www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Russian lawmakers move to recriminalize homosexuality

Ryan: gluttony has been criminalized at various times; during the second world war, rationing was imposed, and exceeding one's rationed amount was in fact criminal in the US; gluttony would have required committing various criminal acts to obtain the food needed for serious gluttony. (Under regulations of the Office of Price Administration. VERY few were prosecuted.)

Lust itself can't be criminalized (save as a thought crime), but acting on the last has been unlawful, often criminal, in all but recent (post 1960) US and Europe, tho exceptions have been made for prostitutes, within certain narrowly defined parameters. Even in Rome, where prostitution was legal, having an adulterous affair was a potentially capital offense; adultery being sleeping with another man's wife. The Roman wife could be executed, and the man enslaved or killed, depending upon the social strata involved.

Hatred can't be criminalized save as a thought crime, but again, most societies throughout history in fact consider hate crimes to be mitigations, not aggrivations; starting in the 19th century that trend starts to change to the modern one in Europe and N America.

Avarice/greed/covetousness, again, is not directly criminalizabe, but the actions it triggers (usury, theft, fraud) are punishable.

It is historical fact that UK/US common law is based upon medieval England's adopting of the 10 commandments and Pauline writings as the basis for civil law (replacing the Anglo-Saxon Wotanic principles). Western Society's civil law is in fact grounded in banning the actions exemplary of sin; most commonly held crimes are in fact biblical in origin. Even tax evasion is a sin; Christ said "Render unto Cæser what is Cæser's, and unto God what is God's."

And I thoroughly agree that hate crimes are often pushed as thought crimes. Some jurisdictions restrict them to crimes of violence committed whilst explicitly making issue of certain protected statuses; I don't know how the Russians would treat them, but Russia has a bad history of criminalizing thoughts-expressed-but-not-acted-upon.

Not quite. A husband who caught his wife in the act could kill her if he so wished. He could not kill the man, however, within the letter of the law. Also, under Roman law, adultery applied only to a man having sex with a married woman not his wife. He could have sex with unmarried women to his heart's content, and while their brothers might make life hot for him, he would not have committed adultery under the law. In short, there was a double standard: women were punished for adultery, men generally given grudging respect (if they got away with it).

Adultery was not even a crime for men under the Codex Justinianus. It became one under common law in the Middle Ages, mainly because it was seen as fraudulently using another man's property.

I should also mention that Roman criminal proceedings were not like our own: there was no public prosecutor, no attorney general or district attorney to bring charges against a perpetrator. Rather, (as in our civil courts), one private party would have to bring charges against another private party; the jury decided among them, while magistrates heard appeals.

Adultery by a plebian with a patrician woman usually resulted in harsh punishments; in some imperial reigns, it could be death and or enslavement; slaves could be castrated and/or put to death.

Depends on who was in power and just how A/R they were, Stuart. The other thing is that no legal codex survived its emperor as a functional code, since promulgations rendered it invalid usually within a year or two.

The crime there was not the act of adultery but the lese majeste of fornicating above one's station. On Roman law, though, you are absolutely wrong: in 99% of all cases, the Romans consulted statutory and then case law. For most crimes, Romans still used jury trials well into the third century. Even after that, magistrates (who were autonomous insofar as sending a missive to Rome for instructions could take weeks or months before getting a reply) tended to rely written legal codes supplemented by commentaries by noted jurists.

It should also be noted that Roman law applied only to Roman citizens. Non-citizens were judged by the laws of their city or province, but Roman magistrates could deal with non-citizen offenders in a summary manner--witness what happened to a certain peripatetic first century Galilean rabbi.