Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome by Rebecca Langlands

200 PHOENIX Sexual Morality inAncient Rome. By Rebecca Langlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. vii, 399. Despite its title, Langlands's study ismore accurately an examination pudicitia in the Roman literary tradition. While book-length studies have been done on the near Greek equivalent of sophrosyne and also on aidos, Langlands's book is the first comprehensive study of sexual virtue in the Roman world. Her focus is on the use of pudicitia from the second century b.c.e. to the second century ce. She argues that pudicitia, along with its opposite impudicitia, were key ethical concepts throughout the history of Rome and that their study "offers us an entry point of rich potential into Roman morality and culture" (3) and provides "a new route to studying ideologies of sex inRoman culture, one which allows us tomove beyond the idea of penetration, of sex as necessarily phallic and involving activity and passivity ... and beyond the male desiring subject, to deal with women, children and even slaves as moral subjects" (7). She thus offers an alternative to Foucault's approach to Roman sexuality and ethics. Langlands's method is a close reading of pudicitia in a broad number of texts. She examines key passages on pudicitia in Livy, Valerius Maximus, Cicero, Seneca, Quintilian, ps.-Quintilian, Tacitus, and Suetonius and includes a brief look at Plautus, Propertius, Ovid, Petronius, and Apuleius. Langlands focuses on pudicitia because it is "a peculiarly Roman concept" (2), having no English derivative and thus no pre-assigned meaning. She is sensitive to socio-cultural contexts in her readings, but her application of social and anthropological theory is not well developed. Her interest is in how gender affects the Roman understanding of pudicitia, whether pudicitia is a physical state or has a psychological component, and how it relates to status differentiation and to an ethics of power in ancient Rome. The book is organized into seven chapters with an introduction and short conclusion. She begins with a critique of common English translations of pudicitia and suggests "sexual virtue" as the best English equivalent for the term. The first chapter looks at the cult of pudicitia and thus Pudicitia as a goddess, showing how sexual virtue was important not just for the individual and his or her social standing, but for the community and state as well. The focus of the chapter is the importance of pudicitia to married women and, in contrast to Greek women, the importance of openly displaying pudicitia through one's behaviour, ritual practice, and public honours. She observes that authors differ widely on how a woman might make such a display and posits a common anxiety about how one recognizes pudicitia. Chapter Two looks at narratives with pudicitia in Livy. This chapter also forms the foundation of the book, since Langlands comes back to these accounts of Livy, particularly the story of Lucretia, when discussing later accounts of pudicitia. She is not always successful, however, in developing these intertextual references (see below). Rather than focusing on the Lucretia story as a rape, and translating per vim as "force" as others do, she plays with its other meaning, "power," and interprets the story as a competition between Lucretia's husband and Tarquinius, and between libido and pudicitia. While this adds another dimension to the tale, Langlands presents a naive understanding of what constitutes rape (89-90). Langlands critiques feminist interpretations that equate the stories of Lucretia and Verginia by portraying both as sacrificial victims for the greater good of Rome. Although recognizing structural similarities in the narratives, she argues that the story of Lucretia stresses women's potential as ethical subjects: Lucretia kills BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 201 herself to prove she was unwilling and to demonstrate her virtue. The second tale instead emphasizes the duty of others to protect the more vulnerable, with Verginia more passive than Lucretia. Langlands notes that while modern commentators refer to this story as the story of Verginia, Livy's focus is actually Verginius and the importance of pudicitia as a communal possession. Chapter Three examines the exempla of Valerius Maximus. This chapter is based on Langlands's 2000 dissertation, Gender and Exemplarity in Valerius Maximus. Valerius

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