85 Chapter 6 Sexual Violence, Martyrdom, and Enslavement in Augustine’s Letter 111 Midori Hartman In 409 CE, Augustine of Hippo responded to a letter from Victorian, a priest who was concerned about recent barbarian invasions across the Roman Empire. This letter (Letter 111) represents his theological struggle with the question of violence and sin, which would become a central issue in his major treatise, City of God (413–426 CE). 1 Writing this letter a year prior to the devastating 410 CE sacking of Rome, Augustine frames regional violence in terms of equating humanity with a willfully disobedient enslaved person who must be punished. 2 He uses Luke 12:47–48 as scriptural support, and argues that God allows such violence to happen to the world because the world rejects the gospel. However, even Augustine recognizes the challenge of cer- tain real-life experiences to this broad claim, namely, when the violence hap- pens to God’s most faithful followers in the form of death or sexual violence. This paper explores how Augustine utilizes slavery in Letter 111 in order to frame the general increase of violence found within and at the borders of the imperial world as a just punishment for a gospel-rejecting world that he saw in the early 5th century. I argue that his use of slavery to explain violence proves problematic when considering individual victims—most especially the sexually violated servants of God—whom he claims have obtained the wounds of martyrdom as a result. Augustine’s intention is to distance God from blame in response to questions of theodicy by focusing on human agency in sin: perpetrators of violence are the sinners, not the victims. However, as I will argue, Augustine’s use of enslavement metaphors and the language of martyrdom to explain and justify the violence apart from God