Rape and the Word Paelex: Agency and Opprobrium

This paper examines the literary use of the Latin word paelex, which describes someone who has sex with a married man but is not married to him (typically implying a competitive relationship between the man's partners, emphasizing the wife's superior status). A paelex is imagined as someone with destructive power, who would destroy a stable relationship and harm the wife, but more often the wife is the one exercising power against the paelex. In Ovid's works paelex is weaponized against rape victims, to cast their rapes as adulterous affairs and suggest they deserve opprobrium, with repercussions in modern rape culture.