female fellow slaves. If an owner found that his male slave was having a sexual relationship with a free woman, the law required that he warn the couple three times to break it off. If the affair continued, he had the right to take ownership of the woman. References to women from respectable families having sex with a male slave are infrequent, indicating that male writers were not preoccupied with the risk of it. Cicero offers no examples in either the gossipy parts of his letters or in court cases where he attacks the reputation of a woman: he accuses Clodia of incest and of running her house like a brothel, but not of sleeping with slaves. Not even Messalina or Sallust's Sempronia is accused in the hostile sources of having sex with a slave. Sex with a slave was among the trumped-up charges against Claudia Octavia, the wife of Nero, when Poppaea Sabina campaigned to take her place, but mostly it was a matter for innuendo or insult against a husband who failed to prevent it. Despite the external controls and restrictions placed on a slave's sexuality, Roman art and literature perversely often portray slaves as lascivious, voyeuristic, and even sexually knowing. One of the themes of Roman comedy that distinguishes it from its Greek models is the depiction of master-slave relations. Freeborn Romans who fell into slavery were supposed to be protected from sexual exploitation, as indicated by two different stories recorded by ancient historians. Before the abolition of debt bondage in the 4th century BC, free Romans were sometimes driven to sell themselves or their children into slavery when they were overwhelmed by debt. According to Livy, debt slavery (nexum) was abolished as a direct result of the attempted sexual abuse of a freeborn youth who served as surety for his father's debt with the usurer Lucius Papirius. The boy, Gaius Publilius, was notably beautiful, and Papirius insisted that as a bond slave he was required to provide sexual services. When Publilius refused, Papirius had him stripped and whipped. The youth then took to the streets to display his injuries, and an outcry among the people led the consuls to convene the senate. The political process eventually led to the Lex Poetelia Papiria, which prohibited holding debtors in bondage for their debt and required instead that the debtor's property be used as collateral. The law thus established