 It is possible, however, that no such epidemic of adultery even existed; the law should perhaps be understood not as addressing a real problem that threatened society, but as one of the instruments of social control exercised by Augustus that cast the state, and by extension himself, in the role of "paterfamilias" to all Rome.Humiliating or violent punishments for adultery are prescribed by law and described by poets, but are absent in the works of Roman historians or the letters of Cicero