journal=The Classical Quarterly|year=1990|volume=40|issue=2|page=375|doi=10.1017/S0009838800042956|s2cid=170121080 }} Gortynian adultery law said that unless payment was made within five days, the kyrios could abuse the adulterer however he wished, paralleling the abuse of adulterers permitted in Athens.{{cite journal |last=Kapparis |first=Konstantinos |title=Humiliating the Adulterer: The Law and Practice in Classical Athens |journal=Revue internationale de droit de l'Antiquité |year=1996 |volume=43 |page=74 }}

In various other Greek cities, we have stories of adulterers being publicly humiliated as a form of punishment. According to Plutarch, the people of Cyme called adulterous women "donkey riders".{{cite journal|last=Forsdyke|first=Sara|title=Street Theatre and Popular Justice in Ancient Greece: Shaming, Stoning, and Starving Offenders Inside and Outside the Courts|journal=Past and Present|year=2008|issue=201|page=3|doi=10.1093/pastj/gtn014}} Aristotle says that in Lepreum in the Peloponnese, male adulterers were bound and led around the city for three days, while adulteresses were made to stand in the agora in a transparent tunic for eleven days. In Pisidia, we are told that adulterers and adulteresses were paraded around the city together on a donkey.{{cite journal|last=Forsdyke|first=Sara|title=Street Theatre and Popular Justice in Ancient Greece: Shaming, Stoning, and Starving Offenders Inside and Outside the Courts|journal=Past and Present|year=2008|issue=201|pages=3–4|doi=10.1093/pastj/gtn014}}

In some places the punishment for adultery could be more severe, though again stopping short of death. In Epizephryian Locris in southern Italy, for instance, a moichos could be punished by blinding. In other cities, such as Lepreum and Cumae, the moichos was at risk of atimia – the loss of civic rights.{{cite book|last=Cantarella|first=Eva|chapter=Gender, Sexuality, and Law|title=The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law|editor1-last=Gagarin|editor1-first=Michael|editor2-last=Cohen|editor2-first=David|year=2005|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|page=244}}

• Adultery
• Oikos
• Women in Classical Athens

{{reflist}}

Athens

Category:Classical Athens

Category:Culture of ancient Greece