Stuprum
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Stuprum is defined in the Oxford Latin Dictionary as “dishonour, disgrace, defilement, unchastity, debauchery, lewdness, and violation.”
In Roman law and moral discourse, stuprum is illicit sexual intercourse, translatable as "criminal debauchery" or "sex crime". Stuprum encompasses diverse sexual offenses including incestum, rape ("unlawful sex by force"), and adultery. In early Rome, stuprum was a disgraceful act in general, or any public disgrace, including but not limited to illicit sex. By the time of the comic playwright Plautus (ca. 254–184 BC) it had acquired its more restricted sexual meaning. Stuprum can occur only among citizens; protection from sexual misconduct was among the legal rights that distinguished the citizen from the non-citizen. Although the noun stuprum may be translated into English as fornication, the intransitive verb "to fornicate" (itself derived from the Latin fornicarium, which originally meant "a vaulted room"; the small vaulted rooms in which some prostitutes plied their trade led to the verb fornicare) is an inadequate translation of the Latin stuprare, which is a transitive verb requiring a direct object (the person who is the target of the misconduct) and a male agent (the stuprator).
Stuprum was also the loss of one’s pudicitia, even if it was unwilling. Romans associated the loss of pudicitia with chaos and loss of control.
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