This chapter charts the processes by which deceptive sex came to be regarded as potentially constituting rape. Through tracing these developments, the chapter shows how doctrinal features of the law, such as the way consent and deception are thought to be related and the modes of deception punished by law, were important to this process. Yet the chapter also argues that to fully appreciate how and why the changes occurred, it is necessary to pay attention to the array of interests the law has sought to protect and how these have shaped the range of topics of deception that might ground a charge of rape. This argument leads to the conclusion that, in the context of deceptive sex, deception has not been considered wrongful because it invalidates or precludes consent, as is commonly thought; rather, deception has invalidated or precluded consent because it has sometimes been considered wrongful. The chapter ends by introducing some reasons why this insight is important to ongoing debates regarding the criminalisation of deceptive sex.

This chapter examines the law of nullity of marriage to consider how deception has affected the existence or validity of consent. It articulates important differences between void and voidable marriages, arguing that these speak to the public and private sides of marriage, respectively. It also showcases the range of deceptions that have been considered legally significant, situating these within the cultural framework outlined in Chapter 1. On top of this, the chapter argues that the range of qualifying deceptions has often been justified with reference to public policy or convention on the basis that the relevant information would typically be important to an intimate partner or that its disclosure would serve a collective interest or value. The chapter concludes by suggesting that changes in the law of nullity, and a small number of related areas of law, demonstrate that there is still a desire for legal recognition of the wrongs and harms associated with inducing intimate relationships, even as these have shifted over time.

This chapter examines the action of breach of promise of marriage to show its relationships with deception. It outlines how a broken promise of marriage, which could always imply deception regarding intention to keep the promise, attracted damages and highlights how known deception constituted an aggravation. The chapter also demonstrates how deception about certain features of oneself or one’s circumstances could justify a fiancé(e)’s decision to break a promise of marriage. Beyond these points, the chapter shows how conventions about relationships shaped the processes by which promises of marriage could be inferred or imputed, and it explores the links between actions of breach of promise of marriage and changing expectations of marriage, including the expectation that it should be based on real love. Through this process, the chapter offers an original argument about the decline of breach of promise at marriage which reveals its changing relationship to deception. The chapter concludes with some reflections on what actions of breach of promise suggest about the capacity of law to regulate promises and statements of future intention, as they relate to intimacy, in a contemporary context.

This chapter explores the civil wrong of seduction to establish its nature and parameters and draw out its associations with deception. It argues that, as the earliest legal response to deceptive sex, seduction is in some senses the civil law analogue of later criminal laws. The chapter then shows how the action of seduction was rooted in the idea that deception was wrongful because it was one way of leading a woman off the ‘right’ path and that the harms it caused reflected the gendered significance of marriage and other ‘moral’ forms of intimacy. Furthermore, it highlights how these features of the action provided a framework within which the range of qualifying deceptions was limited and the temporal dimensions of the wrong were set. Finally, the chapter offers some reflections on how the distinctions between private and public introduced in Chapter 1 bore on the decision to keep seduction a civil wrong before foregrounding how these observations, and those made throughout the rest of the chapter, are pertinent to contemporary discussions about criminalising deceptive sex.

This chapter analyses legal responses to three situations: someone pretending to intend marriage, someone entering marriage or a civil partnership for ‘ulterior motives’ and someone entering marriage or a civil partnership when an existing relationship disqualifies them from doing so. It argues that, historically, marriage was used to compensate women who experienced the first form of deception and to punish the men who deceived them; that in ‘ulterior motive’ cases, marriage might have been withheld from the deceptive party; and that bigamy provided legal recognition of the harms and wrongs experienced by duped individuals at the same time as it protected the state’s interest in shoring up marriage. The chapter concludes by arguing that the move away from each of these positions over time means that the extent to which the law protects individuals’ interests in avoiding deceptively induced intimate relationships has decreased. It further argues that this development has implications for how we assess the adequacy of contemporary legal responses to inducing intimacy.

This chapter analyses crimes involving procuring sex, including procuring sex by deception. It argues that to appreciate the nature of these offences, and their place within this book, it is necessary both to understand how the verb ‘to procure’ was interpreted, including when and why it required deception, and to pay attention to the acts whose procurement was proscribed by law. The chapter provides elucidation on both fronts, showing how the procuring offences were geared towards prohibiting ‘illicit’ (i.e., immoral) sexual activities and therefore criminalised the use of deception to lure others into committing such acts. In demonstrating this point, the chapter argues that a culturally sensitive vision of what makes intimacy valuable shaped and constrained the use of the procuring offences. Finally, the chapter argues that the demise of the procuring offences set the stage for the expansion of the crime of rape by deception and that examining how the procuring offences worked yields important lessons for those attempting to engage critically with this development.

This chapter summarises the overarching narrative of this book and argues that as was as being intrinsically valuable it can inform contemporary debates about using law to regulate the practices of inducing intimacy. The discussion is organised around three sets of issues: the public and private dimensions of sex and intimate relationships, including the interests protected by law, the form of response (i.e., state or non-state), and the variety of legal response (i.e., public or private); the structure of legal responses, the meaning of consent and its relation to deception, targeted modes of deception, culpability matters, the requirement for a causal link between deception and ‘outcome’, and the temporalities of the legal wrong; and the substance of deceptions, including the dynamics governing the range of topics about which transparency has been expected. Drawing the discussion together, the chapter concludes by offering a new framework for constructing legal responses to deceptively induced intimacy, which builds on the core insight and these responses have historically been predicated on temporally sensitive associations between self-construction and intimacy.

Chapter 1 focuses on the poem’s symbolic treatment of landscape and reads the Thebaid’s articulation of the relationship between human authority, nature, and wilderness as able to conceptualise power and reflect on important socio-cultural issues of Flavian Rome. While Statius’ praeteritio seems to cut off Ovid’s Theban histories from the poem, Tisiphone’s journey to Thebes, Polynices’ journey to Argos, Tydeus’ embassy to Thebes, Tyresias’ necromancy, and the march of the Argives against Thebes display episodes of destruction of the landscape by natural, divine, and chthonic forces that suggest Statius’ Theban universe being characterised by the same deceptiveness, tendency to chaos, and accessibility to infernal forces of the Metamorphoses’ world. By reworking the spatial narratives deployed by Ovid to critically rewrite the Aeneid’s geopolitical discourse, the Thebaid not only influences our understanding of the Augustan classics, but also provided ancient readers with a chaotic worldview that potentially challenged their perceptions of the narratives of re-established order and providence heralded by the urban and socio-cultural landscapes of Flavian Rome.

There are two Sun Tzu verses which, by Sun Tzu’s own affirmations, may be seen as summations of the active ingredient of his way of war. One is Theme #6’s centerpiece verse III.4 (Passage #6.1).

This chapter starts by framing the larger debate concerning universalism versus contextualism in ethics, largely mirroring the one between positivism and relativism in science. It proposes that pragmatism transcends this dichotomy by considering the role of general (and particular) ethical norms and values in context and by focusing on moral deliberation. The pragmatist approach to ethics is described before discussing the ways in which ethical concerns and forms of reasoning accompany every phase of a research project. The practice of using deception, which is both widespread and controversial in social and psychological research, is reflected upon. Finally, the chapter ends with considerations regarding mixed methods, multi-resolution designs, and their ethical commitments.

Chapter 7 sets Recognising the Best Physician at the heart of its discussion, moving the focus from popular philosophical works to tracts of social commentary that are rich in ethical references or subtexts. I suggest that, despite its content being closely related to the material discussed in The Best Doctor is Also a Philosopher, the latter contains a more generalised advocacy of how the proper doctor ought to behave, whereas Recognising the Best Physician restricts its focus to treating Galen’s individual virtues, and renders self-projection more central to the narrative. This enables Galen to provide a more pragmatic account of the connection he envisaged between medicine, ethics and society, and place the morally didactic function of medicine in particular at the forefront of his intellectual horizons. I highlight how Recognising the Best Physician offers a plethora of passages discussing moral issues, for example the emphasis on the value of truth over deception, the issue of flattery and the ethical corruption of contemporary society. I show that to better illuminate the immorality of his medical colleagues, Galen, inspired by philosophical intertexts, notably the Republic and the Gorgias, creatively likens them to wicked and dissimulating orators. By also attributing features of self-interested politicians familiar from Platonic metaphors to contemporary charlatan physicians, Galen recategorises his rivals’ abilities and undermines their moral standing to suggest that the ideal kind of medicine to combat public disorder is the moral medicine embodied by himself. To that end, Galen sketches himself as a Platonic helmsman, entrusted with a humanistic vocation and safeguarding social and political stability.

The bacio mordace, or the biting kiss, was one of the most erotic and consequently very popular poetic tropes of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, particularly through the poetry of Battista Guarini (1538–1612) and Giambattista Marino (1569–1625). In his later books of madrigals, particularly the Seventh Book of 1619, Monteverdi was drawn to madrigals with such provocative imagery, although in a more overt way compared to his earlier kiss madrigals of the Second Book of 1590. In his later kiss madrigals, Monteverdi sought to give a musical dimension not so much to a cerebral obsession with kisses, but rather in the execution of them. The concertato medium proved ideal to render musical poets’ syntactical play on who is kissing whom, and the degree to which teeth were involved.

This chapter analyses several roles of silence in Greek novels before Heliodorus. On a macro-level, it suggests that the writing of the text was itself a breaking of silence, manifested in narrators’ openings in Achilles Tatius and Longus. Moving to characters, it reviews situations where the choice of silence is crucial to plot development – most far-reaching in Longus, where the couple’s origins must be concealed for four fifths of the narrative to allow them to grow up as simple herdsfolk. In Chariton too the choice between speech and silence repeatedly affects plot development. Silence is often allied with deception, twice with fear. In three novels a protagonist’s romantic involvement with a third party is crucially suppressed in communications between the couple. Next addressed are types of silence closely related to the novels’ central theme of eros, whether as a symptom, or the silent kissing Cleinias suggests to Cleitophon. Different is the silent awe a protagonist’s dazzling beauty triggers. Finally some topoi shared with other genres are examined: ‘everybody else was silent, but X began to speak’; and ‘for a long time X was silent, but eventually began to speak’. It is concluded that silence’s uses reveal it as an important element in constructing an engaging narrative, noting that of these writers only Longus has an ‘unmarked’ use of σιωπ- to mean little more than ‘he/she stopped speaking’.

Should there be a right not to be manipulated? What kind of right? On Kantian grounds, manipulation, lies, and paternalistic coercion are moral wrongs, and for similar reasons; they deprive people of agency, insult their dignity, and fail to respect personal autonomy. On welfarist grounds, manipulation, lies, and paternalistic coercion share a different characteristic; they displace the choices of those whose lives are directly at stake, and who are likely to have epistemic advantages, with the choices of outsiders, who are likely to lack critical information. Kantians and welfarists should be prepared to endorse a (moral) right not to be manipulated, though on very different grounds. The moral prohibition on manipulation, like the moral prohibition on lies, should run against officials and regulators, not only against private institutions. At the same time, the creation of a legal right not to be manipulated raises hard questions, in part because of definitional challenges; there is a serious risk of vagueness and a serious risk of overbreadth. (Lies, as such, are not against the law, and the same is true of unkindness, inconsiderateness, and even cruelty.) With welfarist considerations in mind, it is probably best to start by prohibiting particular practices, while emphasizing that they are forms of manipulation and may not count as fraud. The basic goal should be to build on the claim that in certain cases, manipulation is a form of theft; the law should forbid theft, whether it occurs through force, lies, or manipulation. Some manipulators are thieves.