Rape and military sanctions in the Roman army: the example of Sertorius?

Authors

  • Juliana Gendron Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.53351/ruhm.v9i19.686

Keywords:

rape, military violence, civil war, Sertorius, Appian

Abstract

Ancient historians who described the rape of civilian women by soldiers are rare, but rape is considered nonetheless as one of the forms of violence inherent in the wars and conflicts in antiquity. Victorious soldiers demonstrated their power over the conquered women as part of the war booty. However, an extract from Appian’s Civil Wars constitutes a twofold exception. In Book I, Appian provides a detailed description of how a Roman soldier of Sertorius's army allegedly raped a woman living in a small town of the Iberian Peninsula, and how she mutilated her assaulter. Far from reducing it to an obscure and exceptional event intended to increase the drama of the story, Appian states that Sertorius sentenced to death not only the soldier, but also his entire cohort. Such a punishment inflicted by a Roman general to his own men goes well beyond any known military sanctions, especially in civil wars, when the generals’ popularity among their men was usually more important than respect for military discipline. The vocabulary employed by Appian in this passage will be thoroughly analyzed, but also in the whole of his work, in an attempt to define rape from the point of view of antiquity Rome, particularly in a military context. To conclude, a particular attention will be devoted to the contexts in which such events took place, in order to interpret the passage in light of the internal structure of Appian’s Civil Wars. The ultimate aim is thus to find out whether this testimony constitutes in fact an anomaly in the perception of rape in Roman antiquity.

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Published

2020-12-14

How to Cite

Gendron, J. (2020). Rape and military sanctions in the Roman army: the example of Sertorius?. Revista Universitaria De Historia Militar, 9(19), 56–76. https://doi.org/10.53351/ruhm.v9i19.686

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 19 (2020): Fear, Trauma, and Violence in the Wars of Antiquity

Section

Dossier

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