Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex Lives of the Roman Legion

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

As the Roman Empire grew, so did the importance of its army - the Roman Legion.But what was life on the march like? What happened on the encampments after dark? And why couldn't eunuchs join the Roman legion?!Joining Kate today to tell her all about this battle-hardened rabble, is Rome-based historian and tour guide Alex Meddings. Find out more about his work here: https://alexandermeddings.com/ Episode edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. This is Betwixtor Sheets, and thank you for stopping by once more. But because I'm a responsible adult, I have to protect you from, well, from me, quite frankly, and my guest. So here we go. This is an adult podcast, spoken about adults to other adults about dirty things in an adult's way covering away,

right? I think that you've got the gist of that now. Can we crack on with the show? Do you feel protective? Good, me too! Right, let's do this! I'm crouched behind a stack of shields somewhere on the northern frontier of the Roman Empire. The air smells like blood, sweat and leather.

These bloodthirsty rables have had a couple of days downtime and let's say, discipline has left the encampment. All around me are burly legionnaires, swapping stories, smuggling in wine, and although my Latin isn't the best, They're talking a lot about their relations with the local women. Uh-huh. That's why I'm hiding to protect my honour. Shut up, I have honour.

But what did the Roman soldiers get up to after dark? What were the rules about sex and love on the march? Who was supposed to be in their tents and who was absolutely not supposed to be there? You want to find out? I certainly do. Let's do it. What do you look for a man? Oh, many, of course. arise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs. Social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm careful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry. Hello, and welcome back to Petwix O'Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society with me, Kate Lister. The history books often portray the Roman Legion as battle-hardened, badasses,

and as we're going to find out, they were certainly put through their paces, and that was just the recruitment process. What was life like on tour? What were the downsides and what were the perks of this life? Well, joining me today is Rome-based historian Alex Meddings, and he is going to help us get to know the Legionnaires a little bit better. Also, I'm going to get this in early in this episode.

We have been nominated again for the Listeners' Choice Awards at this year's British Podcast Awards. And if you love what we do, and I love what we do, it would mean the world to us if you would vote for us. Just follow the link in the show notes of this episode. and if you don't, I will send the Roman Legionnaires your way. Right, thank you, everybody. On with the show.

Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Alex Meddings. How are you doing? I am great, thank you. How are you? I'm fabulous. The last time we spoke, you were in Rome, and were there strikes on outside?

Yep, public transport strike. There's none of that today. No, we just have a 35, 36 degree heat. Traffic is as crazy as usual. We are here to talk about the Roman legions. Can I ask you, just my usual starter question, what brought you to the Romans? Do you remember what inspired your love of them?

It was gladiator. It was definitely gladiator. There we go. The original, number one, that is, not number two. Have you seen number two? I have, I'm afraid. Are we moving past that one, phase? I may bring it up later, accidentally, but I'll try and swerve it.

Yeah. But it was gladiator. It's a good gateway film that, isn't it? It is. And then I got to study them at university, and then now I have the fortune of living in Rome and doing tours here and kind of living it every day. You went full in, didn't you?

I loved the Roman so much. I'm moving to Italy and learning the language and doing tours. Among their ancestors, their descendants. The more you learn about them, though, the madder they are this group of people, do you ever find yourself studying them talking about them? And you're like, God, they really are mad, these people.

Every day. Every day. I always find out something new, especially like prepping for something like this, something that just, you can do nothing but sigh. Come on, guys. No, you can't.

You said, there's the awful Romans that I know and love. But one thing that they did do, and they did seem to do very well, but which also involved a lot of awfulness, is conquering. That was a big thing for them. They were all about that.

Absolutely. Firstly, their own peninsula, and then further afield, basically the entire known world. They also like fighting among themselves. I mean, to give them their credit. They love nothing like a civil war. Yeah, civil war, making other people fight one another.

They like that one quite a lot. Yeah, I mean, so much so that their foundation myth is brother-killing brother. And there were loads of other versions in circulation, but the one they settled on was brother-killing brother. That's the one we want. Yeah. That's the one we're going for. Set them up.

But you can't conquer people. effectively if you don't have an army. If you don't have an army, it's just one guy shouting mouth stuff, isn't it? Shouting charge. Nobody follows. You need the army. And that was, so when we say they're like they're good at conquering, really they're good at armying.

That's their thing. Yeah, they're really organized and they're really good at discipline. Do you think that was what set them apart is the discipline bit? Yeah. Discipline, equipment, organisation and artillery. Artillery really helps. They had the unique. advantage in the ancient world of being able to pummel their enemies at a distance using

ballisters before slowly walking towards them, not saying a word, it's quite creepy, they wouldn't kind of shout like a barbarian would, but they would walk slowly towards them. And then when they're at the distance where they can look one another in the eye, the Roman and the barbarian, they'll let out a loud scream, chuck their javelins at them, and then charge them with a mass of men and steel. When I think about it, like one of the things, it just blows my mind. I don't know if this is my Roman Empire that I think about every day, but I do think about this, is like what a battle actually was, what it is,

because we don't really have battles like that anymore. We do war in a different, more detached, deadly, awful way. But the idea that you just go, right, okay, Alex, you're going to get a group of your mates, and I'm going to get a group of my mates, and we're going to meet on a field, and then we're going to try and kill each other, and whoever's got the most left at the end, you can win. and what that must have been like to have been stood on a battlefield.

These guys are going to come over here and try and kill us now. It must have been, they're trying to get into the mindset of that. It would have been, I mean, it would have been terrifying for each of the sides. Every combatant would have felt the fear the same,

but the Romans had the discipline, and they also had the stick and the carrot in the sense that if they were to run away, they faced a worse punishment than they would ever face at the hands of the enemy. You've got like decimation, right? What's decimation? So decimation is,

is when an entire unit, it could be a cohort, it could be a century, but an entire unit has disgraced itself. Maybe it's fled in battle is the usual one. And the punishment for this is that the entire unit is rounded up, and one in ten men will be beaten to death by the others in the unit. That's what I'm talking about when I say you keep finding things about these people. That just gets... That's unbelievable.

And they believe they would win most battles, and they sort of did. they won kind of 70% of engagements they ever fought. And so I think they went in with the belief that, honestly, the men behind me are a bigger threat than those in front of me. And you have like a massive steel pushing you forwards anyway, going into battle. Yeah, yeah. Like group mentality and the threat of being battered to death by your mates.

And the formation, you can't easily run. No, but no, no. Like, once you're in there, like that's kind of, there must have been a few soldiers in there going, what on earth am I doing in here? It's too late now. Excuse me, sir. I don't think I need to speak to HR.

That's not going to happen. Just like a heavy metal concert, like at the front of a mosh pit. Oh, God, love them. But it's not like the Romans were more violent than anyone else. It's not like the rest of the world was all peace and love and jelly babies. Everywhere you look was this horrendous brutality. But the Romans were just better at fighting battles. Is that true?

Or was there some luck in this? To an extent, I mean, they were better drilled. And the drills, as far as we know, we don't know a great deal. But they're pretty simple. It's very much kind of, you know, smash him in the face with the shield and then sticks six inches of steel in him. But I think it's the organisation with the Romans. I think it's the fact that you're able to centralise,

especially in the days of the late Republic and the empire, you're able to centralise command with an Imperator or later with an emperor or with their legates on the field, which is better than generally what you have with barbarians, which tends to just be kind of, well, at least the way they're portrayed by the Romans, a rabble. Yeah. Who invite their families along?

Like, what the... Bad move, that. Bad move. So come and watch. You get that impression from the day. It's like the Romans have turned up wherever they've gone, and they are highly organized and very militarily aware and drilled. And then whoever they've just invaded,

there must have been a certain sense of like, oh, shit, fuck, let's... Where's Fred? Get Fred. Steve, everyone down it right now. Let's go, go, go. And like, there's not a lot of organisation in that when you are defending yourself from this invading force of awfulness. Yeah.

Yeah, it was great. If you can't beat them, join them. So I guess that's why a lot of the people they colonise kind of lie down. And then maybe there'll be a riot or a revolution within a generation or so. But otherwise you kind of just maybe put a bit of resistance, realize it's futile, roll over, and then don't. rise up until the Romans are predictably horrible and start kind of extorting the local population and stealing their chickens.

Yeah. All right. So let's try and drill down who the Legion were, who the squatties were, who the boots, sandals on Caligai on the ground were. Have they always been part of Rome? Like, what are our earliest records? Were they there from the beginning to the end? They were.

Yeah. So the Legion is essentially the core of the Roman army throughout the, the majority of Roman history. So going from Rome's legendary foundation in the 8th century through to the fall of the Western Empire, 5th century, or you could even say the fall of the Eastern Empire and the fall of Constantinople in the 1400s. And it's a body formed exclusively of Roman citizens. You have to be a citizen to fight within the Legion. Interesting. After the age of Augustus, or rather from the age of Augustus, you also have auxiliaries who are locally recruited, and they tend to do like non-legionary stuff like cavalry. Romans aren't really big on cavalry, so legions tend to

be foot soldiers. Why not? But cavalry is cool, like horses win stuff. Why wouldn't they like that? They do, but apparently it wasn't super effective smashing. The Romans kind of realized that when cavalry smashed into their legions, their legions often came off better, their heavy infantry. And so they went, well, like, we don't really need that. They did the sweeping up after the battle, the cavalry. It was really the heavy infantry that did. all the damage. See, they are clever, aren't they? You've got to give them that. Vicious and clever. Very fast learners. Yeah. Okay, so you've got to be a Roman.

Yeah. You also, you had to be five foot seven, so there was a high requirement. All the short kings. All the short ones were ruled out. The only time in history, men have been quite happy to be shorter. Like, oh, sorry, guys. I'm five foot five. Imagine all the Roman legion is on their Tinder profiles. I'm sick. I mean, to be in the cavalry, you had to be taller, actually. And then Nero apparently formed a little cohort, or potentially a legion, actually, formed entirely of men who was six foot and above.

But the rule, the hard and fast rule was you had to be five foot seven. You had to be under 35. There was a cutoff limit. You had to pass a physical, and you had to provide documentation, because the Romans are incredibly bureaucratic, so you had to prove you're a citizen and you're not just a slave who's lying. And vitally, you couldn't be a eunuch. why have they thrown that one in there

Alex so why the eunuchs are being picked on here exactly yeah that's one of those things you find out every day and you go I don't know presumably a bunch of eunuchs once turned up at a recruitment centre and we're rubbish and we're absolutely useless and the commanding officer was like I don't know what to do here let me just write a letter to my superior and get back to you I don't think I can have you guys

so under 35 over 5 foot 7 unless you're working for nearer, in which case it was six foot. Was there a minimum age for joining if they kick you out at 35? Teens. So in your teens, really. Usually you would join when you're kind of 18, 19, 20. And service, the length of service varied. And also, I mean, the nature of the Legion varied as well.

So if we go back to Rome's early history, what you essentially have is you have kind of like farmer soldiers who are fighting seasonally. Seasonally? Yeah. Like going, berry picking in the summer only it's to war. I imagine they also did a bit of scavenging, yeah? And you're kind of depriving all the local farmers of all of their food source for the rest of the year. Okay, so seasonal warfare.

Seasonal warfare. So you'll turn up in the campus marshes outside the walls of Rome, which is nowadays kind of the historic centre where you've got the pantheon and the trevi fountain and hordes of tourists. So they would all kind of muster in the campus marshes. they would work out how many soldiers were needed for that year's campaigns, according to what the Senate had decided to do and who they decided to go and beat up on the Italian peninsula. The soldiers would go and fight. At the end of the summer, they would come back, and they would put down their arms, pick up their plows, and go back to a relatively modest agrarian lifestyle.

That was the ideal, really, the kind of humble ideal of the agrarian soldier. And then as the Romans start fighting further afield, and they start invading all these far-flung lands and fighting campaigns in Africa and in Gaul and kind of east of the Adriatic, soldiers can't return quite so regularly. And so the term of service becomes longer. And they also don't have the guarantee that they're going to be able to just go home and everything will be as it was because people have stolen their farms in the meantime. And so they become loyal to their individual general.

And that's kind of loosely where the civil wars come from. It's the fact that you have individual, very professional but private, almost mercenary armies under the control of individual imperators, as they're called. But these are the warlords like Sulla, Marius, Julius Caesar, Pompeii, each with private armies. You know you're rich if you've got a private army, don't you like? If you, that's like next level stuff. If you can have your own private army, that's like catching. So these rich guys just hire their own private armies and they go to war with one another.

Yeah, I mean, the Senate gives them armies for their various campaigns, but the Romans never really get the hang of the fact that if you're campaigning in Gaul, you can't do it in a year. No, they're very ambitious. So you have to stay for a bit longer and longer. And then all of the securities of money and pension and stability, all of this has to be promised by the general. And so it's up to him through plunder and enslavement and the selling of these enslaved peoples

to basically muster the money to then pay the veterans when they eventually retire. You see, you're not quite selling it to me now. Like, if I was a young 14-year-old Italian lad and, you know, I've gone to my careers day at my school, why did they join? Because, like, I half expected you to say that it was made up of enslaved people because that's... Ooh, that would have terrified them. Oh, would it? I think the Spartans had a few slave fighters on the front lines that hellets.

But no, the Romans are very, very against that. It was really attractive because Rome is a very martial society, it's very military culture. And so it's respectable as a career. Okay, so it's got quite a lot of kudos to it. Yes, absolutely. There's lots of respect and prestige. You can also advance in terms of your social status quite significantly, more than you could in any other profession.

And so you can conceivably enter as a relatively poor citizen and you can come out as like a very senior camp commander who's on a stonking, salary a pension that will set him and his descendants up kind of for life. I guess that's kind of like now, isn't it? Because theoretically you could join the army as a grunt and work your way all the way up. Yeah, by just being kind of diligent. You didn't even have to really fight that much, but just by being diligent and kind of following orders and falling into the hierarchy.

There were also lots of benefits. So they get medical care. That's a big one. I mean, yeah, it's better than many US employers nowadays. Yeah. Let's throw that in that. Donations from the emperor. You got plunder, lots of plunder, so all the plunder that you can pillage and the pension. So at the end of your term of service, 25 years after, during the empire, you would get 10 years of pay upon retirement. And sometimes you would get land in a faraway colony where you can settle down with all your mates and you can extort the local population just like in old times. It's not too shabby. No.

Just some atrocities thrown in there. Exactly. Also, they have legal privileges, which were fantastic. I mean, I think this would have been a key driver for joining the legions. You kind of can't be prosecuted while you're in the legions. Oh, that's. And a lot of men join to escape litigation. Right.

Okay. I'm seeing a loophole there. Like, if you can't be prosecuted for anything while you're in the army, I'm not sure that's the best incentive for the army to behave themselves. Well, I mean, technically it's a military tribunal that will try you for any charge, but they're formed of your mates. And even if a civilian brings a charge against you, they're going to have to do it in a military tribunal. That, and you also can't try a legionary in absentia, they have to be present for the trial. And so conceivably, if I was a Gallic farmer and some of the legionaries have stolen my chickens, and then they've got on a boat and they're hopping over with Julius Caesar to...

Dover to England. I'm going to have to follow them in a little boat of my own. It's not happening. No. Oh, wow. Okay. This is like my brother is in the Navy. He's quite high up in the Navy.

And I remember the first time I realized, hang on a minute, is he passed his driving test after being trained by the Navy to drive. And they paid for his driving test. And the person that assessed him was in the Navy. And my brother was a superior to the person who's testing him. Oh, did you pass then? Yeah, first time. Is he a decent driver?

He is actually. Don't tell him that, though. He'll just go to his head. He drives like a Roman. Drives like a Roman. Yeah, he's terrible on the chariots. Absolutely lethal. I'll be back with Alex after this short break.

Okay, so I'm starting to see the appeal with this then. Although, is it kind of like now, like in theory, in theory, anyone could join the army? Like, a council kid from, like, with zero education. and in theory they could get right to the top. But is that a theory that's actually played out anywhere? Because class, I know the Romans are big on class. Yeah, you have to be a citizen. That's really the benchmark.

A posh citizen? No. Not even a literate citizen. But if you're literate, you're probably going to go further because a lot of the Roman army, a lot of time spent in the Roman army is just doing paperwork and bureaucracy. If you have skills,

so if you're able to wield a pickaxe, If you're able to, I don't know, use a plow. If you're able to do a bit of carpentry here and there, fix a few things, then there's a greater need for you. You're in? Wow. Yeah. They have to be very practical. What kind of jobs were there in the army? Because my comprehension of it is just you join the army and you go and do army things

and go over there and be an army. But there's actually quite a lot to it because, as you've already sort of alluded to, they have to be fed and they have to be trained and they have to be clothed and someone has to look after them. And like, what jobs are there in this army that you can go in and do? I mean, the way the army is organised is into hierarchy, and it's according to, it's your title, really. So whether you're an officer, whether you're a grunt,

whether you're a Miles, a legionary, or a de cano or a sergeant. But depending on where you are in the pecking order, you're going to have to do some of the more shitter jobs, like clean out with that trines, if you're right at the bottom. Everyone has to do some stuff. So everyone has to do a night watch. Don't fall asleep. Otherwise, you will be executed.

That was a big one. Everyone has to dig the ramparts and the temporary fortifications while they're away on campaign. Everyone has to do a little bit of kit inspection. I mean, you also have slaves who are going around. You also have slaves later on who were employed by the state. Seri Castorororan, they're called. They are doing lots of jobs as well, but these are all invisible. We have no archaeological record about who is doing what, so we only have to guess.

But we have, for example, reliefs of the daughter of a commander of a camp. I think up in the north of England, or it may be in Germany, I forget, but there's a relief depicting her being bought wine by a slave girl. Okay, that's interesting. So were there women on these campaigns? Did women go with them? Yes, there were followers. We get glimpses in the literature.

For example, there was a military disaster in 9-80 called the Tudorberg Forest, the disaster of the Tudorberg Forest, where Augustus lost three legions and never really got over it. That's pretty disastrous. ambushed by a bunch of very angry Germans headed by a Roman turncoat. It was essentially a German hostage who was brought over to Rome, trained in the ways of the Legion, and then went back and then used all of that against them. But the description of Varus, who is the commander, going through the area, it kind of looks like a weird humanitarian mission because you have the army, but then you have loads of baggage and you have families and you have women, which is odd, because the Romans make a big deal about being mobile and not having lots of women. and families in tow, but sometimes they do. You tend to get that with most armies, as far as I can work out,

there's kind of quite a vague description of camp followers, which I'm not sure does them justice because they're just following people around. But like the relationship that they had to the soldiers, to watch the best of your knowledge would have been what. It was very easy to say that they were all hookers, but some of them almost certainly were. But it is a little bit more complicated than that. We must come back to the.

hookers, yeah, there's some fantastic anecdotes about that. I mean, the Roman legionaries are very wealthy, because they're getting the pay on a daily basis of kind of an urban labourer back in Rome, but they're getting this every day for the duration of their employment, and that's just the base wage. And if you're a centurion, you're earning a fortune. And so where there's money, you're going to attract merchants and you're going to attract commerce and people who have got stuff to sell, whether it be goods, trade wares, or in the worst case of themselves. And then you have these little satellite settlements called Kanabai or Viki, which spring up around these permanent fortifications. And from kind of the second century AD onwards, a lot of fortifications are kind of permanent because there's not a lot of activity going on on the front line.

Oh, okay. Okay. So they sort of set up and stay there? Yeah. Thing like Vindalanda near Hadrian's War, for example. And the idea that there's no women there or that no one would have had to be. a sneaky girlfriend, a sneaky link. That's just, that's just unrealistic, isn't it? Well, a lot of stuffy scholars are still really adamant that there cannot have been women in the camp, but all

you have to do is look at... I bet you that there was. Oh, they totally was. I mean, all you have to do is look at shoe finds from Vindalanda and you find there are shoes belonging to women, children in abundance. Not to mention the dilder that they found, was it last year or the year before? It got reclassified. It had been recorded in like the 90s as quote-unquote a darning tool And then two scholars, Rob Sands and Rob Collins, went back and looked at it, and they did all this friends of canalesis and then came back and went, no, it's a dildo. A wooden dildo. I listened to that podcast of yours.

It was fantastic. A wooden dildo. It might have been men using it. We don't know that, but... I mean, coming on to dildos, there's this wonderful anecdote from the Second Punic War. So we're in the 200s BC, 3rd century BC. And the Romans are besieging a town called Numantia, which is over in Spain, and they're having a really hard time of it to the extent the Romans have just signed a temporary truce.

And so the Senate sends a guy called Scipio Emilianus, later known as Scipio Africana, it's a fantastic name, over to take back control of this weak legion. And he finds that there are 2,000 prostitutes in the camp that he immediately expelled. And he also chucks out all tools of pleasure. Pardon? And I checked the Latin, and it literally means like tools of pleasure. Deliquiarum instrumenta, instruments of pleasure. And I thought, okay, this is probably just a really weird turn of phrase by our source Libby.

So I cross-referenced it with another source from Valerius Maximus. No, he writes exactly the same. So I'm not saying Skifio was going around chucking up the dildos. I'm also not saying he wasn't going around and checking out all of the dildos. What could he possibly have met? Like a dildos, yes, obviously, and now I think we've got evidence

that that was a thing for the Romans if we ever doubted it. Do you think there really was 2,000 women there telling sex, men and women? No, no, because Roman numbers are just ridiculous. They really always go for the highest possible number and just expect their readers to believe it. Yes, we fought 50 million men.

50 million men and they all had dildos. But I mean, clearly there were enough that it was a bit of a bit of an issue. It was an issue. Absolutely. What is the issue in your opinion? Because it's not just the Romans that do this. Like, women haven't been allowed into the army for a very, very, very long time. And there's various crappy reasons given for it.

But why didn't the Romans want women in the army? What we can glean from our sources is there's just an inherent. mistrust of women. There you go. And I don't really know where this comes from, but their obsession is... I don't know, but getting too turned on watching military drills seems to be a thing and maybe they're going to do something they can't control or sell secrets to enemies. That's another one.

We have some quotes, for example, from Juvenile who talks about women with, quote, on flinching face and hard breasts who participate in male discussions of all things, politics and military and not to be trusted. Who were they? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know whether that's meant to be kind of like figurative and they're quite excited about talking about all things military.

There's another story from our favorite Caligula. There was a Leggett and his wife who were accused of conspiring against Caligula in Panonia, kind of modern day Hungary. And one of the charges brought against this woman who was with the camp commander is that she was entering the camp illicitly and watching the soldiers at Drill. And you can tell that's written by a man. You can't you? you find stuff like that, you're sort of like, guys, guys.

Maybe she was, though. It's like the sexiest thing imaginable is watching Romans doing push-ups. It was like that Diet Coke advert from the 90s. You've got a bunch of five foot seven guys. I mean, like, Gladiator was popular for a lot of reasons, wasn't it? And if it kind of, you know, look like that. But that's, it's kind of mad that, isn't it? Right.

So women are not allowed on the front line. Did they ever sneak onto the front line? Because sometimes you get stories about that. It's like, oh, my God, there was a soldier. and he was amazing and then, oh no, he got undressed and it was actually a girl. Oh, no. I can't find any examples of that in Roman history. No, they thought that women fighting was very, very barbarian.

So I think Budica. Budica, yes. That's something the Romans shouldn't do because they believe that it wouldn't be able to control herself, right? And, I mean, the whole story about Budica has been written by Roman authors, and it does portray her as unable to control herself because she's so excessively cruel. Yeah. What did they think about Boudicca? Because it'd be nice to think that, you know, that like she had a bit of respect, but I'm not sure that she did.

Or did she? There is a weird bit of respect there, actually, yeah. Because Tacitus main source, her earliest source, I think he sees her as kind of rightfully vengeful because... She had cause. Yeah. Her property is confiscated. She's beaten and her daughters are assaulted, rapes. And he realizes it's a really bad thing to do that.

This is the clincher. I think it's because making an alliance with her would have been more beneficial to the Romans in the long term. It's not because she's a woman because they'd have had no issues doing that with captives or enslaved people whatsoever. It's because she is part of the elite of that particular community and because of all the fallout from it. Guys, he shouldn't have done that because we had to go and fight a couple of battles after that, and that was a fath. See, there's the thing again. There's the thing of just like, guys, bloody hell. All right, so women are allowed on the front line.

Were they allowed anywhere within the Legion? Like, because sometimes, I guess it's not Roman, but like I found 18th century, 19th century records of women doing laundry for the soldiers, women feeding the soldiers, that they're there kind of in the background. Yes, so you have a group of women called Fokariae. This literally means a woman of the half or a girl of the half. And it seems that they are kind of like cooks, housekeepers and concubines, like sexual companions of men.

male soldiers. Where they live is unclear. Possibly they live in these satellite settlements, possibly some of them live in the camp. For sure, some of the more senior officers are having their wives and their daughters live on camp with them. But whether the average grunt is highly unlikely, I think. But in some cases, we have grave inscriptions, for example, of freed veterans, veterans who have completed their term of service who are marrying these for Carriye. Okay. Just another tantalizing example of like we know they were there but nobody thought to actually give us the details about them. Yeah, exactly. Nor how they were treated because on this particular grave inscription it's set up by her to him and apparently he was a fine person. But then you kind of imagine whether he was there watching the stone cutter engrave that while he was still alive.

And also it seems quite neutral that. It's like the best thing you know your missus can come up was to put on your grave was it was fine. It's not great. It's all right. It's okay. Moving on. You also have these networks of women in the fortifications themselves, which are really fascinating. And we get a bit of an insight into that. For example, the letters found in Vindolanda.

In Vindolanda, we found this quite famous tablet, which is essentially a birthday letter written by a camp commander's wife called Claudia Severa to the actual commander of Vindalanda's wife, a woman called Svichia Lepidina. inviting her to her birthday. And it's quite a famous text, and it's kind of nice and very long-winded for a birthday invitation. But what interests me a little bit more are some of the other letters around this that were published in the same volume. You have one, which is written by Roman Soldier of Unknown Rank, but he's writing directly to Lepidina to excuse himself from not being able to attend her birthday, which indicates that she has heft.

Doesn't it? If he's bothering himself to actually RSVP? It's like I can't go for drinks with the boss tonight. I'm really sorry. I'm just like so bogged down and extorting the local population and digging ditches. And then there's another letter which is from a woman, a low-born woman we think called Valata. And she's asking Carialis, who is the fort commander, whether he can have a word with Lepidina about that thing that they talked about and sort it out. So I think there is a matriarchy. And I wonder whether when they're...

some of the Romans are worrying a little bit too much about women in the military. There's kind of no smoke without fire, I suppose, in the sense that the women probably did influence some of their husbands' thinking, the thinking of the elite officers, the centurions, kind of in the place where the soldiers couldn't get to in the bedroom behind closed doors. Yeah, we are good at that, yeah. That's the thinking, I think. That's true, though. It's like whenever you get these, like, massive military histories and campaigns and, you know,

political histories. So much of it boils down to who was actually Shagging who and who had like the secret word in somebody's ear and who influenced that. It's always there. And that's the bit we never get recorded. And who's dominant in the relationship? I mean, I think it terrifies the Romans to think that the lead centurion, the Pilospilis, the centurion of the first cohort could be maybe a bit hempect. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine that because it just erodes all of these preconceptions they have about masculinity. And it was very masculine to be in the army, wasn't it? Incredibly. They also had massive hang-ups about homosexuality, unlike the Greeks, who did the whole

kind of pedirustry thing. We'll get to that just a sec. So I want to ask you, were they allowed to have girlfriends and wives when they were in the army? Or was it like a no, like you can't because you see that rule coming in quite a lot of, like, right, no girlfriend, no sex for you, basically. That's what they're going to do. They were definitely allowed to have sex. I think probably encouraged to have sex quite often. But they weren't allowed in theory to. have wives. So Augustus, when he comes in and he sets up the empire, the principal, he becomes sole ruler after about 100 years of civil war, one of the first things he does is he enacts a bunch of marriage legislation. And on the one hand, he passes laws for civilians, which makes adultery a crime.

It encourages them to get married. And it encourages women to have lots of kids, to be rewarded if having lots of kids by Roman citizen men. Ironically, one of these laws is named after his daughter, Julia, who it then turned out was sleeping with the entire Senate and sent to an island. I was just about to ask you about her. I love that fact. Okay, so Augustus is trying to legislate about this, but what does he say about the army?

That's it. So I think he's trying to differentiate in this new golden age of peace, the fact that the civilian is now separate from the soldier. Okay. So while civilians should do all of this, it's their duty. It's also the duty of the soldier to be celibate in closed brackets. Focus. Loyal only to his comrades, not distracted by the presence of women and children.

Also, there are slightly more practical issues like mobility. I mean, an army can march a lot faster if it doesn't have lots of families and kids. It is a faff, in it. If you think about all of your mates and everything, when you're trying to get them all together, like the amount of drama that goes on about partners of just, Oh, I've got to ask, I've got to ask the misses and oh, I've got to pick up. Like, it would just be a lot easy if everyone was single. So putting that into a military escape.

You can sort of understand the theory there. Imagine the WhatsApp group chat. I mean, it's a disaster. Have you got all the wives and kids involved as well? And you're trying to, you know, roll out and go and conquer beyond the Rhine. I'll be back with Alex after this short break. About homosexuality then, because if you're going to come in, you'd be like, right, so we're going to take a group of very young men.

We're going to make them all live together in quite intense circumstances. We're going to send them somewhere sunny, we hope. They're all going to be very loyal to one another. No girlfriends at all. If anyone catches a hooker around here, we're going to chuck them out and all your object of pleasure as well. This just seems like, okay. Yeah.

I have no doubt that from time to time they would have been shagging each other too, but it's not recorded in the literature because of the whole Roman preoccupation with who's the passive party. And you can't be passive. You can't be the penetrated. Yeah. Can you explain a bit about that of like what was their hang up with that? It's immat.

They saw it as emasculating. And at least in terms of how the Legion and how the military is concerned, it's really about being penetrated because they are with their gladius. It's penetrating. And the receptive of their gladius of the sword, the scabbard, it's called the waggina, the vagina. That's where we got a vagina from. It's a scabbard in which the Romans put their sword after all of their staff.

And so it was kind of all right for them to do it with younger boys sometimes. For example, Sulla, one of those warlords from the first century BC, apparently had a group of boys he liked to have hanging around his camp. It was okay to do it with enslaved men. So there's a really shit joke in a playwright Plouters, who's a very unfunny, but one of our only Roman playwrights. And a character asks a slave, whether while he was on watch with his owner, the owner put his sword in the slaves' scabbard way, you know, banter, I guess.

Top bans. They really enjoyed that one. But yeah, between two soldiers, it's tough. We don't have any evidence of that. And in fact, Polybius, who's a Greek author from the Republic, tells us that there was a punishment if you were caught being the passive party, and that is basically your cudgel to death. And that was specifically, he said specifically if you were the one who was bottoming, basically.

Yeah, if you're the bottom. and you are caught committing what they call disgraceful acts and allowing yourself to be abused. It's kind of a loose translation. Any punishment for the top? We don't really know. Possibly something a little bit lighter. I mean, there is a case in which a top who is a primus pilus,

so he's one of the most senior centurions in the entire legion, is caught having sex with a freeborn boy. And he claims that the boy was prostituting himself and that, you know, the legionary, I didn't know. But the punishment for that, at the military tribunal, so at the judgment of his comrades, is that he's found guilty and he's thrown into a prison and he's left to starve there. They weren't messing around, were they? Quite surprising.

Wow. Okay. And that's a really senior soldier. The rationale, I think, well, Livy tells us, is that also there's a military aspect. So if you made your body vulnerable to sexual pleasure and being penetrated, you also made your body vulnerable to the enemy, which is completely insane because in the tightly pat Roman formation, you're more likely to kind of reach around

from the guy behind you than the barbarian running towards you with the dirty great spear. But hey-ho, that's kind of the theory. And Caesar was accused of bottoming for, was it the king of Nabithia or... Bithynia, yeah, he was. But that was for political purposes.

Do you think that was a joke or a slur? We're outing Caesar now. Sorry, everybody. I've always kind of thought he probably did it and he did it in order to secure more. He was really slutty. He was really slutty. He was probably did it and he was like, please don't tell anyone. The king of the thing is like, don't worry.

I won't say a thing. No, not a word. I just shagged Julius Caesar. You tell everyone, I would tell everybody. It's so interesting. I didn't know that they had like a real hang up. I knew that they had the thing about being the passive and the active, but to like, actively legislate against it in the army?

It could work in your favour, though, also weirdly. So there's this one anecdote in Suetonius, an imperial biographer who's talking about the Emperor Domitian. And Domitin uncovers a plot against him by some sections of the army. And involved in this plot are two soldiers, a tribune and a centurion. But these guys, they say, whoa, whoa, whoa, when they're in their trial, they say, no, no, you've made a big mistake. We couldn't possibly be involved in this conspiracy because everybody knows that we're

bottoms and therefore we're so ostracized they wouldn't have involved us in the plot and it works it actually works too passive to plot yeah that's crazy that just shows you that the mindset and the strength of this belief that they had must have had a really good lawyer an exceptional lawyer so before I let you go and you've just been you've been absolutely fascinating I just wonder from your opinion, your research that you've had, perhaps in forced bottoming aside, do you think it was a good life in the Roman army? Do you think that, like, if I could transport you back now, this might be a career that you would consider? It really depends on the time and the place. I mean, if you can get a relatively cushy, I mean, it was tough. It was very physically tough to be a

Roman legionary with all of the drills and the training and the potential for being executed if you fell asleep on the watch, for example. But if you could get a nice cushy posting somewhere like, I don't know, Northern Africa, like Charmel's sake, you can bring your British wife that you met over on campaign in Vindalanda. It wouldn't be too bad. But then if you're talking about the midst of the Puneit Wars, when you know, you've got like Hannibal and elephants coming out of you. That wouldn't be good, would it? That'd be a bad time to join. I wouldn't take that. But I think it really depends. It's much better to be in the Roman Legion than in any other army that the Legion might come up against. But it'd be right to be a soldier, you reckon? We think about 50% of those who enlisted probably survived to

retire, and then you'd have retired on a stonking great pension with lots of land. And also, if you're an auxiliary, so if you're not a citizen to start with, but you're just someone from a local, British or German community, then upon your retirement, you're going to be given a diploma, a certificate, which grants you and your family citizenship. You, step up in terms of the social ladder. You become a citizen with all the rights that entails. So, yeah, it's not too bad unless you're one of those unfortunate 50% who don't survive. So it's all right if you can live through it.

That's probably as good as that's going to get, isn't it? It's as good as it gets, I think. Alex, you've been so much fun to talk to. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? The best place would be my website, Alexander Meddings.com. I do lots of tours around Rome. and on the Appian Way. Private tours, there's also another website,

Appia with Alex.com, where you can book those directly. Amazing. Thank you so much for talking to us about this. You've been marvellous. Thank you, Kate. Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Alex for joining me.

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The Ancient. If you would like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. Coming up, we've got episodes on Catherine the Great and a major Victorian sex work scandal. This podcast was edited by Tom Delaggy and produced by Stuart Beckwith.

The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.