Lex Scantinia - Prosecutions

Prosecutions

The infrequency with which the Lex Scantinia is invoked in the literary sources suggests that prosecutions during the Republican era were aimed at harassing political opponents, while those during the reign of Domitian occurred in a general climate of political and moral crisis.

Two letters written to Cicero by Caelius indicate that the law was used as a "political weapon"; ancient Rome had no public prosecutors, and charges could be filed and prosecuted by any citizen with the legal expertise to do so. Abuse of the courts was reined in to some extent by the threat of calumnia, a charge of malicious prosecution, but retaliatory charges motivated by politics or personal enmity, as Caelius makes clear in this case, were not uncommon. In 50 BC, Caelius was engaged in a feud with Appius Claudius Pulcher, the consul of 54 BC and a current censor, who had refused to lend him money and with whose sister Caelius had a disastrous love affair. Appius's term as censor was a moral "reign of terror" that stripped multiple senators and equestrians of their rank; sometime during the fall of that year he indicted Caelius, a sitting curule aedile, under the Lex Scantinia. Caelius was happy to respond in kind. Both cases were presided over by the praetor Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus—ironically, in the view of Caelius, since Drusus himself was "a notorious offender"—and evidently came to nothing. "Few people," Eva Cantarella observed, "were completely free of suspicion in this area."

Although the law remained on the books, it had been largely ignored until Domitian began to enforce it as part of his broad program of judicial reform. The crackdown on "public morals" included sexual offenses such as adultery and illicit sex (incestum) with a Vestal, and several men from both the senatorial and equestrian order were condemned under the Lex Scantinia.

Quintilian refers to a fine of 10,000 sesterces for committing stuprum with a freeborn male, sometimes construed as referring to the Lex Scantinia, though the law is not named in the passage.