The Roman perception of rape was always tied to the status of the victim. The violation of a free Roman woman - especially if she happened to belong to the aristocracy - was regarded as a horrifying crime, and punishable by death (Dig. 47.11.1). Sexual violence against (one's own) slaves, on the other hand, was ignored (with very occasional exceptions: Dig. 1.6.2). Like slaves, the inhabitants of a town taken by force had no legal rights (unless they happened to be Roman citizens ); and few Roman generals had the ability, let alone the desire, to restrain their troops from rape. Generals, in fact, often encouraged brutality:

"When Scipio thought that a sufficient number of troops had entered [a newly-taken city] he sent most of them, as is the Roman custom, against the inhabitants with orders to kill all they encountered, sparing none, and not to start pillaging until the signal was given. They do this...to inspire terror, so that when towns are taken by the Romans one may often see not only the corpses of human beings, but dogs cut in half, and the dismembered limbs of other animals..." (Poly. 10.15)

Rape is not explicitly mentioned here, but it is hard to imagine that Scipio would have condemned it.

This is not to say, of course, that every Roman soldier willingly participated in such atrocities. Our sources simply don't mention the reactions of individuals. At least in retrospect, some Romans could sympathize with the victims of rape. In 189 BCE, after Gnaeus Manlius Vulso defeated the Galatians (a Celtic people in what is now central Turkey), a chieftain's wife named Chiomara was taken captive. According to Livy:

"[Chiomara] was in the custody of a centurion who was notorious even among soldiers for his licentiousness and greed. At first he made improper proposals to her, but finding that she treated them with abhorrence, he took advantage of her servile condition and violated her." (38.24.)

The centurion then decided to ransom Chiomara back to her own people. She tricked him, however, into an ambush, where the centurion was killed and beheaded. To let Livy finish the story:

"Wrapping up the murdered man's head in her robe, [Chiomara] took it to her husband...Before embracing him she flung down the head at his feet, and whilst he was wondering whose head it could possibly be, or what this act could mean, she told him about the outrage she had endured and the revenge she had taken for her violated chastity. It is recorded that by the purity and strictness of her life she maintained to the very last the honor of a deed so worthy of a matron."

Livy plainly admired Chiomara - as did a number of other Roman authors.

It should also be noted that, at least once the frenzy of the sack was over, soldiers could be punished for rape. Once, for example:

"A woman tore out with her fingers the eyes of a soldier who had insulted her and was trying to commit an outrage upon her. When [the Roman general] Sertorius heard of this he put to death the whole cohort that was supposed to be addicted to such brutality, although it was composed of Romans." (App., BC 1.109)

The mass rapes and other horrors perpetrated by Roman armies cannot be whitewashed. But there is no reason to think that every Roman soldier, or every Roman, blithely condoned them.