The Sexual Assault Case That Shook Ancient Rome
"You say that he raped an actress,” Cicero told the court. “And this is said to have happened at Atina, while he was quite young.”
There was a low, subdued chuckle from the crowd. They were all men — women weren’t allowed inside the courtroom — most from the town of Atina themselves. They’d made the 80-mile trip to support a man they respected, whom they believed had been unfairly accused.
His name was Gnaeus Plancius, and in the year 54 B.C., he was one of the most powerful men in Rome.
It was more than 2,000 years before the #MeToo movement, but a scene similar to the ones we’ve witnessed so often lately was already playing out. A prominent politician was on trial for corruption and bribery, charges bolstered by dirt his enemies had dug up from his past: the violent sexual assault of a young girl.
Those charges of corruption and bribery were a serious matter, but to the men in the court, the rape charge was nothing. It was harmless boys-will-be-boys misbehavior — something half the men there were guilty of themselves.
His lawyer, Cicero, didn’t even bother to deny it. He just threw up his arms in a mock flourish and, to the gleeful delight of the men who surrounded him, declared: “O how elegantly must his youth have been passed! The only thing which is imputed to him is one that there was not much harm in.”
And that was it. Nobody bothered to bring it up again.
Raping an actress, as Cicero assured them, was nothing more than following “a well-established tradition at staged events.”
It was hardly a crime, every man in the courtroom agreed. It was mudslinging; a cheap attack on a decent man’s character, bogging down the process of something that actually mattered: a trial over bribery.
“But please,” Cicero said when the chuckling had died down, “let us at last come to the merits of the case.”
The case moved along. The men all but forgot she’d ever even been mentioned. And life went on for everyone but her: that actress, still back home in Atina. The only hint she’d ever lived would be in Cicero’s speech. It would live on for thousands of years, studied by politicians and law students as a brilliant piece of oration — a perfect demonstration of how to shut down people who threw meaningless slander at a decent man.
Her name has been lost to time — nobody bothered to write it down. To the Roman Republic, she was just some whore in Atina who’d flaunted her skin on stage and then acted surprised when a red-blooded man couldn’t control himself.
The woman from Atina knew well what the men thought of her. She was an actress — and in Rome in 54 B.C., that made her little more than a prostitute.
It wasn’t a secret. The men didn’t hide how they saw women on the stage. They even worked it into poetry.
“[What] you have with actresses, you have with common strumpets,” the poet Horace wrote. A few years later, the moralist Plutarch would add that consorting “with actresses, harpists, and theatrical people,” was a “mode of life” that would leave them riddled with diseases.
Even the men who loved the theater saw the women on stage as little more than sex objects — like the poet Martial, who, after watching a troupe of actresses dance on stage, ran home and wrote a rave review that said: “They would have caused Hippolytus himself to masturbate!”
Women, in those days, weren’t allowed to perform in respectable Greek tragedies on glamorous stages — the female roles were usually played by young boys. Instead, there were mimae: women who put on silent comedy shows, usually stripped down to next to nothing, performing over the jeers of horny men yelling for them to take off the rest of their clothes. And plenty of the girls — if they knew what was good for them — would do just that.
To the men of Rome, these were filthy women — “the lowest level of life,” they were called, right in the nation’s code of law. They got on the stage because they loved to show off their bodies, and they wanted nothing more than to be ogled, harassed and violated by strangers.
That, at least, was how the men saw them — but these women hadn’t chosen their lives. Some had been forced into it when they were still just children, by starving parents with no other way to pay their bills. Most of the rest were slaves.
Rather tragic tale that obviously doesn't end that well, despite the writer's attempts at a hope spot. If it involves women and their rights as humans and it's set any time before the Enlightenment, your batting average will be impossibly high if you just assume "they get fucked over."