Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Incest in Ancient Rome

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

What's the worst thing you could accuse someone of in Ancient Rome? There are a few strong candidates, but incest is definitely up there.In today's episode, Kate speaks with Roman historian, Emma Southon, author of A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women, to find out more about the different ways the Ancient Romans thought about incest.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely bed twixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I'm so glad to be here with you once again. But before we can get going, in case you've forgotten what this whole show is about and how we can be particularly sensitive at times,

here's your fair do's warning. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. We are actually talking about incest today, So although I do mess around with the fair-doos warning quite a bit, I think that it's fair to say that this episode is reaching the very outer limits

of what anybody wants to listen to on a podcast. So now you have been warned. If you will persist in listening to this, don't be writing as angry letters, because fair-doos, you have been warned. There's no escaping it. At the time of this recording, we are building up to a general election in the UK. And as our politicians come out to battle, kind of,

It makes me think about how politicians battled in years gone by. Were they hiding in fridges? No, they weren't. You might think the slur and slander of modern politics can be a bit out there, but they have got nothing, nothing on the Romans, who were way ahead of the political insult game. And what was their go-to insult to discredit a fellow politician? You guessed it.

It was to, there's just no delicate way of putting this, they accused them of incest. and they were all doing it, the accusations were flying around like anyone's business. It's a cheap shot for sure, and in the political sphere, who can resist one of those? But what else do we know about incest in ancient Rome? And what is the evidence of it during that time? Well, I don't know if you're prepared for this one, but we're going to do it anyway. Let's go.

What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing it. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful dance. Goodness, we have nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets,

The History of Sex Scandal and Society, with me, Kail Lister. Taboos are always interesting to explore, and perhaps there is none more tabooy than incest. That's a big one, in it? Even saying it, you get a sense of how loaded with shame it actually is. And fair enough, for good reason, I'm not about to defend incest on this podcast. But how did the ancient world view incest?

Was it always off limits? Was anyone allowed to do it? Could you get away with it if you were rich? All good questions. Well, joining me today is the ever-fabulous Emma Southern, author of A History of the Roman Empire and 21 women to help me find out. I am ready if you are. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets.

It's only Emma Southern. You're back. I'm back. You can't get rid of me. I just keep turning up. I can't. I want to install you for a permanent series called fucking hell the Romans were shit and then we can just get you out to talk about just this horrendous things that they're doing. Yeah, I've got so many of them. I have an endless list of terrible, terrible things that they did and ways in which they were horrible and why we should laugh at them more. So yeah, fucking hell the Romans were shit would be

an endless series. They're being particularly shit in today's episode because we're looking at incest. Yeah. Which thrilled me when we were like, do you want to come on and talk to incest? And I was like, yes, I do. One of the things that I've noticed more and more since talking to you

for a few episodes is that if you want to slag someone off in the Roman period, you either call them a slag or you say that they're shagging their brother. That seems to be like the go-to burns. This is one that you throw at men specifically, so you can call a woman a sag, and that's really all you need. But you can't call a man a slot because obviously they are. So instead you say, well, you must be shagging your sister and or mom if they haven't got an available sister

or a stepmother if they don't have an available mother or just anybody. Then that's a very useful, like, oh, well, look, obviously all men shagg, but you're doing it wrong. When like you pointed it out, I suddenly started to notice it everywhere. It's the thing that they say. There could be like some kind of Roman drainage planning committee. And if, you know, somebody disagreed, they'd be like, yeah, but you do fuck your mum. So no drainage planning for you.

And everyone would go, oh, well then, that's all we needed to hear. I mean, we didn't need anything further. And then, and also he write a poem about it, so it must be true. Because very often they write a poem about it. It's a strange one because, you know, It varies culture to culture. Generally, it's frowned upon. There is an interesting discussion to be had about when do we start calling it of like,

no, no, that's not okay. Because like cousins and then we're a bit like, oh, okay. Like second cousins, third, twice removed, like when you kind of go away. But at some point, and we don't know where it is, but there is a cutoff where we go, oh, well, that's all right. Yeah, that's far enough away. The Romans have a very interesting perspective on this in that they think that cousin marriage, is fine.

Sex between cousins and marriage between first cousins happens all the time and is basically fine and they have no problem with that at all. But marriage between step brothers and sisters who have technically no genetic relationship and step families and even in-laws at certain removes is verboten. So they consider it to be incest if you married your mother-in-law or whatever. But cousins is fine. So it's not genetic, but like it has not. no kind of closeness of relationship necessarily. They're very much have a problem with the

up and down incest, essentially. So across generations is less bad, which is why you get brother-sister incest accusations all the time because it's like the least bad kind of incest. Least bad. Yeah, but across generation, so like parent-child or uncle niece or like grandparent or anything like that, or even step-parents or mother-in-law, son-in-law, that kind of thing, that is very bad and very disgusting. I suppose today we would still get the ick, though, if you married your mother-in-law. Definitely. That would still raise a few eyebrows, wouldn't it?

Why do you think that the Romans, they seem to have had a real thing about this? Are they different from other cultures or, like, why was it a particular kind of trigger point for them? It's a trigger point for them because it's a religious crime for them. So the word incestim is not just sex between family members. It's also any kind of like religiously impure sex. So technically sex with a Vestal Virgin is incestim and that's the crime as you're prosecuted for. And other kinds of like religiously impure sex. So priests having sex with people that they shouldn't do or on days that they're not supposed to is also incest.

So it's basically a violation. It's kind of like sin basically. It's like an impure form of sex. violation of the natural order which is ordained by the gods. And so when you are accusing someone of incest, you're not just accusing them of like a gross sex crime. You're also accusing them of being religiously impure and defiled and therefore even worse than just if they had had sex with somebody that they should be having sex with. They have completely defiled themselves and everything in Roma's religion. We tend to think of them as being quite

rational, I suppose, but they're not. They're absolute lunatics. And they think that they think that everything is religion. And if you sit down and read any of their history books, you're like, okay, okay, here's a discussion of this very boring, I don't know, senatorial debate about where they're going to put a statue. And then they'd be like, and then it rained blood. And that was a bad sign. Right, yes.

Didn't rain blood, did it? That's a lie. Yeah, everything is couched in these religious terms, and they see everything as religious. And so they see incestors being something that is akin to having sex with a Vestal Virgin or punching your dad, which is also pretty much the worst thing that you can do, which is a real violation of what they call the Moss Maorum, like the natural law of the world. Right.

No shagging Vestal Virgins, your cousin and don't punch your dad. Yeah, but you can have sex with your cousin. That's fine. Oh, you can have sex with your cousin. Yes, of course. I did say that. I'm trying to remember my Roman mythology, and I'm definitely shaky on it. But I'm sure some of their gods were banging them.

All their gods, yes. The Greek mythology especially is very big on Hira and Zeus, a brother and sister. Yes, that's the, yeah. And they are always falling out and they're always having sex with each other. And there's a good couple of other gods like Ocean Arnis and the other female god of the ocean whose name I can't remember, a brother and sister as well. Ariel. Yeah. Sorry.

They're always doing incest. amongst the gods, which makes it quite confusing when they're like, you can't, people can't do it. But basically they, in much the same way that they're basically fine with female gods having roles that they wouldn't have in life. Like, like Minerva and Athena as kind of martial gods, but women in real life never fight and aren't supposed to be like intellectual. But it's because they're gods, they're different. The rules don't apply to gods.

They can do whatever they like. but humans are guided by natural laws of humanity and can't go around just doing whatever they like. So they're not supposed to. There's no sense that there was one particular God who was very anti-incest that people are being punished because of what they thought then.

No, just it's basically fine for gods to do things that humans can't. Like gods are always going around, like turning people into swans and then raping them. And as a general rule, that's also very frowned upon in, general culture. There's definitely a sense that, well, I can do it because I'm a god, fuck off, like that. Was there a class consciousness around this in the human population? Is this one of those things where, like, if you're really rich and up a class,

it's probably okay if you do a spot of incest and not for the pores? Well, so in other cultures there definitely is. So the Ptolemaic dynasty of which Cleopatra is the last one in Egypt, two of the Macedonians who descend from Alexander the Great in Egypt, they marry each other all the time like they have so many brother-sister relationships and also the Persians do it as well

but they're royal family but they present themselves as being kind of divine so they're always presented as being brother-sister gods in those contexts there is an argument that the Julio Claudians, one of the reasons why the Julia Claudians are accused of doing incest so often so Caligula is accused

of having sex with all of his sisters and then treating Ducilla as though she was his wife and then he'd tries to deify her after she dies. And then Claudius marries his niece, Agrippina. And one of the arguments as to why they're doing this is that they're trying to present themselves in this mold of divine family. So they're kind of exempt from the rules that they can do things that other people can't

because they're trying to show themselves to be above everybody else. Because they have divine ancestors now, like Augustus is a god, Julius Caesar is a god. They've been telling everybody they're descended from Venus for 50 years. it doesn't work and everybody's like oh good god no we're kind of disgusted by this on various different levels but there kind of is this idea that if you can push your present yourself as a god or as being divine then you might be able to get away with it and other cultures can which then trickles down into society so it's one of a weird quirks of roman egypt is that brother-sister marriage happens there all the time and we have censuses from egypt which

show that something like 15 or 20% of marriages that are recorded in these censuses, across like a 200, 300 year period are full brother and sister. And they're happily writing that down, like they're filling in their census form, like, yes, we have the exact same parents. And they'll say full brother, full sister, and these are our children. And it's like very, very common in Roman Egypt that they just don't really enforce the Lord over there. They're just like, it's a weird thing that Egyptians do. Why do you think that they would do?

I mean, it can't just be that, you know, everyone in Egypt, ancient Egypt really fancied their brother or sister. So they just kind of went, okay. Like genetic and evolutionary biologists would suggest to us that the reason incest is such an ick all around the world, except they wouldn't use that word, is because you are genetically predisposed to not have sex with your family, that you are supposed to move away from them. Like you'd be kind of fighting to overcome that, oh, God, it's my brother. How are they justifying it in ancient Egypt? Is it just like, well, it saves on housing?

So there's lots of questions. So nobody ever asks them to justify it, which is interesting. So nobody ever says to them or even really talks about it. They're just like this is something that they do in Egypt. The main argument for why it happens so often is that what you have is a class of, colonial settlers in Egypt who are Greek, who come with Alexander the Great and stay and then become like a cultural elite and who are largely forbidden from marrying ethnic Egyptians because you lose status if you marry an ethnic Egyptian and there is a real racism in

the ancient West, like in Greek culture and in Roman culture against Egyptians. It's a real insult to call somebody an Egyptian and there's this bit in juvenile. about like he's an Egyptian so his statue isn't even worth pissing on and like if you're going to insult somebody you call them an Egyptian and so they are largely prevented from marrying ethnic Egyptians and so they turn in and just marry each other and they all have Greek names these people really who are marrying and so that's basically what pushes it is that they all just marry one another and there's not that many of them because they're settler Colonials and they refuse or cannot mix with the population of Egypt. They just sort of sit in

the middle of them. And that's one argument as to what happens so often. But everybody then just seems to think that it is extremely fine. I mean, maybe once it had been normalized, it was... Yeah, after a couple of generations. Is that why Cleopatra there is still a sort of a raging debate about whether or not she would have been dark-skinned or light-skinned and then, like, occasionally somebody will try and make the claim that Cleopatra was black and then other people come in and go, no, she was Greek. She wouldn't have been like that. Is that because there was this racist inbreeding of like, wow, okay. And also because a large proportion of her family tree is a stick. It's all, the brothers and sisters pretty much all the way down and occasionally an niece and uncle in there.

It's not healthy, is it? It was not healthy. She married two brothers? Yeah. And then, her sister was also involved and then yeah but the Ptolemaic family tree is not a diverse one by any stretch of the imagination I think there's like two or three people that come from the outside and none of them last what about inbreeding I mean like one thing that we do know now is that as far as the gene pool goes it's like don't swim in the shallow end of it like move out so was there illnesses that was cropping up as a result of this probably we don't have that much evidence for it because we don't have paintings if we have paintings of people that we could probably see like their weird Habsburg chin, you would

probably be able to see some nice features across generations that reiterated, but because they don't talk about it and they don't know about it. So it's not something that they consider to be, all of the census things are always like no identifying marks. So maybe they just got real used to looking at their receding chins. And maybe, although maybe if you were a census taker starting in front of Queen Claire Poucher, you would probably write down, yeah, it's fine. This all looks great to me. Like there's no issues here at all. In fairness, everybody does say about Cleopatra that she was notoriously not beautiful. So maybe that's what they might have heard that. She's very charming. We've got to make up for it, haven't you? If you're not that pretty and

you're banging your brother. You've got to bring something to the party. But it was illegal, right? The Romans said it was illegal. So why did they say, oh, except in Egypt? Like, what was that? Like, because it was under Roman rule. It was under Roman rule, mostly because they didn't really like that many people have Roman citizenship. So as long as you paid your taxes, then up until like the third century, they weren't that interested in letting people have Roman citizenship. So if you didn't have Roma privileges, then they weren't always that interested in enforcing Roman laws. Secondly, it kind of maintained a useful way of controlling the population because everybody else in the area was also really squicked out by it. So it meant that those groups would never join together.

So everybody would just be like, oh no, those are weird. They're never going. Nobody's ever going to join in with that group of Egyptians to start a rebellion because no one wants to hang out with them. That makes sense. Yeah. And it also kind of feeds into this idea that Romans really do believe that Egypt is a filthy, like morally polluted place. They think that ancient Egyptian religion is weird.

Like they're always cracking jokes about them worshipping animals because of the animal-headed gods. They think that it's just a place of like pure barbarism, basically. and the fact that they do incest is something that they can be like, well, obviously they do, it's Egypt. What else would they be doing there? Egypt and Persia. It's the east. It's full of just magical people.

And they think that there's this race of people in Africa who have one giant foot and they hop around on the one giant foot. And then when it's too hot, they lie down and they use the giant foot as an umbrella to give them shade. That's just not true. No. That's just lies. So they're like, well, yeah, obviously this is the kind of thing that happens in Africa. It's Egypt. It's like the east and there's the foot people and then there's the incest. It's all basically the same. I suppose once you've got past the giant foot people, incest would seem pretty small potatoes in comparison.

I mean, at least you can understand that, yeah. But back in Rome, they think that incest pisses off the gods. They don't like that. But did they have any understanding that it was genetically bad for you? They wouldn't have said that, obviously. but just it's not healthy to do it anyway. Was there any kind of understanding or was it just religious objection? It's just religious objection and this idea that it is morally wrong because the gods wouldn't like it.

It's against nature for sex to happen within the family, basically. And once you have this connection, in law, they're only really interested in marriage. So it's only really technically banned to marry somebody within your family. So you can't marry a brother, you can't marry an uncle. Just the sex part is not technically illegal. It's just the kind of thing that pops up in Paris. Right. So you could get like a hand job or something from your uncle.

Yeah. As long as you didn't marry them. As long as you don't try to make it legal, then it's kind of, it's not all right. Everyone's going to think that you're awful. But it's a kind of thing that it's useful if you want to get something out of someone. So there's this one point where Tiberius prosecutes somebody in Spain for incest with his daughter, but it's because he wants his minds. He's like the richest man in Spain and he owns all the silver mines in Spain.

And so he prosecutes him for incest and then his punishment is that he gets all of his minds taken away from him, which now belong to Tiberius, wouldn't you know? Just look at that. I know how mysterious. I could like ask you for loads of examples of when Roman people were accused of this. And I definitely want you to tell me about Caligula because he's a fascinating one. But for your money, was any of it true? Did any of them actually get it right? Of just like, well, yeah, they actually probably were.

Or was this just a free-for-old? Well, Claudius and Agrippina, definitely. They get married. They have to change the law. That was Uncle and niece, wasn't it? Yeah, that's Uncle and niece, which is bad. It's her dad's older brother as well, so super icky. So that one is definite.

They probably were having sex, but they definitely got married. The big one that is always a big question is Clodius and Clodia, who is lesbian in Catullus, who comes up in so many sources. Almost all of them are Cicero, who hates Clodius. with the fire of a thousand thousand sons and will take any opportunity to say that Claudius was having sex with not just one sister but two sisters and that first comes up in a trial

when a bunch of people come forward including the sisters husband Luclis and say that they caught them in bed together so I would say that if there is one that is a maybe like a you know tipping towards the side of might have happened then Claudius and Clodius and Clodius that then gets kind of passed on to the other Clodia, the famous Clodia,

because obviously everybody has the same fucking name, which is incredibly annoying. But I reckon that Clodius might have had a bit of a something with at least one of his sisters. I'll be back with Emma after this short break. Right, let's talk Caligula, because that's definitely one of the rumours that has dogged. I mean, that's definitely not the worst thing he's ever done.

What's the evidence, who's saying what, and how true is it likely to have been? So your main written evidence is this one line really in Suetonius, where he says that Caligula had sex with all three of his sisters, and he has specially liked to sleep with Drusilla, who is the middle sister. And then the kind of external evidence is that he really likes his sisters. First thing he does, really, when he becomes emperor,

is he adds them to the, like, oath of loyalty. So you have to say whenever you're giving any kind of, like I swear by Caligula and his sisters. And he puts them on coins and he puts up statues of them and then just really includes them to a degree that everybody finds weird in the running of the empire. And then when Drusilla dies, so she dies of kind of a fever quite young,

he absolutely loses his mind with mourning. And he enforces this citywide morning where nobody is allowed to laugh for like a month. And he grows his hair and grows his beard and is kind of constantly found running around and beating his head against walls and just he really takes it hard that his sister is dead. And the only real explanation that anyone can come up with

is that he can't possibly have just loved her as a sister. Like this is not a normal reaction to a sister dying. In context, he has had literally every single member of his family other than his sisters were murdered. So he's had a lot going on and he is mentally unstable in general. Like he is not the most, doesn't have the strongest grip

on his emotions at the best of times. But it is generally believed that he mourns her so hard because he loves her more than her brother and sister should. And then that kind of trickles into, you get I Claudius, where they're having a relationship from the time of their children,

and then all the way up to one of my personal favorite bad films ever, which is 1979 Caligula, with... Oh, I love that one. Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell and Peter O'Toole just inexplicably in this terrible, terrible film where basically the theme of it is that Drusilla is his great love and they're frolicing in fields

and constantly fucking and with loads of opera going on in the background. But that's evidence. Is it true? Probably not. Like it seems unlikely. It seems... I would suggest more likely. that he was very traumatised and had a limited grip on his ability to control himself.

And this was just like a final straw when she died. But it's definitely very much part of his mythology now. It is, isn't it? Because when someone is a complete shit throughout history is that there is this urge to go back and make their sex life weird as well. Like you see that with all kinds of tyrants and dictators, like, you know, the same things about Hitler and this, that and the other. And it's like, it's interesting.

but I was never really on the fence about him. Like, you don't need to add that in to really push me over. The horrors were bad enough. I didn't need the one ball thing, yeah. And I think Caligula might be a bit like that, is that it's kind of, it's like extra window dressing for how terrible his rule really was. And Romans don't love nuance that much.

So they very much have, like, bad guys are bad and good guys are good. And it has to be in any. every facet of their life, like so bad emperors have real bad sex lives, and good emperors have perfectly pure sex lives where the worst thing they do is defile a virgin. Yes. So, you know, you get it with Nero as well. Nero is also accused of having sex with his mother, who is one of their sisters accused of...

Poor Agrippina gets accused of having sex with her brother, marries her uncle and then is accused of having sex with her son. So she is in the middle, cause in trouble wherever she goes, bless her. What were the punishments for this then? I'm going to guess that the super rich, like the royalty, the ones that are going, yeah, but I'm a god kind of, sort of, a little bit. Shut up. Like, what's the point?

Because if you said it was the same crime as violating a Vestal Virgin, and now you've been on the podcast before and spoken about what happens to them, and that was not nice. So what happens if you have been shagging your uncle or your mum and you're busted as a normal person? Depends on who is in charge. So if you're an emperor, the worse that happens if somebody writes something mean about you after you're dead, and that's not that bad. If you are a normal person, you are either, depending on what you have done, either going to be executed or exiled, and that is also going to depend on what whoever it is that is hearing the case wants from you.

If all you've done, all the legal cases that we have of people who are prosecuted for incest, for marrying somebody that is in their family, none of them are actually really. really punished. They just have them married, ended, mostly because it seems to have come out through ignorance rather than anything else. So there's quite a famous case with a woman who is married by her grandmother to her uncle, but she doesn't know it's her uncle. And they're together for 40 years and have children, and then it is revealed. And the case is about the legal status of their children, basically. But because she had no idea that she was marrying her uncle or that she had been married to her uncle for 40 years, they basically say, okay, well, the marriage is dissolved, but we're going to protect the status of your children because you didn't do this

on purpose. So that tends to happen. If it is in the senatorial arena, these people tend to be being accused of incest or being kind of pulled up on incest because people want something from them, in which case, if they're found guilty, they either get executed. Like Salinas gets executed because Agrippina and Claudius want Octavia, Claudius's daughter, to marry Agrippina's son, but she's already engaged to somebody else. So they accuse him of incest with his sister and have him executed so that then she's, Octavia is free to marry Nero. Very convenient. Very messy. Yeah. If you want someone's minds, then, you know, the punishment is that they lose their minds. If you need them to be dead, the punishment is that they're dead.

So there's no like baseline, really. It's just whatever needs to happen in order for the accuser to get what they need is what you get. I think one of the most famous stories about incest has got to be the Oedipus myth that remains with us today in this like Freud's Edipal complex, which was always fun to teach students about. That was always an amazing class when you're trying to explain what it is and they just look at you like, yeah. For anyone that's not aware of the story, I'm going to ask you to just tell us. a bit about the Oedipus myth, but also

was that well known in Rome at the time? So it's definitely well known. It's very, very well known. So the story is that is this kind of cursed family in Thebes, and Oedipus' father is a member of this kind of cursed family, and Oedipus is cursed

that he will marry his mother and kill his father. And this is a prophecy that is given when he's born. So his father sends him away and to be exposed. He is rescued and raised by kind of a small farming community. One day he's on his way to Thebes because there is another curse which is happening,

which is that there's a plague and it's been said that if you can solve these riddles and you can it's a very cursed town, Thebes, like it's, it has a bad time for very hundreds of years. So he's on his way to Thebes and he meets a man on the road. They have an argument about who's going to get out of the way, which escalates wildly and Edipus kills the guy that he's having an argument with who turns out to be the king of Thebes who is his father. But nobody knows this yet. So he continues on his way to Thebes, where he defeats the Sphinx, does the riddles, becomes the king of Thebes and marries the now widowed queen being his mother. They have children together and then through a series of mildly ludicrous, tragic events,

it's revealed that that's what's happened. The mother kills herself, he tears out his eyes and the curse is fulfilled. It's bleak, isn't it, that story? It's very bleak, and he does it all by accident, but in Greek tragedy, in Greek mythology, ignorance of the law is no defence. And so the curse is fulfilled. It then continues down through his children as well,

and he has to wander, because Antigone is his children, and so it continues on through yet more plays of monstrous things happening in Thebes. this idea that incest is a polluting crime, is something that cannot be washed away, is something that is against the gods, and that can only really happen if you are accursed and the gods don't love you, really. It's something, and there are versions, the Romans wrote versions of this all the time,

and they will use it as an example when they're talking about people who are committing incest. But Edipus is a tragic figure whereby he does this by accident, like he doesn't know that that's what he's doing. It's not until his parentage is revealed. Whereas people who are being accused of incest in Rome are almost always being accused of doing on purpose because they are so evil that they just love to shag their cester. Right.

Okay. Okay. So Oedipus is, he's a tragic figure in Rome. Yeah. And people are writing about him a lot. Yeah. You know, he has their classic, kind of like he's got way too much confidence and they all think that they can get around this prophecy

and it turns out that you can't. They do like that twist. don't they? The ancient Greeks. They like that one. Someone makes a prophecy and then the whole thing is somebody trying to outrun the prophecy.

Oh, no, you can't. And all you ever do is fulfill the prophecy in a whole new way. Always end up shagging your mum. You cannot get away from the gods because the gods always know. And it is profound hubris to think that you can outwit the gods.

And yeah, so the Romans are not sympathetic, but they understand this as tragedy, which is why when people accidentally marry their uncle, they are like, okay, Like, you know, me too. With other things, they can be quite brutal. Like, they would for forcibly exile people for adultery, even when nobody wanted them to do it.

They're very strict on the old adultery. They're real strict on the old adultery. My current obsession of something that I would like someone to write me a novel about is the islands that they kept putting women on, that they were exiling them for their adultery, some of whom were exiled even though the husbands were like, no, I forgive them. Like, I don't want them to be prosecuted in any way.

And someone else would prosecute them. and then they would be exiled against everybody's will. These women on islands just being like, what did you do? I was just thinking what I was talking to you about, so the concept of incest and it makes us all go, it's horrible, but it's still very much with us in royal families. I think that if brothers and sisters tried to marry, the questions would be raised.

I think somebody would have to go, no. But first cousins are still... Victoria and Albert were first cousins. Right. Yeah. It's only very recently that they stopped doing that. And still like half the royal families in Europe are all Victoria and Albert descendants because they then also sent them off to marry other cousins.

When you start looking into World War I history and all of the political leader, you suddenly realise that, oh my God, this is one family. It is one family. It's just like spread out. It's just a reunion gone horribly, horribly wrong. The other thing I was thinking, it was like brother and sisters getting together and going like in ancient Egypt. But then I suddenly remembered, and I'm aware this isn't a documentary,

but just go with me. Like Game of Thrones, right, with Jamie and Searcy, when that first dropped that they were actually twins that were having sex to each other, everyone went, and then by the end of it, we're kind of almost rooting for them. Yeah. You can forget about it quite quickly. Like when John Snow and Dineris, they got together. I remember everyone being like, oh, it's quite sweet.

There aren't a nephew. It's not sweet. It's amazing how much quickly something can become normalised. And I'm sure that all of these people who are living around in these communities where 20% of people who married were brother and sister, the first one, they were like, ooh. And by the seventh, they're like, eh, it happens. Another brother-sister wedding to go to.

What are you going to do? I found out recently that my grandparents were first cousins. That was a family moment. I was all sat around going, okay. I don't know what to do about this information now. And, you know, I should actually fact-check that with my mother just to make it for it. Before I out my entire family as being genetically inbred on the podcast,

I'll double-check that. Hello, lovely betwixters. It's Kate Lister here. I'm just jumping into this episode to confirm that I did check this fact with my mother and my paternal grandparents were in fact cousins. My mother has also asked me to make sure that all the listeners know that it wasn't my fucking side of the family. Thank you very much.

And back to the show. It still happens, and I'm sure it still happens all over the place. And it's interesting how kind of culturally constructed incest is, because they're really against in-laws, for example. Like, that is really terrible to be marrying an in-law. Whereas I really think, like, the worst you'd get is you'd have to sell your story to a magazine. And people would be like, this is like generationally, like the age gap here is weird, but otherwise it's not.

Oh, Emma, you have been wonderful to talk to it, as always. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? They can find me at emma southern.com. They can find me on Instagram at Emma Southern, or my podcast is History of Sexy. Thank you so much for joining me. You've been horrific as always, but you are so much fun. A delight. Always happy to make everybody uncomfortable.

Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Emma for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or perhaps you just wanted to say hi, then you can email us at betwixtat historyhit.com. We've got episodes on everything from the Tudor origins of the condom

to the sex life of Henry VIII, all come in your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delaggy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.