considered sexually available; sexual misconduct (stuprum) was adultery depending on the status of a female partner. A character in a play by Plautus expresses a man's sexual freedom in comic terms: No one prohibits anyone from going down the public way (publica via); as long as you do not make a path through posted land, as long as you hold off from brides, single women, maidens, the youth and free boys, love whatever you want. A married or marriageable woman and young male citizens are off-limits, just as if they were the property of someone else, and in fact adultery as a crime was committed contrary to the rights of the paterfamilias to control his household. For a man, adultery was a sexual offense committed with a woman who was neither his wife nor a permissible partner such as a prostitute or slave, in effect when his female partner was another man's wife or his unmarried daughter. The later jurists emphasize that adulterium in the strict sense was committed with a married woman. For a married woman, no infidelity was acceptable, and first-time brides were expected to be virgins. According to Cato (2nd century BC), a husband had an ancient right (ius) to kill his wife if he caught her in the act of adultery, but if this "right" existed, it was a matter of custom and not statute law. In the Republic, adultery was normally considered a private matter for families to deal with, not a serious criminal offense requiring the attention of the courts. No source records the justified killing of a woman for adultery by either a father or husband during the Republican era, though adultery was grounds for divorce. Following the collapse of the Republic, moral legislation became part of the new political order under Rome's first emperor, Augustus. Laws pertaining to adultery passed in 18 BC were part of his program to restore the mos maiorum, traditional social norms, while consolidating his political authority and codifying a more rigid social hierarchy in the wake of the recent civil wars. The appeal to old-fashioned values cloaked the radical overthrow of the Republic's participatory political institutions by top-down, one-man rule. The Lex Iulia de adulteriis ("Julian Law concerning acts of adultery") was directed at punishing married women who engaged in extra-marital affairs. Scholars have often assumed that the Lex Iulia was meant to address a virulent outbreak