A lot of men, as 2023 taught us, are obsessed with the Roman Empire, but maybe a certain number of them wouldn’t be if they knew what the Ancient Roman practice was for dealing with cheaters.
TikTok user @ancientstuffgirl has enlightened the people of the app by revealing how adulterers were handled back in the days of the Roman Empire. And although it may seem a little uncivilized to our modern sensibilities, a lot of TikTokers actually think it might be worth resurrecting the idea to act as a deterrent for those thinking of sleeping around behind the partner’s back.
“If you were a man in Ancient Rome and you caught your wife cheating,” Ancient Girl explains, “you were encouraged to lock her up with her lover and then you had 20 hours to call as many neighbors as you could and invite them to come check out the guy who was sleeping with your wife.”
“Bring this back I’m nosy,” reads one, honest, comment. The notion of publicly shaming cheaters is unsurprisingly appealing to the people of TikTok, given that this is what #TattleTok is all about, anyway. Is secretly filming a married man flirting on a plane and then that video going viral really that much different from a Roman dude “hear-ye”ing his neighbors to come look at his wife’s lover, caught with his toga down?
Hilariously, and inevitably, this video also seems to have garnered the attention of Roman empire obsessives who hit back at Ancient Girl for pointing out this antiquated bit of sexism. “Let’s cancel Ancient Rome,” one man wrote, in an attempt at sarcasm. The best response, though, has to go to this guy’s hot take: “And ?? It was in Ancient Rome, it no longer exists.” Well… he’s got us there!
Still, I think we can all agree that Rome’s rules about how to respond to adultery were a little too elaborate to be worth bringing back, even for the cheatee. As per Ancient Girl, once those 20 hours of social shaming had elapsed the husband then had three days to go around making public declarations about his wife’s torrid affair to as many people as would listen. As someone put it in the comments, “Dude the stress?! This is like coming home from a stressful day at work and finding out you have three days to plan a wedding.”
This all sounds pretty bleak for Roman wives, but it should be noted that at least women had the right to divorce their husbands without any justifications in Ancient Rome, at least from the first century onward. In fact, only one spouse’s consent was needed to complete a divorce — the divorced person didn’t even need to be informed about it!
The jury is still out on whether we should bring back that part of Ancient Rome, too.
