Desperate Housewives and the Legal Implications of
Fantasizing About the Help

Heather Waddell Gruber (Ohio University)

I argue that the known laws governing moicheia did not address the delicate subject of sexual affairs between Greek mistresses and their slaves, though it must have been an implicit social fear. The third declamation of Hadrian of Tyre (ca.113-193 CE) reveals the legal difficulties involved in this sort of extra-marital relationship.

There were several legal methods for addressing moicheia: the moichos could be brought before the Eleven for execution or killed by the cuckolded husband himself if he was caught in flagrante; he could be imprisoned until a ransom could be exacted; or he could be maltreated or abused by the husband. A wife who was guilty of moicheia was to be divorced and was forbidden from wearing ornaments or appearing at public festivals. The literary sources (primarily Lys. 1, [Dem] 59, Ar. Nub.), however, are silent on the subject of wives sleeping with their own slaves. We do know of two laws on this topic: the law code of Gortyn imposes a penalty of 200 staters for a slave who seduces a free woman (Column II, 25-8), and Dio Chrysostom tells us that the child of a slave and a citizen woman would be free, though not a citizen. Sexual relationships between mistresses and slaves are much more attested in Roman culture (Cic. Cael. 23 [57]; Petron. Sat. 75.11; Mart. 6.39, 12.58; Juv. 6.279, 331-32; Livy 1.58.4; Tac. Ann. 14.60). Beginning in the second century CE there seems to be a dramatic increase in laws dealing with these sorts of relationships, which might suggest that it was becoming more and more common (Evans-Grubbs). This is the world in which Hadrian lived.

The hypothesis of Hadrian’s third declamation (RG I.528-31) reads as follows: “A master accuses his slave for adultery, with his own wife having described that she had had a dream in which she had had sex with the slave in the temple of Aphrodite.” What follows is an amusing speech, in which the speaker argues, in the character of the wronged husband, that the dream is proof of an actual moicheia that the husband has long suspected of taking place. The entertaining nature of this speech, however, belies the legal complexities involved with such a scenario. While it was customary for the moichos to be the party brought to court, as women had no legal standing, in this case the adulterer similarly had no legal standing, being a slave. Normally a slave’s master would represent him in court, but in this case the master is playing the prosecutor. Of the penalties available under known Greek law, none would seem satisfactory in this case. Execution would have been unavailable because the couple was not caught in flagrante, and the so-called proof of the wife’s sex dream would have been specious at best. A ransom would not have been merited because even if the kyrios did allow the slave to have some money, it already legally belonged to him. The husband explains why he could not maltreat the slave, believing that it would cause him to be pitied rather than dishonored. Perhaps the most obvious solution would be to sell the slave; however, in the husband’s speech we learn that he himself is in love with the slave, thus making this a desperate and insoluble situation.

Although declamations are purely fictional, often favoring imaginary laws to real ones, they are nevertheless products of the culture in which they were created, and as such they reflect the attitudes of those who practiced and listened to them. I hope this paper helps us understand more about a social issue that common sense dictates must have existed but which is absent in the literary sources.