Definition
A Latin term from Roman civil law denoting a male who engages in adultery — specifically, one who corrupts or carnally knows the wife of another man. The term is rooted in the Digest of Justinian and appears in legal sources as a precise gendered designation, distinct from adultera (the female counterpart).
Two senses appear in the historical legal record:
1. Adulter (person): A man who commits adultery with another's wife; one who corrupts a married woman. The Digest defines the offense in terms of the man's relation to another's household: qui alienam matremfamilias corrumpit — he who corrupts another man's wife.
2. Adulter solidorum: A secondary, non-sexual meaning — a corruptor of metals; a counterfeiter or debaser of coin. This usage is entirely unrelated to marital offense and belongs to the law of monetary fraud and forgery.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An adulterer, especially a male one.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To commit adultery; to pollute. [Obs.] — used as a verb form, now archaic.
The gap between common and legal meaning is narrow in the first sense: ordinary and legal usage both point to a man committing adultery. The meaningful divergence is in the secondary legal sense — adulter solidorum — which has no common counterpart and which a researcher encountering the term in isolation would not recognize as referring to counterfeiting at all.
Common Confusion
Adulter is frequently encountered in older legal texts without the gendered distinction being made explicit. Researchers accustomed to English legal sources may read adulter as a general synonym for "adulterer" without appreciating that Roman and civil law sources maintained a strict grammatical and legal distinction between adulter (male) and adultera (female), each carrying potentially different procedural postures under the lex Iulia de adulteriis. Additionally, adulter solidorum looks superficially like a compound form of the marital offense term but is conceptually unrelated — a failure to recognize this can produce significant misreading of monetary law passages.
Why It Matters in Research
Adulter is a term of art in Roman and civil law sources, not a common law term. It will surface primarily in treatises engaging the Digest, in ecclesiastical law commentary, and in early American and British legal dictionaries drawing on the civilian tradition. Researchers using Law Mind corpus sources should note:
First, the term is essentially absent from English common law sources as a technical designation. Where English sources discuss marital infidelity, they use "adulterer" or address the conduct through criminal conversation (crim. con.) doctrine, not the Roman adulter framework.
Second, the adulter solidorum meaning creates a genuine trap. A researcher tracing counterfeiting or monetary debasement through civil law sources may encounter this term in passages having nothing to do with marital relations. Context is essential.
Third, the Digest citations embedded in Burrill's entry (Dig. 48.5.4.pr; Dig. 48.5.15.8; Dig. 50.16.225) point to the lex Iulia de adulteriis, a core text for understanding Roman adultery law. Burrill is more precise here than either edition of Black's, which gives only the general gloss from Calvin's Lexicon Juridicum without engaging the Digest directly.
Fourth, if researching the history of adultery as a legal offense — particularly its ecclesiastical and civil dimensions before American codification — adulter serves as a gateway term into a much larger body of Roman and canon law material. The transition from adulter (civil law term of art) to "adulterer" (common law and statutory usage) tracks the broader absorption, and partial rejection, of Roman family law by English and American legal systems.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition: adulter means one who corrupts or seduces another man's wife, derived from Latin. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) are nearly identical and rely on Calvin's Lexicon Juridicum for the adulter solidorum gloss — a sound civilian authority. Burrill goes further, engaging the Digest directly and preserving the gendered pairing (adulter / adultera) as separate entries, which is the more historically accurate treatment of Roman law usage.
What the historical dictionaries collectively underemphasize is the procedural and prosecutorial context of the term under the lex Iulia de adulteriis — the Roman statute that governed who could bring charges, in what order, and with what consequences. The dictionaries treat adulter as a definitional matter rather than a term with significant legal mechanics attached to it. Researchers needing more than the gloss should go directly to the Digest citations Burrill provides rather than relying on any of these dictionary entries as substantive sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Adulter as a technical legal term has no operative role in American common law or modern statutory systems, which use "adultery" as the conduct and "adulterer" as the person. The term remains relevant only in historical research involving Roman law, canon law, or civilian jurisdictions that adopted the Digest framework.