Example using original meaning of "rape"?

Factual Questions
1

I understand that the original meaning of the verb “to rape” meant to seize by force and carry off. Does anyone have any examples (preferably actual literary examples using the word in a full sentence) of how this was used? Did it apply only to the seizing and carrying off of womenfolk (as in “The Rape of Persephone”), or did it apply also to non-female persons, children, goods, and other valuables?

Would one have said something like “The Northmen raided our village and raped my suit of armor and my second-best bed”?

2

What about “The Rape of the Lock”? The title refers to the theft of a lock of hair (by an admirer, of course).

3

It fits meaning-wise, but it’s still using “rape” as a noun and I’m curious about its use as a verb.

4

From Plutarch’s The Parallel Lives:

“For that the residents of Alba would not consent to give the fugitives the privilege of intermarriage with them, nor even receive them as fellow-citizens, is clear, in the first place, from the rape of the Sabine women, which was not a deed of wanton daring, but one of necessity, owing to the lack of marriages by consent; for they certainly honoured the women, when they had carried them off, beyond measure.”

“Rape” here would have been “raptio,” abduction of women.

Raptio - Wikipedia

ETA: in the Latin translation.

5

“Rape” in the phrase “rape and pillage” is used at a verb. I’m not sure if it’s used in its original sense, but it seems it might be.

6

“… Sense of “sexual violation or ravishing of a woman” first recorded in English as a noun, late 15c. (the noun sense of “taking anything – including a woman – away by force” is from c.1400). The verb in this sense is from 1570s.” Online Etymology Dictionary

You may need to find someone with access to the OED online to get an example used in a sentence. Someone at Wordwizard Home can find the first OED citation for you. Wordwizard has a lot of hoops in the registration process but there are good answers once you get there.

7

My access to the OED online lists this example:

J. Barlow Columbiad viii. (Argument) 282 Address to the patriots who have survived the conflict; exhorting them to preserve the liberty they have established. The danger of losing it by inattention illustrated in the rape of the Golden Fleece.

Or how about this:

J. R. R. Tolkien Silmarillion (1977) xxiv. 251 Few of the Teleri were willing to go forth to war, for they remembered the slaying at the Swanhaven, and the rape of their ships.

8

Rape of the Sabine Women

9

I remember seing a drawing in an old Greek mythology book about Zeus and the “rape of Europa.” Also, in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” Miles Gloriousos was said to have “raped Thrace thrice.”

10

According to the OED, the original meaning of the verb rape was simply to seize by force – nothing about carrying off. You can, for example, “rape” a location in this sense. There’s a cite from ?1387 which uses “rape” to refer to the eating of prey by a carnivorous fish.

The “carrying off by force” sense is identified by the OED as a distinct meaning, with the first cite from 1450. Apparently this sense was, from the outset, used especially (though not exclusively) to refer to carrying off women for the purposes of sexual violation. Note that the act of rape was the carrying off, though, and not the subsequent sexual violation.

The third sense of actually committing sexual violation, with or without any preliminary carrying off, is first cited in 1574. But, interestingly, this sense disappeared in the 18th century, and didn’t reappear until the nineteenth century – the OED has no quotes between 1684 and 1823.

According to the OED, the third sense is “now the usual sense”, to the extent that it influences the other two senses. But the first two are not obsolete, and the OED has modern quotes for both of them.

Twentieth century citations from the OED for “rape” in the sense of carrying off by force:

1934 - (The Times, 14 February): “Not a day dawned in the dry season when a pagan could be sure that he or his womenfolk or his children might not be raped away to slavery before the sun went down.

1989 – (K. Rexroth, More Classics Revisited, i. 9): “Phaedra, after all, is a princess raped away from the old decaying Minoan civilization of Crete by Theseus, the representative of barbaric Athens.”

2003 (The Independent, 30 December): “Nearly a million of those burnt and raped from their homes during the war have gone back.”

As you can see, in each of the citations there is at least some suggestion of the possibility of sexual violence. Nevertheless the focus is on carrying away.

11

May I ask why you want to know? I’m curious.

12

Well, there’s the Rape of Nanking back in 1937-38.

13

Ow. Splinters. :eek: