(Römisch-Germanisches Museum) During the Republic, a Roman citizen's political liberty
(libertas) was defined in part by the right to preserve his body from physical compulsion, including both corporal punishment and sexual abuse.
Virtus, "valor" as that which made a man most fully a man
(vir), was among the active virtues. Roman ideals of masculinity were thus premised on taking an active role that was also, as
Williams has noted, "the prime directive of masculine sexual behavior for Romans." The impetus toward action might express itself most intensely in an ideal of dominance that reflects the hierarchy of Roman patriarchal society. The "conquest mentality" was part of a "cult of virility" that particularly shaped Roman homosexual practices. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, an emphasis on domination has led scholars to view expressions of Roman
male sexuality in terms of a "penetrator-penetrated"
binary model; that is, the proper way for a Roman male to seek sexual gratification was to insert his penis in his partner. Allowing himself to be penetrated threatened his liberty as a free citizen as well as his sexual integrity. It was socially acceptable for a freeborn Roman man to desire sex from either sex, as long as he took the penetrative role and was directed towards slaves and prostitutes. Although adultery is looked down upon generally, such relationships were condoned as long as it was confined to slaves and prostitutes, or less often a concubine or "kept woman." Lack of self-control, including in managing one's
sex life, indicated that a man was incapable of governing others; the enjoyment of "low sensual pleasure" threatened to erode the elite male's identity as a cultured person. It was a point of pride for
Gaius Gracchus to claim that during his term as a
provincial governor he kept no slave-boys chosen for their good looks, no female prostitutes visited his house, and he never accosted other men's slave-boys. In the Imperial era, anxieties about the loss of political liberty and the subordination of the citizen to the emperor were expressed by a perceived increase in passive homosexual behavior among free men, accompanied by a documentable increase in the execution and corporal punishment of citizens. The dissolution of Republican ideals of
physical integrity in relation to
libertas contributes to and is reflected by the sexual license and decadence associated with the Empire.
Male nudity , idealizing the male form without nudity
(1st century BC) The poet
Ennius declared that "exposing naked bodies among citizens is the beginning of public disgrace
(flagitium)," a sentiment echoed by Cicero that again links the self-containment of the body with citizenship. Roman attitudes toward nudity differed from those of the Greeks, whose ideal of masculine excellence was expressed by the nude male body in art and in such real-life venues as athletic contests. The
toga, by contrast, distinguished the body of the sexually privileged adult Roman male. Even when stripping down for exercises, Roman men kept their genitals and buttocks covered, an
Italic custom shared also with the
Etruscans, whose art mostly shows them wearing a
loincloth, a skirt-like garment, or the earliest form of "shorts" for athletics. Romans who competed in the
Olympic Games presumably followed the Greek custom of nudity, but athletic nudity at Rome has been dated variously, possibly as early as the introduction of Greek-style games in the 2nd century BC but perhaps not regularly till the time of
Nero around 60 AD. Public nudity might be offensive or distasteful even in traditional settings; Cicero derides
Mark Antony as undignified for appearing near-naked as a participant in the
Lupercalia, even though it was ritually required. Nudity is one of the themes of this religious festival that most consumes Ovid's attention in the
Fasti, his long-form poem on the
Roman calendar.
Augustus, during his program of religious revivalism, attempted to reform the Lupercalia, in part by suppressing the use of nudity despite its fertility aspect. Negative connotations of nudity include defeat in war, since captives were stripped, and slavery, since slaves for sale were often displayed naked. The disapproval of nudity was thus less a matter of trying to suppress inappropriate sexual desire than of dignifying and marking the citizen's body as free. (1st century CE), on a body of the Greek
Hermes Ludovisi type The influence of Greek art, however, led to
"heroic" nude portrayals of Roman men and gods, a practice that began in the 2nd century BC. When statues of Roman generals nude in the manner of
Hellenistic kings first began to be displayed, they were shocking not simply because they exposed the male figure, but because they evoked concepts of royalty and
divinity that were contrary to Republican ideals of citizenship as embodied by the toga. In art produced under Augustus, the programmatic adoption of
Hellenistic and
Neo-Attic style led to more complex signification of the male body shown nude, partially nude, or costumed in a
muscle cuirass. One exception to public nudity was
the baths, though attitudes toward nude bathing also changed over time. In the 2nd century BC,
Cato preferred not to bathe in the presence of his son, and
Plutarch implies that for Romans of these earlier times it was considered shameful for mature men to expose their bodies to younger males. Later, however, men and women might even bathe together.
Phallic sexuality ; the tip of each phallus was outfitted with a ring to dangle a bell Roman sexuality as framed by Latin literature has been described as
phallocentric. The phallus was supposed to have powers to ward off the
evil eye and other malevolent supernatural forces. It was used as an
amulet (fascinum), many examples of which survive, particularly in the form of
wind chimes
(tintinnabula). Some scholars have even interpreted the plan of the
Forum Augustum as
phallic architecture. The outsized
phallus of
Roman art was associated with the god
Priapus, among others. It was laughter-provoking, grotesque, or used for magical purposes. Originating in the Greek town of
Lampsacus, Priapus was a fertility deity whose statue was placed in gardens to ward off thieves. The poetry collection called the
Priapea deals with phallic sexuality, including poems spoken in the person of Priapus. In one, for instance, Priapus threatens anal rape against any potential thief. The wrath of Priapus might cause impotence, or a state of perpetual arousal with no means of release: one curse of Priapus upon a thief was that he might lack women or boys to relieve him of his erection, and burst. This metaphorical tendency is exemplified by actual
lead sling-bullets, which are sometimes inscribed with the image of a phallus, or messages that liken the target to a sexual conquest—for instance "I seek
Octavian's asshole." The most common obscenity for the penis is
mentula, which Martial argues for in place of polite terms: his privileging of the word as time-honored Latin from the era of
Numa may be compared to the unvarnished integrity of "
four letter Anglo-Saxon words".
Mentula appears frequently in graffiti and the
Priapea, but while obscene the word was not inherently abusive or vituperative.
Verpa, by contrast, was "an emotive and highly offensive word" for the penis with its
foreskin drawn back, as the result of an erection, excessive sexual activity, or
circumcision.
Virga, as well as other words for "branch, rod, stake, beam", is a common metaphor, as is
vomer, "plough". , wearing a
Phrygian cap and weighing his phallus in a
balance scale (House of the Vettii) The penis might also be referred to as the "vein"
(vena), "tail" (
penis or
cauda), or "tendon"
(nervus). The English word "penis" derives from
penis, which originally meant "tail" but in
Classical Latin was used regularly as a risqué colloquialism for the male organ. Later,
penis becomes the standard word in polite Latin, as used for example by the
scholiast to Juvenal and by
Arnobius, but did not pass into usage among the
Romance languages. It was not a term used by medical writers, except for
Marcellus of Bordeaux. In
medieval Latin, a vogue for scholarly obscenity led to a perception of the
dactyl, a metrical unit of verse represented as an image of the penis, with the long syllable
(longum) the shaft and the two short syllables
(breves) the testicles. The apparent connection between Latin
testes, "testicles," and
testis, plural
testes, "witness" (the origin of English "testify" and "testimony") may lie in archaic ritual. Some ancient Mediterranean cultures swore binding oaths upon the male genitalia, symbolizing that "the bearing of false witness brings a curse upon not only oneself, but one's house and future line". Latin writers make frequent puns and jokes based on the two meanings of
testis: it took balls to become a legally functioning male citizen. The English word "testicle" derives from the
diminutive testiculum. from which descends French
couille.
Castration and circumcision To Romans and Greeks,
castration and
circumcision were linked as barbaric mutilations of the male genitalia. When the cult of
Cybele was imported to Rome at the end of the 3rd century BC, its traditional
eunuchism was confined to foreign priests (the
Galli), while Roman citizens formed
sodalities to perform honors in keeping with their own customs. It has been argued that the
Apostle Paul's exhortation of the
Galatians not to undergo circumcision should be understood not only in the context of
Jewish circumcision, but also of the ritual castration associated with Cybele, whose cult was centered in
Galatia. Among Jews, circumcision was a marker of the
Abrahamic covenant;
diaspora Jews circumcised their male slaves and
adult male converts, in addition to Jewish male infants. Although Greco-Roman writers view circumcision as an identifying characteristic of Jews, they believed the practice to have originated in
Egypt, and recorded it among peoples they identified as
Arab,
Syrian,
Phoenician,
Colchian, and
Ethiopian. The Neoplatonic philosopher
Sallustius associates circumcision with the strange familial–sexual customs of the
Massagetae who "eat their fathers" and of the
Persians who "preserve their nobility by begetting children on their mothers". thought to have been used either by devotees of Cybele or by veterinarians, with the heads of deities and animals having ritual significance During the
Republican period, a
Lex Cornelia prohibited various kinds of mutilation, including castration. (Two millennia later, in 1640, the poet
Salvatore Rosa would write in
La Musica, "Fine Cornelia law, where hast thou gone / Now that the whole of Norcia seems not enough / For the castration of boys?") Despite these prohibitions, some Romans kept beautiful male slaves as
deliciae or
delicati ("toys, delights") who were sometimes castrated in an effort to preserve the androgynous looks of their youth. The emperor
Nero had his
freedman Sporus castrated, and married him in a public ceremony. By the end of the 1st century AD, bans against castration had been enacted by the emperors
Domitian and
Nerva in the face of a burgeoning trade in eunuch slaves. Sometime between 128 and 132 AD,
Hadrian seems to have temporarily banned circumcision, on pain of death.
Antoninus Pius exempted Jews from the ban, as well as Egyptian priests, and
Origen says that in his time only Jews were permitted to practice circumcision. Legislation under
Constantine, the first Christian emperor, freed any slave who was subjected to circumcision; in 339 AD, circumcising a slave became punishable by death. A medical procedure known as
epispasm, which consisted of both surgical and non-surgical methods, existed in ancient Rome and Greece to restore the
foreskin and cover the
glans "for the sake of decorum". Both were described in detail by the Greek physician
Aulus Cornelius Celsus in his comprehensive encyclopedic work
De Medicina.
Regulating semen Too-frequent
ejaculation was thought to weaken men.
Greek medical theories based on the
classical elements and
humors recommended limiting the production of semen by means of cooling, drying, and astringent therapies, including cold baths and the avoidance of flatulence-causing foods. In the 2nd century AD, the medical writer
Galen explains
semen as a concoction of blood (conceived of as a humor) and
pneuma (the "vital
air" required by organs to function) formed within the man's coiled
spermatic vessels, with the humor turning white through heat as it enters into the testicles. In his treatise
On Semen, Galen warns that immoderate sexual activity results in a loss of
pneuma and hence vitality: It is not at all surprising that those who are less moderate sexually turn out to be weaker, since the whole body loses the purest part of both substances, and there is besides an accession of pleasure, which by itself is enough to dissolve the vital tone, so that before now some persons have died from excess of pleasure. The uncontrolled dispersing of
pneuma in semen could lead to loss of physical vigor, mental acuity, masculinity, and a strong manly voice, a complaint registered also in the
Priapea. Sexual activity was thought particularly to affect the voice: singers and actors might be
infibulated to preserve their voices.
Quintilian advises that the orator who wished to cultivate a deep masculine voice for court should abstain from sexual relations. This concern was felt intensely by
Catullus's friend
Calvus, the 1st-century BC
avant-garde poet and orator, who slept with lead plates over his kidneys to control
wet dreams.
Pliny reports that: When plates of lead are bound to the area of the loins and kidneys, it is used, owing to its rather cooling nature, to check the attacks of sexual desire and sexual dreams in one's sleep that cause spontaneous eruptions to the point of becoming a sort of disease. With these plates the orator Calvus is reported to have restrained himself and to have preserved his body's strength for the labor of his studies. Lead plates,
cupping therapy, and
hair removal were prescribed for three sexual disorders thought to be related to nocturnal emissions: satyriasis, or
hypersexuality;
priapism, a chronic erection without an accompanying desire for sex; and the involuntary discharge of semen.
Effeminacy and transvestism , 3rd century AD)''
Effeminacy was a favorite accusation in Roman political invective, and was aimed particularly at
populares, the politicians of the faction who represented themselves as champions of the people, sometimes called Rome's "democratic" party in contrast to the
optimates, a conservative elite of
nobles. In the last years of the Republic, the popularists
Julius Caesar, Marcus Antonius (
Mark Antony), and
Clodius Pulcher, as well as the
Catilinarian conspirators, were all derided as effeminate, overly-groomed, too-good-looking men who might be on the receiving end of sex from other males; at the same time, they were supposed to be womanizers or possessed of devastating sex appeal. Perhaps the most notorious incident of
cross-dressing in ancient Rome occurred in 62 BC, when Clodius Pulcher intruded on annual rites of the
Bona Dea that were restricted to women only. The rites were held at a
senior magistrate's home, in this year that of Julius Caesar, nearing the end of his term as
praetor and only recently invested as
Pontifex Maximus. Clodius disguised himself as a female musician to gain entrance, as described in a "verbal striptease" by Cicero, who prosecuted him for sacrilege
(incestum): Take away his saffron dress, his tiara, his girly shoes and purple laces, his bra, his
Greek harp, take away his shameless behavior and his sex crime, and Clodius is suddenly revealed as a democrat. The actions of Clodius, who had just been elected
quaestor and was probably about to turn thirty, are often regarded as a last juvenile prank. The all-female nature of these nocturnal rites attracted much prurient speculation from men; they were fantasized as drunken lesbian orgies that might be fun to watch. Clodius is supposed to have intended to seduce Caesar's wife, but his masculine voice gave him away before he got a chance. The scandal prompted Caesar to seek an immediate divorce to control the damage to his own reputation, giving rise to the famous line "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion". The incident "summed up the disorder of the final years of the republic". In addition to political invective, cross-dressing appears in Roman literature and art as a mythological trope (as in the story of
Hercules and
Omphale exchanging roles and attire), religious
investiture, and rarely or ambiguously as
transvestic fetishism. A section of the
Digest by
Ulpian categorizes
Roman clothing on the basis of who may appropriately wear it; a man who wore women's clothes, Ulpian notes, would risk making himself the object of scorn. A fragment from the playwright
Accius (170–86 BC) seems to refer to a father who secretly wore "virgin's finery". An instance of
transvestism is noted in a legal case, in which "a certain senator accustomed to wear women's evening clothes" was disposing of the garments in his will. In a "
mock trial" exercise presented by
the elder Seneca, a young man
(adulescens) is gang-raped while wearing women's clothes in public, but his attire is explained as his acting on a dare by his friends, not as a choice based on gender identity or the pursuit of erotic pleasure. Gender ambiguity was a characteristic of the priests of the goddess
Cybele known as
Galli, whose ritual attire included items of women's clothing. They are sometimes considered a
transgender priesthood, since they were required to be castrated in imitation of
Attis. The complexities of gender identity in the religion of Cybele and the Attis myth are explored by Catullus in one of his longest poems,
Carmen 63.
Male–male sex (
British Museum, London, 15 BCE – 15 CE) Roman men were free to have sex with males of lower status with no perceived loss of masculine prestige, and indeed, sexual mastery and dominance of others — regardless of their sex — could even enhance their masculinity. However, those who took the receiving role in sex acts, sometimes referred to as the "passive" or "submissive" role, were disparaged as weak and effeminate (see the section below on
cunnilungus and fellatio), and that certainly included for the purpose of sexual gratification, whether that was with a woman or a man. On the other hand, allowing one's body to be subjugated for the pleasure of others, particularly for sexual purposes, was seen as degrading and a mark of weakness and servility. Laws such as the poorly understood
Lex Scantinia and various pieces of
Augustan moral legislation were meant to restrict same-sex activity among freeborn males, viewed as threatening a man's status and independence as a citizen. Latin had such a wealth of words for men outside the masculine norm that some scholars argue for the existence of a homosexual
subculture at Rome; that is, although the noun "homosexual" has no straightforward equivalent in Latin and is an anachronism when applied to Roman culture, literary sources do reveal a pattern of behaviors among a minority of free men that indicate same-sex preference or orientation. Some terms, such as
exoletus, specifically refer to an adult; Romans who were socially marked as "masculine" did not confine their same-sex penetration of male prostitutes,
amasius or slaves to those who were "boys" under the age of 20. The
Satyricon, for example, includes many descriptions of adult, free men showing sexual interest in one another. Some older men may at times have preferred the passive role with a partner of the same age or younger, but this was socially frowned upon. Homoerotic Latin literature includes the "Juventius" poems of
Catullus, elegies by
Tibullus and
Propertius, the second
Eclogue of
Vergil, and several poems by
Horace.
Lucretius addresses the love of boys in
De rerum natura (4.1052–1056). The poet
Martial, despite being married to a woman, often derides women as sexual partners, and celebrates the charms of
pueri (boys). The
Satyricon of
Petronius is so permeated with the culture of male–male sexuality that in 18th-century European literary circles, his name became "a byword for homosexuality". Although
Ovid includes mythological treatments of homoeroticism in the
Metamorphoses, he is unusual among Latin love poets, and indeed among Romans in general, for his aggressively heterosexual stance, though even he did not claim exclusive heterosexuality. Although Roman law did not recognize marriage between men, in the early Imperial period some male couples were celebrating
traditional marriage rites. Same-sex weddings are reported by sources that mock them; the feelings of the participants are not recorded. Apart from measures to protect the liberty of citizens, 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. "Death by sword" was the punishment for a "man coupling like a woman" under the
Theodosian Code. Under
Justinian, all same-sex acts, passive or active, no matter who the partners, 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. Justinian also demanded the penalty of death for anyone who enslaved a castrated Roman, although he permitted the buying and selling of foreign-born eunuchs as long as they were castrated outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire (
Codex Justinianus, 4.42.2).
Rape of men Men who had been raped were exempt from the loss of legal or social standing
(infamia) suffered by males who prostituted themselves or willingly took the receiving role in sex. According to the jurist
Pomponius, "whatever man has been raped by the force of robbers or the enemy in wartime
(vi praedonum vel hostium)" ought to bear no stigma. Fears of mass rape following a military defeat extended equally to male and female potential victims. by the
nymphs (
opus sectile,
basilica of Junius Bassus, 4th century AD) Roman law addressed the rape of a male citizen as early as the 2nd century BC, when a ruling was issued in a case that may have involved a male of same-sex orientation. Although a man who had worked as a prostitute could not be raped as a matter of law, it was ruled that even a man who was "disreputable
(famosus) and questionable
(suspiciosus)" had the same right as other free men not to have his body subjected to forced sex. In a book on rhetoric from the early 1st century BC, the rape of a freeborn male
(ingenuus) is equated with that of a
materfamilias as a capital crime. The
Lex Julia de vi publica, recorded in the early 3rd century AD but "probably dating from the
dictatorship of Julius Caesar", defined rape as forced sex against "boy, woman, or anyone"; the rapist was subject to execution, a rare penalty in Roman law. It was a capital crime for a man to abduct a free-born boy for sexual purposes, or to bribe the boy's chaperone
(comes) for the opportunity. Negligent chaperones could be prosecuted under various laws, placing the blame on those who failed in their responsibilities as guardians rather than on the victim. Although the law recognized the victim's blamelessness, rhetoric used by the defense indicates that attitudes of blame among jurors could be exploited. The rape of an
ingenuus is among the worst crimes that could be committed in Rome, along with
parricide, the rape of a female virgin, and robbing a temple. Rape was nevertheless one of the traditional punishments inflicted on a male adulterer by the wronged husband, though perhaps more in revenge fantasy than in practice. The threat of one man to subject another to anal or oral rape
(irrumatio) is a theme of invective poetry, most notably in Catullus' notorious
Carmen 16, and was a form of masculine braggadocio.
Sex in the military The Roman soldier, like any free and respectable Roman male of status, was expected to show self-discipline in matters of sex. Soldiers convicted of adultery were given a
dishonorable discharge; convicted adulterers were barred from enlisting. Strict commanders might ban prostitutes and pimps from camp, though in general the
Roman army, whether on the march or at a permanent fort
(castrum), was attended by a number of camp followers who might include prostitutes. Their presence seems to have been taken for granted, and mentioned mainly when it became a problem.
Septimius Severus rescinded the ban in 197 AD. Other forms of sexual gratification available to soldiers were the
use of male slaves,
war rape, and same-sex relations. Homosexual behavior among soldiers was subject to harsh penalties, including death, Sex among fellow soldiers violated the Roman decorum against intercourse with another freeborn male. A soldier maintained his masculinity by not allowing his body to be used for sexual purposes. This physical integrity stood in contrast to the limits placed on his actions as a free man within the military hierarchy; most strikingly, Roman soldiers were the only citizens regularly subjected to corporal punishment, reserved in the civilian world mainly for slaves. Sexual integrity helped distinguish the status of the soldier, who otherwise sacrificed a great deal of his civilian autonomy, from that of the slave. In warfare, rape signified defeat, another motive for the soldier not to compromise his body sexually. issued by
Julius Caesar, depicting a military trophy with a
nude captured Gaul and a
female personification of defeated Gallia; Venus is pictured on the obverse An incident related by
Plutarch in his biography of Marius illustrates the soldier's right to maintain his sexual integrity. A good-looking young recruit named Trebonius had been
sexually harassed over a period of time by his superior officer, who happened to be Marius' nephew, Gaius Luscius. One night, having fended off unwanted advances on numerous occasions, Trebonius was summoned to Luscius' tent. Unable to disobey the command of his superior, he found himself the object of a sexual assault and drew his sword, killing Luscius. A conviction for killing an officer typically resulted in execution. When brought to trial, he was able to produce witnesses to show that he had repeatedly had to fend off Luscius, and "had never prostituted his body to anyone, despite offers of expensive gifts". Marius not only acquitted Trebonius in the killing of his kinsman, but gave him a
crown for bravery. Roman historians record other cautionary tales of officers who abuse their authority to coerce sex from their soldiers, and then suffer dire consequences. The youngest officers, who still might retain some of the adolescent attraction that Romans favored in male–male relations, were advised to beef up their masculine qualities, such as not wearing perfume, nor trimming nostril and underarm hair. During wartime, the violent use of war captives for sex was not considered criminal rape.
Mass rape was one of the acts of punitive violence during the sack of a city, but if the siege had ended through diplomatic negotiations rather than storming the walls,
by custom the inhabitants were neither enslaved nor subjected to personal violence. Mass rape occurred in some circumstances, and is likely to be underreported in the surviving sources, but was not a deliberate or pervasive strategy for controlling a population. An ethical ideal of sexual self-control among enlisted men was vital to preserving peace once hostilities ceased. In territories and
provinces brought under treaty with Rome, soldiers who committed rape against the local people might be subjected to harsher punishments than civilians.
Sertorius, the long-time
governor of
Roman Spain whose policies emphasized respect and cooperation with provincials, executed an entire
cohort when a single soldier had attempted to rape a local woman. Mass rape seems to have been more common as a punitive measure during
Roman civil wars than abroad. ==Female sexuality==