Pedagogia violenta: la violenza contro le "puellae" come prassi educativa nella famiglia romana

This paper investigates "violent discipline" or "disciplinary violence" in ancient Roman households, with a focus on freeborn girls (puellae, virgines, and filiae familias) subjected to the patria potestas. [While contemporary global organisations like the UN, UNICEF, and WHO strictly condemn physical and psychological punishment against minors, in ancient Rome, disciplinary violence was socially widespread, legally sanctioned, and tolerated as a corrective and punitive tool to enforce social practices and moral codes.] Although modern scholarship has explored corporal punishment within Roman schools and its effects on male youths (pueri), the gender dimension of violence inflicted upon girls remains understudied. By adopting a gender perspective, this study analyses how the educational framework prepared young girls for their future roles as wives, mothers, and guardians of the mos maiorum. The core of the research examines three exempla found in Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia within the section De pudicitia. These accounts illustrate two distinct roles of violent pedagogy. The former is a corrective violence of an emotional and psychological nature—as demonstrated by Publio Menio’s severe punishment of a freedman who kissed his daughter—aimed at stressing the value of chastity when a transgression is deemed retrievable. The latter is a strictly punitive violence resulting in death, as shown in the cases of Pontius Aufidianus and Publius Attilius Philiscus, who exercised their ius occidendi to execute their daughters for losing their virginity or committing stuprum. Ultimately, the study contextualises these punishments within the wider moral and legislative restorations concerning pudicitia promoted during Augustus’ and Tiberius’ times, demonstrating how physical domestic violence addressed to Roman girls mainly responded to an unrecoverable failure in the transmission of traditional civic values.