Sexuality in ancient Rome

• 1. Introduction

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  Sexuality in ancient Rome was not the tale of unbridled license that later centuries imagined. On a lead sling-bullet recovered from a Roman battlefield, soldiers had scratched a crude image of a phallus alongside a taunting message: "I seek Octavian's asshole." That combination of humor, aggression, and calculated humiliation captures something central about how Rome thought about sex. It was never merely a private matter. It was bound up with power, social rank, the favor of the gods, and the survival of the state.

  Roman society was patriarchal, and a man's capacity to govern himself sexually was inseparable from his fitness to govern others in public life. The word virtus, meaning virtue and valor, shared its root with vir, the Latin word for man. The corresponding ideal for a woman, pudicitia, described not mere passivity but an active, even competitive quality that combined self-control with personal honor. These were not abstract ideals. Censors, the public officials who tracked social rank, had the power to strip citizens of their place in the senatorial or equestrian order for sexual misconduct, and on occasion they did.

  What will the documentary explore? How Romans theorized desire through competing philosophical schools. How the law defined sexual crime, and who it actually protected. How soldiers, women, slaves, and priests each inhabited a different version of Roman sexuality. And how the whole elaborate system began to crack as Christianity reshaped the empire from within.

• 2. Literature, Art, and the Sources

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  Plautus, the comic playwright who died in 184 BC, gave Roman audiences plots revolving around sex comedy and young lovers kept apart by circumstance. He is one of the earliest voices in a tradition that would span centuries and dozens of genres, all of them leaving behind evidence about how Romans thought and talked about sex.

  Ancient literature about Roman sexuality falls into four main categories: legal texts, medical texts, poetry, and political discourse. But some of the richest material comes from genres with lower cultural prestige. Comedy, satire, graffiti, magic spells, and interior decoration have more to say about sex than epic or tragedy ever did. The poet Catullus, writing in the 50s BC, explored erotic experience from delicate romanticism to brutally obscene invective. Ovid, who died in 17 AD, wrote the Amores and the Ars Amatoria, works that, according to tradition, contributed to Augustus's decision to exile him from Rome.

  The satirist Juvenal, writing in the early 2nd century AD, railed against the sexual mores of his time. The epigrammatist Martial, who died around 102 or 104 AD, braced his social observations with sexually explicit invective. Ovid noted that a number of writers known for salacious material had been lost entirely. Greek sex manuals and what he called "straightforward pornography" circulated in Rome, published under the names of famous courtesans. The Milesiaca of Aristides, translated by one of the praetors of 78 BC, was considered so scandalous that when the Parthians defeated Roman forces at the Battle of Carrhae, they were reportedly shocked to find copies of it in the baggage of the officers.

  Erotic art preserved in Pompeii and Herculaneum adds another layer. A series of paintings from the Suburban Baths at Pompeii, discovered in 1986 and published in 1995, presents scenarios including a variety of positions, oral sex, and group sex. Everyday objects such as mirrors and serving vessels were decorated with erotic scenes. Ovid describes a tabella, a small painting depicting sexual positions, hanging comfortably alongside portraits of mythological figures in a respectable house. This art was not hidden. It was a mark of taste.

• 3. Sex, Religion, and the State

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  The complement of male and female was fundamental to how Romans imagined the divine. The Dii Consentes, Rome's council of twelve major deities, were organized in male-female pairs. At least two state priesthoods were held jointly by a married couple. The Vestal Virgins, the one state priesthood reserved for women, took a vow of chastity that in exchange gave them unusual independence from male authority. Among the sacred objects in their keeping was a phallus: Vesta's fire, in the Roman religious imagination, held both sexual purity and the procreative power of the male simultaneously.

  Cicero described the desire to procreate as the "seedbed of the republic." Marriage produced children and in turn a household, a domus, which was the basic unit of urban life. Roman religious festivals wove sexuality into civic observance. The February Lupercalia, still celebrated as late as the 5th century of the Christian era, included an archaic fertility rite. The Floralia featured nude dancing. At certain festivals throughout April, prostitutes participated or were officially recognized. The god Liber, the "Free One," oversaw physiological responses during sex; when a male put on the toga of manhood, Liber became his patron and, according to the love poets, he traded the innocent modesty of childhood for the sexual freedom of adulthood.

  The fascinum, a phallic charm, appeared on everything from jewelry to wind chimes to lamps, including as an amulet to protect children and triumphing generals. This was not separate from respectable religion. It was part of it. Roman religion promoted sexuality as an aspect of prosperity for the state, and private religious practice offered its own layer. Love charms called amatoria, binding spells called defixiones, and collections of syncretic magic such as the Greek Magical Papyri all catered to what one scholar described as "a very lively market in erotic magic in the Roman period."

  Marcellus of Bordeaux, a contemporary of the 4th-century scholar Ausonius, collected more than 70 sexually related treatments in his medical work De medicamentis, including remedies for erectile dysfunction, hydrocele, undescended testicles, and spells to ensure a woman's fidelity. His instructions for a lizard-tail fertility charm, preserved verbatim in the source, suggest how little distance separated Roman medicine from magic.

• 4. Theories of Desire

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  Lucretius, writing in the mid-1st century BC and a contemporary of Catullus and Cicero, devoted the fourth book of his philosophical poem De rerum natura to one of the most extended treatments of human sexuality in all of Latin literature. The poet Yeats, describing the translation by Dryden, called it "the finest description of sexual intercourse ever written."

  Lucretius presented his analysis from an Epicurean framework. Desires ranked as those that are natural and necessary, like hunger, those natural but unnecessary, like sex, and those neither natural nor necessary, like the desire for political glory. Love, he argued, is merely an elaborate cultural posturing that obscures what he called muta cupido, "dumb desire." He compared ejaculation to blood spurting from a wound. His prescription was casual sex with a common prostitute, a "streetwalking Venus," as a way of releasing tension without becoming obsessed. The best sex, for Lucretius, was that of happy animals or of gods.

  The Stoics of the Roman Imperial period took a sharply different direction. Musonius Rufus and Seneca, both active roughly a century after Lucretius, emphasized sex within marriage and rejected the double standard that gave Roman men sexual freedom denied to women. Musonius argued that if men claimed authority over women on the grounds of superior self-control, they ought to demonstrate that control by managing their own sex drives. A man visiting a prostitute, he said, harms himself by lacking self-discipline. Seneca went further, describing sexual desire for pleasure as "a destructive force insidiously fixed in the innards." The wise man, he wrote, makes love to his wife through good judgment, not emotion.

  The emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius reduced sexual intercourse to "the friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of some mucus." Seneca attacked the senator Hostius Quadra, who reportedly surrounded himself with distorting mirrors so he could watch sex parties from multiple angles and make penises appear larger. Meanwhile, Juvenal satirized Stoics who affected a rough, manly exterior while privately indulging. Martial repeatedly made the same joke.

• 5. Bodies, Status, and the Law

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  During the Republic, a Roman citizen's political liberty was defined in part by the right to preserve his body from physical compulsion, including both corporal punishment and sexual abuse. This meant that status shaped Roman sexual law from the ground up. The legal concept of stuprum, "criminal debauchery" or sex crime, applied only among citizens; the protection from sexual misconduct was among the rights that distinguished the citizen from the non-citizen.

  The word raptus, from which English derives "rape," meant primarily kidnapping or abduction in Roman law. The mythological rape of the Sabine women is understood in Roman sources as a form of bride abduction in which sexual violation was a secondary issue. Rape in the sense that English speakers would recognize was more typically expressed as stuprum committed through violence. As laws pertaining to violence were codified toward the end of the Republic, a more specific category emerged: raptus ad stuprum, abduction for the purpose of committing a sex crime.

  The rape of a freeborn male, an ingenuus, was treated in Roman rhetoric as a capital offense equivalent to the rape of a materfamilias. In a book on rhetoric from the early 1st century BC, these two crimes are placed on equal footing. The Lex Julia de vi publica, probably dating from the dictatorship of Julius Caesar and recorded in the early 3rd century AD, defined rape as forced sex against "boy, woman, or anyone." Men who had been raped were explicitly exempt from the infamia, the loss of legal standing, suffered by men who prostituted themselves willingly. The jurist Pomponius stated directly that a man raped by robbers or enemy soldiers in wartime ought to bear no stigma.

  The historian Valerius Maximus, in his twelve anecdotes about assaults on chastity, included male victims in equal number to female. In the military, a handsome young recruit named Trebonius killed his superior officer, the nephew of the general Marius, after repeated sexual harassment. When brought to trial, Trebonius produced witnesses to show he had never prostituted his body despite offers of expensive gifts. Marius not only acquitted him but awarded him a crown for bravery.

• 6. The Shifting Line of Empire

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  In the 2nd century AD, one scholar noted, "there is a boom in texts about sex in Greek and Latin," alongside the rise of romance novels. That wave crested and then receded. Frank sexuality all but vanished from literature thereafter, and sexual topics became the province of medical writing or Christian theology.

  By the 3rd century, celibacy had become an ideal among a growing number of Christians. Church Fathers such as Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria debated whether even marital sex should be permitted for procreation. The sexual culture of martyrology focused on tests against chastity and on sexual torture; Christian women were more often than men subjected to sexual mutilation, particularly of the breasts. The prosecution of homosexuality as a general crime began in the 3rd century, when male prostitution was banned by Philip the Arab, a sympathizer of the Christian faith.

  By the end of the 4th century, passive homosexuality under the Christian Empire was punishable by burning. The Theodosian Code prescribed "death by sword" for "a man coupling like a woman." Under Justinian, all same-sex acts, passive or active, regardless of who the partners were, were declared contrary to nature and punishable by death. Homosexual behaviors were pointed to as causes for God's wrath following a series of disasters around 542 and 559.

  The poet Ausonius, a Gallo-Roman scholar based in 4th-century Bordeaux, briefly revived the obscene humor of Martial, though he shunned Martial's interest in pederasty and was at least nominally a Christian. His contemporary Marcellus of Bordeaux went on compiling his catalog of sexual remedies. These figures inhabit a transitional moment, when the old frameworks had not yet been fully replaced but the new ones were closing in fast. The legal and religious machinery of the Christian Empire would take centuries to finish the work, but the direction had been set before the 4th century was out.