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

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

How sexually depraved were the Romans?Whilst they were a civlised, stoic and innovative bunch, they were also a promiscuous bunch with very questionable morals.Joining us today is friend of the show Emma Southon, author of A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women.How did the Romans view incest? What fate awaited the Vestal Virgins? And what went on at the debauched festivals of Bacchus? Let's find out.This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts.Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code BETWIXTTHESHEETS1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/ 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. Paper Twixters, I'm so pleased that you're here. We do have fun together, don't we? But we have safe and sensible and well-protected fun around here. And in order to do that, to have safe podcasting fun, I need to give you your fair do's warning and here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults

about adulty things covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. And now we've managed to get through that. On with the show! The torches are lit, the songs are being sung, and the wine is a plenty. Well, we are in ancient Rome, and what would ancient Rome be without the wine?

We are all set to worship the god Bacchus, the god of wine and, well, debauchery, really. What starts out as funning games with men and women from all different walks of life coming together, swiftly becomes an orgy. The men are with the men, the men are with the women, and though it might not be documented, you can bet your bottom dollar that the women got with the women too.

It was an absolute free-for-all. This was the Bacchanalia. These drunken, rowdy parties, known as the Bacchanalia, quickly garnered a reputation for being, well, little more than a violent sex cult with rituals and murders. I don't know about you, but that's enough for me to lose my hard on. As with Rome itself though, the good times wouldn't last. In the years following the collapse of the Roman Empire,

scholars would write about these Bacchanalia festivals and use it as evidence of the corruption and moral decay of Rome. The moral of this story, of course, is always leave a party while it's at its peak. 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 copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough. Hello, and pushing the society.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. One thing time can do, and definitely the Victorians did,

is sanitised the past. What do you think of when you think of the Romans? If you're anything like me, maybe you're just thinking of Russell Crow and his bulging biceps. Or perhaps you think of it as a very civilised society, full of order, logic, rules, stoicism and innovation. However, I feel it is my moral duty to tell you that not only were they a very, very filthy bunch, but they were also morally corrupt in ways that you can barely conceive of. Not all of them, of course, hashtag not all Romans, but some, as we will find out today, were shockingly debauched.

And joining us to take us on this journey back to sex in ancient Rome is the absolutely awesome Emma Southern. Are the ideas that ancient Rome was a promiscuous one accurate? What fate awaited the Vestal virgins who were not so virginal? And how loose were their morals around incest? Hitch up your toga's betwixters. I am ready to do this if you are. Hello and welcome back to Betwixter Sheets. I'm so pleased to have you. you here again. It is the one the only, the wonderful Emma Southern. How are you doing?

I am delightful. I'm gradually working on my plan to become a secret co-host of Betwixt the Sheets that by just turning up constantly. And it's going brilliantly. It's going just like very kind of just like creeping in until you've just become part of the fixtures and fittings and be like, hasn't she always been here? She's always been here. One day you'll open a door and I'll just in your house. Perfect sense. Yeah. But we are here today.

And of course I had to get you back on to talk about this. We're talking about sex and the Romans, which I was sure that we'd spoke about this before, but we haven't. We've spoken about how horrible and violent and Twatty the Romans are, definitely. Yes. But specifically about the kind of sex that the Romans were having, not so much. Yeah. Now we're going to talk about how horny they were, which is very horny indeed.

They have that reputation of being, like when people think of the Romans, they do, it's the last days of Caligula, it's orgies, it's excess, it's all of that stuff. Yeah, largely that's the fault of the Christians. Oh, is it? It is. Well, they considered, you know, showing your hair to be wildly. Erotic. Horish. But they considered everything that the Romans did to be the horniest thing that ever happened.

But what you have is lots and lots of early Christian writing. about how the Romans were decadent and corrupt and terrible and having sexy sex times all the time. But it is also helped along by the fact that they were pretty decadent and really into shagging. And even like the late Republican kind of glory of the empire, early imperial stuff, is pretty sexy. I was just about to ask you, did the Romans conceive of themselves as a very, very horny bunch? Is that largely something that has come about afterwards or at the time? were there people going, I think we should slow down here a bit, lads. They conceived of themselves to be very chaste and well behaved and everybody else to be very slutty.

So whenever they talk about other cultures, they're always like, those people are doing sex in a very bad way. Unlike us who are doing it, obviously, in the chastest and most reasonable and most logical and best way possible because they thought that everything they did was the best thing. Wow. Yeah. So they conceived of themselves as being very moral indeed and then put penises on absolutely everything. They did love a dick. They absolutely did.

They really did. Their views of sex, very different from the early Christians. And I suppose that we have to kind of own up. There's a lot of projection going on. In our own time, still we project back that they were this absolutely mad, mad, mad, mad bunch of horny dogs running around. but when you dig into it, that is true. That's definitely a part of it. That's true.

But it's certainly not the case that it was just this sort of like just mass free-for-all orgy for several hundred years. They actually had a lot of stigma and rules and laws and thou shalt bloody well not be doing that kind of stuff going on, didn't they? Yes, they did. So they have this thing called Mossmajoram, which is the customs of the ancestors, basically and that they refer back to constantly and it's their sort of imagined, idealised past,

which is very strict and very buttoned up and very, very chaste and women don't drink wine and men don't wear long sleeves is considered to be one of them. Waring long-sleeved is considered to be profoundly slutty. Well, I've always thought. Yeah. The longer the sleeve, the horny of the man, you know that.

And so they have these image of themselves And that's what you see in their kind of legal writing and their moral writing and in their laws that they pass about marriage. Because they gradually get more and more interested in passing laws around sex and what is allowed. And things like making adultery illegal is something that the first emperor does, whose caligula's grandfather. But he makes adultery illegal and makes it so that you can be prosecuted for it. And he insists that everybody has to be married so that mostly people, people are having sex within marriage. And these ideas in their legal writing and they have kind of moral writings as well.

So philosophy writings are all very much. But then where they will say, that's how it should be and it should be all very good. And that's how we should be behaving, but we're not. And then at the same time, you very often have poets and things who are saying what people are doing. The orgies thing is always a thing that comes up because people talk about bacchanalia. but we only know about bacchanalia because they made them illegal in 186 BCE, so quite quite early. Relatively in Roman history, they outlawed them completely

and said that they were completely on Roman and very bad indeed. So that's the Greeks. Isn't that interesting that now that they've become synonymous with Roman sluttiness, just for anyone who's listening, who's going backer who's a what now, what is the bacchanalia? So the racanalia is the worship of the god Bacchus, who is the god of wine and a god of kind of sexual fun. And basically they were introduced into Rome. They're a Greek thing. And if you've read the secret history by Donna Tart, that's I think where most people know about them. But they were introduced into Rome and then banned because there were stories that went round that there were rituals held at night and everybody would get very, very drunk. And then there would be lots of music and kind of rhythmic ritual singing. And everybody would be lots of music and kind of rhythmic ritual singing. And everybody would be. would get kind of high off of the alcohol and the rhythmic, and then they would have sex with each other. And men would have sex with men, and men would have sex with women. And nobody

mentions whether women were having sex with women because it didn't occur to them that that might happen. And just jolly james. Yeah, it definitely happened. And then men would be being murdered. And then also people would do secret deals, which was a real problem as well. But mostly, everybody would get kind of delirious. They're in Greek plays. So there's a play in which, called the Backeye, where women get kind of hyped on wine and the worship of Bacchus and then rip one of their sons apart. That's kind of the image that people have of what the Romans were doing all day every day. But really, they were very rarely doing it.

You couldn't do that all day every day. It would be exhausting to, you know, absolutely. Yeah, the hangover alone would stop you, surely. Although one of the funniest things about the Bacchanalia conspiracy is that when it comes out, the consul says this is happening five times a month. And all I can think when he says it is that's so often to be having an orgy. I mean, no, you need some. That's twice in a week at one point.

You need some downtime. I mean, that's very difficult on your knees at least. No. It's hard enough going to a book group once a month, let alone, full orgy with... Exactly. So it might not have been... Or maybe it was like a sex club where you don't have to go five times a month. Like, it's just open five.

five times a month. You could get like a membership and swing by, see who's there. You can drop in a couple of times, yeah. Okay, so that's probably real then. If there are laws banning it, that would seem to be reasonable evidence that this actually did happen. Yeah, the Bacchanalia was definitely banned and illegal and considered to be foreign and under Roman. So potentially somebody was doing something, but kind of in the laws and when they're talking about this thing in politics, they're very moral and very kind of women must control their sexuality and there are fewer rules for men. Obviously. So this is very much sounding like those people who mythologised the 1950s is this ideal time of family values and what a wonderful time it was, right?

Yeah, exactly. And it's an imaginary time. As a single time period seems to do that. everyone has this like imaginary, it wasn't it so much better 50 years ago, ish. It never fucking was. Yeah. Ever. So the bacchanalia definitely happened. There were some orgies.

How well attended. We're not entirely sure. This, women were definitely scrutinized for their sexual behavior much more than men were. And you can see that because the Romans would indulge in some epic slut shaming when they didn't like women. women, especially high-powered women? Yes, all the time. And it's always something that you can throw to women. So there's this brilliantly awful speech of Cicero,

which is technically a murder case about a woman called Clodia, who was accused a guy of trying to kill her, which seems like a fairly reasonable thing to bring to court. And Cicero managed to turn the entire trial into an accusation and just a complete character assassinate. of Clodia in which he accuses her of owning gardens just so that she can seduce boys, of attempting to seduce everybody, of being a common prostitute, of having a statue in her house that's covered in trophies of all of her sexual conquests, and that the only reason that she's

accusing his poor, dear sweet, Kylius, his client of doing a murder or an attempted murder, is that she tried to seduce him and he said no, and she is spurned. And so she's going to ruin his life because she can't cope with the idea that somebody would not want to have sex with her. And she murdered her husband because he rejected to her having sex with everybody in the entire world. And all of her evidence she only got because she had sex with somebody. And you're like, wow. Now we all forget what Kylius was even in trial for because now everybody only remembers how badly he destroyed her reputation. And because she is a woman who is very, very rich, very, very powerful.

and her brother was an enemy of Cicero. And any time you get a woman who is, like, in the imperial period, any woman in the imperial house who does anything that looks like power, they get accused of incest or of sleeping with somebody that they shouldn't be sleeping with or of using seduction to get their power. Or Messalina, the classic one. There's a poem about her dressing up as a prostitute and going to work in a brothel during the nights because she's unsubes.

satisfied by her husband and so she has sex all night and has to be kicked out in the morning because she is still unsatisfied even though she's had all of their sex because just the idea of women being sexually active is an easy way to completely destroy their credibility. Do you know how I know that that story is bullshit? Like there are many reasons why I know that story is bullshit. That's because I know a lot of sex workers who talk very freely and the idea that they would go to work because they just really enjoy having sex. No.

No. It's such a male stupid fantasy that this woman would have gone to a brothel to really enjoy having sex. No. That an empress would go to a brothel because she loved sex so much that she would do it for free and have sex with everybody. It's such a kind of fantasy one that the sex worker is there because she's enjoying sex. She enjoys it so much rather than because it's her job. She needs the money.

Honestly, sex with you is just a cherry on top of this. Like she's got a mortgage. It's so stupid. And also, it is also a slayer on Claudius because the idea was that women can't control themselves. And if you leave them uncontrolled, then they will go off and do all kinds of ridiculous stuff like that. But also that it is there for their husband or father's job to control them.

And if women are going off and doing stuff like this, then it is, their husband is weak because he can't control his wife, basically. And there is a very clear line in all Roman law and all. just Roman culture that women need to be controlled at all times or else they'll go wild. They'll either go wild and be evil or wild and have sex with everything that moves and some things that don't. To get themselves into such states of cognitive dissidents and actually you can still see misogynists and manosphere activists getting themselves in the same bind.

In one way, they're absolutely castigating a woman for having any kind of sex at all. Like what an absolute fucking mega slut? an awful, awful person for behaving like this. But then at the same time, there's this conversant idea that you have to be married and that if your husband isn't controlling slash satisfying you in bed, because it's also a slur on him that he hasn't satisfied his wife, so she has to go. So there's this acknowledgement that she needs to have sex,

but with this person and only in this way. But also at the same time, how dare you have sex? You can have sex, but you shouldn't enjoy it too much. Yes. I'm not with too many people. Yeah. And if they are going to be people, then they should be upper class people

because a lot of they're like really obsessed for status and hierarchy in a really frightening way. And so Agrippina, the younger, for example, is accused of having sex with Friedman. So well below her in the hierarchy. If she was having sex with other aristocrats, then less of a problem. And when she is having sex with other aristocrats,

no one really seems to mind. But when she's having sex with people beneath her, then that's the problem. So what about men's sexuality then? Were they slut shamed? like this? Was there ever a sense of like, oh my God, I can't believe that you're, I'm sure that there were stigmas around it, but what were they for men? How would you shame a man for some sexual behaviour? What would it be? Obviously not given enough to your wife seems to be one.

That would be one. So if your wife isn't getting enough, then that would be a problem. And obviously impotency is always something you can laugh at people for. But there are two ways. Firstly, men have like way more outlets for it because men have sexual. access to enslaved women and enslaved men. They have sexual access to anyone who isn't a married woman of their own status. So they can have sex with unmarried women as much as they like. And there are certain categories of women like sex workers. Like sex workers legal, sex work is regulated, sex workers tax. It is a part of Roman commerce and the Roman kind of labor landscape. So they always have access to sex workers, everything from high courtisans with their own

spaces to concubines that they have in their house. So when Claudius finds out that his wife has attempted to marry somebody else, Messalina, they tell him by telling his favorite concubine. Right. Yeah. So they get his favorite concubines to tell him because he has other women who live in the palace who he has regular sex with. And that is fine. So they have access. When it becomes a problem is if they are having the wrong kind of sex with men, that casts them as effeminate. So there is a clear delineation. I think it's called the Penetration Paradigm,

which is a fun way of putting it, whereby Romans kind of very simplistically think that being penetrated is shameful in some way. Bottoming. Yeah. So if you are penetrating other men, fine. That is still an example of masculine control. But if you are being penetrated,

then that is often or very usually considered to be shameful and that's something that you can be mocked for. So Nero is regularly mocked for being penetrated, for being fucked and various other ones are. They look so for dressing too much like a woman, but they can have sex with as many women and men and young boys as they like, and that is absolutely fine. Yeah, what was that, that sort of institutional pedophilia or pediracity that they had going on, deeply uncomfortable and bizarre topic? So this was a sort of a system where parents would basically give the green light for their young sons to go off and be an in quote apprenticed to an older guy.

Yes. It comes from Greek culture and is like very Hellenistic. But it is this idea that older men naturally fancy younger boys and young beautiful boys. And like young is under 18. I was just going to say like what we're talking here. Okay. Yeah. So teenage boys basically who are considered to be.

very beautiful and the idea of a relationship whereby the older man gets sex with a beautiful boy and the younger man gets access to the older man's kind of connections and wealth and experience and therefore it's kind of a mutual exchange of, you know, it's a form of sex work basically, but it's happening in elite families very often. So the most famous one is Hadrian and Antenus where he finds Antenus while he's traveling around and he falls in love with him. He's a young boy from a fairly wealthy family, but he sort of just scoops him up and takes him around the world with him

and is in love with him and parades him around at his boyfriend. And then when Antenus dies by drowning in the Nile, this is where he becomes a figure of fun, is that he goes mad about it and starts calling cities, Antenus, and starts putting up statues to Antonus everywhere and trying to have him deified and kind of behaving in a manner that suggests that he really loved Antenus more than he's supposed to. Like, he's not supposed to love him.

He's just supposed to appreciate him. But it is very common. There's some very sweet letters from Marcus Aurelius, actually, from when he was the younger partner, writing to his older partner, Fronto, who is kind of a tutor about how much he loves him. And he just said, you know, I'm dying with love for you. I can't wait until I next see you. It is the most, it is agony that I adore you so completely. And every time Fronto writes back and it's just like, okay, I appreciate your company too.

What was like the age limit on this stuff? Because the whole thing around this is like it's a young boy. And I'm sure that that is, again, it's tied in with this notion of femininity of like basically being the girl. And that a young boy who's just about to go through puberty, they'll have the clean, not a beard yet, they'll still have their quite gentle feature, very feminine looking. Yeah, they're called beardless boys. Yeah. So that's kind of what we're dealing with here.

Like, what was the upper age range on this? I mean, was it sort of like, tick tock, tick tock, and then you're out on your ear? I mean, 22 would be too old to be the younger. Yeah. So, I mean, they're like pubescent. So they're called beardless boys. And so once they really become men, so 18, 17, 18 is going to be too old. So this is very much like pederasty.

for the most part. But it is a completely accepted, borderline institutionalised part of Roman culture. People become a figure of fun if they are still hanging around with their boyfriends when they're adults or if they are kind of lusting after people who are their own age.

People get quite possessive over their boys as well, like the idea that this one's my favourite boy and no one else is allowed to have sex with him. I'll be back with Emma. after this short break. So there is a lot of, I'm going to say sex. I don't feel a comfortable, well, sexual behavior going on. And certainly men have seem to be able to.

There's an abundance available to have sex with people. Did the Romans have a concept of to be something sexually immoral? I'm thinking of like when we're talking about the underage, they wouldn't have thought of underage, would they? But did they have a sense of like when it was too young? Was pederastia thing to them or was just anything? game. Like they could have sex with enslaved people, but was there ever anyone saying, hang on a minute, this might be a bit shitty? Or just, was there anything like that?

No. No. No. I mean, they have this concept of Delisier. I was really going out on a limb there. You're getting into very grim territory, but there is this thing called Delisier, which are child pets, which are literal children that are kept around because they are delightful and who are definitely considered to be sexually available because enslaved people of all. They have this idea that when you're a free person, you can't have sex before you're 12 because you can't get married. But enslaved people are not people, really. And so they do have, they are often treated like pets that you have around and who sometimes those pets are just cute. And sometimes those pets offer other much more horrible uses.

There are stories of Tiberius doing things with infants that is not appropriate. Yes, I've read those. That's, yeah, grim as fuck. Nah, infants are considered to be a cut off, like people freaked out by people that... I'm glad they had some standards. The line is basically, are they still breastfeeding? Oh, fucking hell.

Wow. I've always trying to tell people that they're awful and I don't think anyone ever believes me, but they really are. Should we pick it up a bit and talk about incest? What was their thoughts on? Because if I remember correctly, Colligula, our mate, Caligula,

He had a very, very, very, very, very close relationship with his sister, Drazilla, which a lot of people, or maybe it was a horrible accusation, but there was a suggestion there was incest and there was discussion that Nero must have been having sex with his mother. And was this just slurs? Or did they have something enshrined in law about this? So incest is definitely illegal, right up until Claudius makes it legal to marry your biological niece. And everyone thinks that is weird. And incest is a thing they don't like, which is why they kind of accuse everybody. of it all the time. There's about a 7,500 year period where incest is kind of a go-to thing that you accuse people of and it becomes a question of either everyone is doing incest in the Roman aristocracy for 100 years or nobody is doing incest. It's just as kind of like a meme that people are repeating. But yeah, so Caligula is accused of having sex with all three of his sisters, partly because he makes it part of the oath that you take to the emperor, like when

you say, oh, by the name of the emperor, I promise I'll do this, that you have to say by the name of the emperor and his sisters. And he makes them hang out with him all the time. It's all the proof I need. But he spends loads of time with his sisters. And also, Ducilla dies. She's the only one of the entire family who dies of natural causes. And there's six siblings there. So that's quite impressive. And she dies and he is just completely thrown away in grief. And he makes it illegal for people to laugh. and he disappears into the night and he stops shaving and he start like every so often heard just screaming in bedrooms

just because his grief is so overpowering and because he was alleged to have had sex with her and she was his favourite sister and that he was considered to have been having a sexual relationship with her that's kind of gradually become in the modern imagination, this idea that she was his great love which I find fascinating

because there's no evidence that she was into it or that they were romantic necessarily. necessarily, but yeah, so he is said to have had sex with all of his sisters, but he's also said to have done all kinds of things, like talk to the moon. And then Agrippina is his sister, has another one of his sisters, and she is accused of sleeping with her son or attempting to seduce her son Nero when she is on the outs of his opinion. Like when he's fallen out with her, there is a great story in Suetonius that when sometimes they would be traveling in a closed litter through town with the curtains pulled. And when Hero got out, he would have suspicious stains on his tunic. But, you know, maybe he's just dropping his ice cream on himself. I'm not to sure. I don't think that Agrippina would sleep with her son personally. The other version of it is, so there's two versions.

One is that Agrippina tried to seduce him, and the other is that he fancied her, and she wouldn't have sex with him. So he got a concubine who looked exactly like her so that he could have sex with her. And then when he killed Agrippina, he spent ages. like fondling her body because he fancied her. And those two stories are completely opposed and means you probably don't really have to believe either of them. No. No, I mean, it's just easy, isn't it?

Character assassination is just to come up with something weird sex stuff that somebody's done. Yeah. That's pretty consistent throughout history. Yeah, the late Republican period and like Julia Claudian period is thrown around loads and then it really falls out of favour. But like Clodia is accused by Cicero repeatedly. of sleeping with her brother Claudius.

And he's also, there was a rumor that Claudius had been caught having sex with another one of his sisters. And that's why her husband divorced her. And so it's just like this period of Roman history where people just really like accusing one another of incest. I suppose to say we still call someone a motherfucker. I suppose. That's quite a handy insult.

Maybe that's a weird. No, it's not at all. I'm trying to make strange links. It's better not to try to make sense of it because they're, kind of deranged, yeah. You mentioned divorce there. How easy was it to get divorced if you were a Roman person? Was it just a case to go to court and going,

they've definitely had sex with their brother, they had stains on their tunic, I saw it, and then everyone goes, right, okay, okay, divorce. You don't even need to go to court, actually. So there's two types of marriage. One is like the ancient type, which becomes very rare by the historical period. So which is called Manus Marriage,

which is where the wife goes into the legal control of her husband. then it's kind of hard. The man can divorce unilaterally, but the woman can't and has very little power. But that became very, very rare by the late Republic. And by that time, most marriages were called Seen Manu, which is that she stays in the control of her father or somebody else. And then either party can just say, I'm over it.

And all you need, you can send a letter, which has been notarized, which is called a repudium, which is a letter that says this marriage is over by, or you can get seven witnesses and just tell them in front of them and say, I don't want to do this anymore and then leave. So it's pretty easy. Okay. People do it all the time.

And there's loads of rules about if a woman sends the repudium but then kind of regrets it two days later. So like you've had a really big argument and you've stormed out and you've sent him the letter that says we're divorced, I'm over it. And then you make up later and she comes back like, are they divorced or are they not divorced? Repudiate the repudium. Yeah. Or if someone has moved out and moved in with somebody else, but they've never got round to like telling anybody that they're divorced or like doing a letter, then are they divorced?

And the answer is no. So unfortunately you can't get married again. But otherwise, it's very easy to just drop someone a note. Yeah, it really is. It's like a post-it note on the fridge just pretty much, yeah. put them off. Wow. And they don't have to really agree to it. One side can just say, I divorce you. That sounds oddly enlightened to me. We spent a long time, well, you know, maybe just felt long talking about the absolute awfulness that the Romans are capable of

and they kind of the slutty behaviour that they will indulge in, which they see, despite the fact they think of themselves as quite chaste, I think that I have some notes for them on that particular one. Yeah. But let's talk about a group of people that were famous for being the most chaste of all. And I'm so fascinated by these people. The Vestal Virgins. Yeah.

Who were they? And how would you get this particular gig? So you get this job. The job is being the priestess of Vesta, which is the sacred hearth at the centre of Rome, which has to burn all the time. And if it goes out, then it's a disaster for Rome. And so you have six women whose job is to look after it and take. it and do various rituals around it. You get that job between the age of six and ten,

because your dad nominates you for it. And then you spend 30 years doing it, you spend 10 years as a trainee, 10 years as a priestess, and then 10 years like training the next generation. Once you are in, you are in and you cannot get out. There is no quitting being a Vestal Virgin, which is great for something that you maybe start doing at seven. Then responsibility is that they have to stay pure for the flame and they cannot be defiled. And what that means is that they have to stay celibate, completely celibate, and they have to stay virgins, which is why they're initiated so young. They have to be also free women with free citizen parents who are all freeborn, so no former enslaved people or families of former enslaved people. So they are protected from

any of the nastier behaviours of Roman men by their kind of free status. And then they spend their doing the quite tedious job of sweeping and burning and poking a fire all night. In exchange, they're allowed to make wills and they get quite a lot of privileges. So they get the best seats at the theatre and at the games. And also, everybody has to get out of their way. That sounds good. And if you touch them, then you can get executed. Oh.

Yeah, which is pretty good. Okay. They have the ability to save people from being executed. If they see somebody on their way to execution, then they can just say, no, I free you, which is quite fun. So were they allowed to just like go and hang out around Rome? Like if you were in like the Roman equivalent of a Starbucks, they could just be a Vestal Virgin just there.

Yeah. So they could just kind of come and go as they pleased. They had jobs. It's quite a fairly onerous position like keeping the fire going. And there's all sorts of rituals around it like making special breads and doing lots of various things with special water from special places. They also look after these ancient artefacts, which are believed to have come from truels.

which are kept in a special room that only the Vestal Virgins are allowed to go into and that nobody else has ever allowed to enter and really this always makes me laugh it's called the penis No, it's not That's the room name So they've got all of that

But on their off time they can kind of walk around There's a very famous story of a Vestal Virgin saving her brother from being attacked People are trying to arrest him and she jumps on his chariot. He's holding a triumph, like illegally, basically, and people are trying to stop him from doing this parade. And she jumps on his chariot and protects him with her body and because nobody is allowed to touch her, they can't touch him.

So they can get away with quite a lot of stuff. But the offside of that is if they trip up in any way, then they get brutally killed. Brutely killed. Okay. So when bad things happen, generally the Romans will be convinced that this is because the gods have gone off them. and then they will try to identify what's upset the gods. And a surprising amount of the time,

it turns out that a Vestal Virgin has lost her virginity somehow. And when a Vestal Virgin has lost her virginity, there is no way of expigating that crime except taking the Vestal Virgin and burying her alive. Now, who came up with that? That's some weird fine print, isn't it? That's... It is.

Why bury alive? I mean, the print gets even finer because what they do is they take her... by the city walls. They do a full funeral possession for her while she's still alive. And then they put her in a hole that they have dug, like they dig out a kind of small cave, which has got a bed in it. And they put in some oil, some milk and some bread and a lamp. So she's got light and a bit of food and drink.

And then they wall her up in there. So they can say, basically, she was alive when we last saw her. We didn't kill her. She just happens to have died in the place where we left her. And so they get to do human sacrifice basically and an execution for the gods without actually getting their hands dirty in any way. And so there's 50 odd examples of when Vestal virgins across the periods were buried alive, including under the Emperor Domitian, which is very late in Roman history, like very much the historical period. So it is the finest of fine princes that they can be, oh yeah, no, we just popped her in there and warder in and also left an arm, guard outside. She was fine when we saw her. Yeah, exactly. So, like, how would they go about

proof? Because, like, if the setup is, like, oh, the weather's gone really shit, the crops have failed, the gods must be pissed off. I know, hang on, what someone must be knobbing the Vestal Virgins. Like, how did they catch them? Like, like, or was this just, because I know people think that you can prove virginity, but you can't prove virginity. It's complete gibberish. It's nonsense. It's like looking at somebody's elbow. It's just like, it means. It's, nothing. So like what were they doing? Were they subjecting them to bogus virginity tests or did they actually manage to catch them in flagrante with somebody else? Ninety nine percent of the time it's that they managed to find somebody. Either somebody comes forward and says, oh, I saw, you know,

that Vestal Virgin doing something. There's one where a woman is put on trial. She is acquitted, thankfully, but it's like this is the kind of thing that you could be put on trial for. But one of the vestals is put on trial for wearing dresses that are too nice and being too funny in conversation. Oh, dear. This isn't a good gig, is it, at all? This is Vestal virgins need to unionise quite swiftly. Just when you were saying there that like they could just go out and about when they weren't tending their flame thing, that makes me think they must have had shift patterns. They must have had like timetables and stuff. Yeah. Because there's a head Vestal virgin who's like the manager. So she's the one who's like making sure everybody's doing everything right.

Someone's on their lunch break and when's Julia going to come in? I don't believe you're sick and all that's, oh, God. Yeah, she's got 24 hours off. If you managed as a vest or virgin, you've signed up at the age of seven, you spend 10 years training to keep a fire going and not have sex. That seems like a lot of training for that. But okay. And then you spend 10 years doing the thing,

as long as you're not wearing nice dresses or talking to people or flirting in any way. Then there's 10 years of training the other people of how to keep the fire going. Was there a retirement plan? If you managed to beat off all of these obstacle courses, and then at the age of 38, is there a good retirement plan for you? There is a good retirement plan. Oh, there is. Hurrah.

Okay. Yeah. So you get to maintain most of the privileges, so you still get the good seats. You still get, you have the right to make a will and own your own property and dispose of it as you like, which is pretty good for a Roman woman.

They're all from rich families, so they're fine in terms of money. Like, they're not coming from a place where they have to go and work in a Starbucks in order to pay a mortgage, they all just go back to there. But you can also get married. I was just going to ask you that. I was just going to ask you that. So most of them don't, interestingly, presumably, because once you're an adult the first

time you meet a man in a social context, you're probably like, oh, Jesus Christ. What is this thing? Yeah, especially if you've got your own money. Yeah. Actually, I was fine without this. If you've been socialized generally to not have to deal with it, then probably is easier to not get married. Yeah, but some of them do and they get married.

And if you manage to survive it, you can live quite a nice life afterwards. And everybody remembers you as a Vestal Virgin, so everyone's still real nice to you. Has you done any research of what the percentages of Vestal Virgins that were bumped off? You said there was at least 50. Yes. I have no idea how many there would have been in total. Like, how perilous was this? It's not that perilous.

Not that perilous. No, mostly because even the Romans do generally bulk at the idea of burying a woman alive. It's good to know there's some boundaries. Okay. They find that quite uncomfortable. I think if the execution was just that they, you know, chop their head off or had them hanged or crucified, then they probably wouldn't worry so much because they do that on the daily.

But the idea of one, killing a freeborn high aristocratic woman, and two, the burial alive whole ritual thing involves quite a lot of organization, and that does freak them out. So there's like probably thousands. In fact, there must be thousands, because it starts well before the historical period. They're instituted very early, and it's Gratian in like the fifth century who cuts them out.

So you've got a good thousand years, over a thousand years of having six Vestal Virgins. And only, as far as we know, only about 50 of them were buried on. Only 50 years. I think I would take my chances. I think so. You know, when you think about what the wives have to put up with

and what the mistresses have to. to put up with. In fact, everybody pretty much, I think that this sounds like an occupational risk I'd take. I don't think I would because I'm very easily bored. And I think after the second time of sweeping the special dust around, I'd be like, no, I need a book, I need something, I need a party. Yes. Okay. Well, that leads me to a very interesting final question. If you could go back to ancient Rome, who would you be? Was anybody having a reasonably good time? It doesn't seem to matter who you talk about. It's pretty shit.

It is. A lot of times they're just complaining. I mean, you'd want to be a freeborn man, obviously. Definitely. Definitely. That would be the ideal. Specifically, I would want to be someone like a Marshall or a juvenile who's a freeborn man, who's a poet, and who just get paid people, invite him to dinner so that he can do his hilarious poems and then buy his books.

And then he has loads of poems about how much everybody tells him they like his books, which is brilliant. You wouldn't want to plump for being an emperor, would you? Even though they might be tempting, because they didn't last very long. No, 50-50 chance of being murdered, but you can be a poet. All you've got to do is every so often knock out a poem about how demission is great. And the rest of the time, you can knock out poems that are basically making fun of everybody around you and everybody thinks you're brilliant for it.

I love that. So final, final question. In all the things that you've studied about Roman, they do have this reputation probably quite well deserved as being an absolute bunch of pervents. Are you still capable of being shocked by these people? Is there still occasionally things that you find that you go, oh, for God's sake? Yes, there are plenty.

I mean, every so often there's something really dreadful. Sometimes, when I was reading for this, I was looking up the best erotic poems, and there's an erotic poem from Catullus, which is him technically threatening a rival called Alias, and he basically says, look, if you don't stop hitting on my favourite boy, then I'm going to face fuck you to death. Jesus Christ.

It'd be better for you to die on face fuck than if you die with my cock in your mouth. Wow. Strong words. And that I was a bit like, okay. See, things are like normally when you'd say that to somebody, I don't think you would say that to anybody, but you might say like a modern equivalent of like, I'm going to fuck you on. I'm going to fucking kill you. You don't mean to go through with it.

Yeah. I'm not sure that that would have been, he might have actually meant that from the things you've been telling me. Yeah. He didn't just say that to him. He wrote it down and then he edited it and then he made sure there was written down in the book of poems that he published that was widely distributed around. That is commitment to a piece, isn't it?

Yeah. And it's not the only one of those he's got. He's got another one that is about two guys that he just doesn't like where he says, I'm going to face fuck you and ask fuck you. you because you're just really annoying. There must have been people read that going. He's on about the face fucking again. Not again.

Basically, yeah. He's done another face fucking one. I prefer it when he does his ones about trees. Sculler's going, yes, this is very much part of his face fucking period of work. Yeah, the cycle. Oh, you have been incredible and horrifying to talk to, but amazing as always. And if people want to know more about you, show after this, they will have questions. Where can they find them? They can find me and all my

rebooks at emmaSouthern.com. They can find my podcast at history is sexy.com and they can find me on Instagram at Emma Southern. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You have been horrifying. You will have nightmares once again. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Emma for joining me. And if you like what you heard, if this was your Roman Empire, then please don't forget to like review and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just fancy saying hello,

then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We have got episodes on everything from Neanderthal Sex and the Real Charles Dickens with Miriam Margulies. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.

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