Sex and the Enslaved Woman in Roman Legal Texts

The sexual capacities of female slaves posed an inconvenient problem for the jurists who composed the texts that made up the ancient Roman legal code. The problem, simply put, was that the female slave’s sexuality, inextricably linked as it was to her ability to conceive and give birth, undermined the fundamental legal fiction upon which the ancient institution of slavery rested -- that an enslaved person is the possession of its owner.

My paper examines the creative attempts some Roman jurists such as Gaius and Ulpian made at reconciling this necessary fiction of objectification with the reality of the enslaved woman as an embodied subject, able to produce human life. I highlight how the legal apparatus was used to maintain distinctions between master and slave, and male and female – with varying degrees of success – through the circumscription of enslaved women’s reproductive powers, the gender-based classification of her offspring’s social status, and the privileging of male slave owners’ subjective appraisals of situations involving enslaved women and their children. These interventions, I argue, ultimately served to reinforce their oppression, both as slaves and as women.

In contrast with the lived experience of individual Romans, ancient legal texts provide a prescriptive and idealized picture of society. However, by focusing on the paradoxes and logical shortcomings that appear in these texts, I seek to uncover some of the anxieties these legal fictions produced about the strength and stability of the institution of slavery and about the place of enslaved women within it.