sexual assault

As more of the Epstein files are released, reminding us of President Donald Trump’s close association with Jeffrey Epstein and the young people he abused and trafficked, as well as the president’s ongoing array of misogynist insults and actions (like calling journalist Catherine Lucey “piggy” and name-calling Marjorie Taylor Greene to the point where she jumped ship), what keeps coming to my mind are the sexual exploits of authoritarians throughout history. As a scholar of the New Testament and the origins of Christianity, I have a special interest in the lives of the Roman emperors—in particular, the notorious Emperor Nero.

According to historians of antiquity (trigger warning here!), Emperor Nero was known to use and abuse many people, especially women, allegedly murdering two of his wives and his aunt while sleeping with a Vestal Virgin and—yes!—his mother before he killed her. Roman politicians and historians held back remarkably little when considering Nero’s excesses. Perhaps the most famous of those writers, Tacitus, shared how Nero “polluted himself by every lawful or lawless indulgence.” Cassius Dio, author of 80 volumes of Roman history, describes Nero skulking around Rome at night “insulting women,” “practicing lewdness on boys,” and “beating, wounding, and murdering” others. And Suetonius, the most famous biographer of the Caesars, claimed that Nero had invented a perversion all his own. At public games he was hosting, he would put on an animal skin and “assail with violence the private parts both of men and women, while they were bound to stakes.”