The punishment of the seducer often varies according to his rank, or according to that of the husband, or according to the relative rank of both, or according to the rank of the adulteress. Among the Monbuttu, if the guilty woman belongs to the royal household, the adulterer is put to death, whereas otherwise he is only compelled to pay an indemnity to the offended husband.[166] Among the Ew̔e-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast the fine imposed for adultery depends on the rank of the injured husband;[167] and the same principle is found in Anglo-Saxon law.[168] Among the Bakongo, again, the penalties for adultery “vary from capital punishment to a trifling fine, according to the station of the offender or the district he lives in.”[169] Drury tells us that in the country of Anterndroea in Madagascar, “if a man lies with another man’s wife who is superior to him, he forfeits thirty head of cattle besides beads and shovels a great number,” whereas “if the men are of an equal rank, then twenty beasts are the fine.”[170] According to the Chinese Penal Code, a slave who is guilty of criminal intercourse with the wife or daughter of a freeman, shall be punished at the least one degree more severely than a freeman would have been under the same circumstances.[171] In India a man of one of the first three castes who committed adultery with a Sûdra woman was banished, but a Sûdra who committed adultery with a woman of one of the first three castes suffered capital punishment;[172] and an opinion is also quoted that for a Brâhmana who once was guilty of adultery with a married woman of equal class, the penance was one-fourth of that prescribed for an outcast.[173] In ancient Peru “an adulterer was punish’d with death, if the woman was of note, or else with the rack.”[174]
[166] Casati, Ten Years in Equatoria, i. 163.
[167] Ellis, Ew̔e-speaking Peoples, p. 202.
[168] Laws of Alfred, ii. 10.
[169] Johnston, River Congo, p. 404.
[170] Drury, Journal, p. 183.
[171] Ta Tsing Leu Lee, sec. ccclxxiii. p. 409.
[172] Âpastamba, ii. 10. 27. 8 sq.
[173] Ibid. ii. 10. 27. 11.
[174] Herrera, op. cit. iv. 338.