Deminion, Mary Alana2011-06-022011-06-022010?2011-06-02http://hdl.handle.net/1828/3341The lex Iulia de adulteriis of 18 BCE, which for the first time made adultery a criminal offence and created a standing court, was touted by the Augustan regime as a return to the moral customs of the Republican past. However, the new reform in fact represented a significant shift away from the traditional authority of the Roman paterfamilias to punish transgressions privately at his discretion and towards the legal power of the emperor and Senate to define and regulate morality on a public scale. Using a variety of primary source evidence, I explore the provisions of the adultery law and place the resulting criminal trials within the context of public staging of the Roman aristocracy. In this way, the adultery law forms part of a larger trend of elite moral regulation becoming public spectacle.enadulteryRoman lawStaging morality: studies in the "Lex Iulia de Adulteriis" of 18 BCE.ThesisAvailable to the World Wide Web