The Ancients - Sex in Ancient Rome

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

We’ve covered bloody battles, we’ve covered stunning cities, we’ve covered civilisations far away from the ancient Mediterranean. But in some 120 episodes of The Ancients we hadn’t covered one of the most popular topics in the world: sex. That is, until now. In today’s episode, strap yourself in for almost an hour’s worth of content all about what the Romans thought of sex. What was acceptable? What wasn’t? And why were the Romans so obsessed with carving penises at sites across the Roman Empire. From Pompeii to Hadrian’s Wall. Joining Tristan in today’s podcast is L J Trafford, the author of the upcoming book Sex and Sexuality in Ancient Rome. Suffice to say, adult themes feature in this episode.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, well, it's the episode that I'm sure a lot of you have been waiting for, if the popularity of similar episodes on other History Hit podcasts is anything to go by.

It's also an episode which my editor has confidently proclaimed will be an instant hit. So we've set the bar very high because it's all about sex in ancient Rome. We're going to be looking at the archaeology, we're going to be looking at the large amount of sexual imagery that survives from across the Roman Empire, what it all potentially means, and we're also going to be looking at the literature and so much more. Joining me to talk about sex in ancient Rome, I was delighted to get on the show, the author LJ Trafford. LJ has written a number of books about ancient Rome, and one of her most recent books is all about sex and sexuality in this ancient civilisation.

is all about sex and sexuality in this ancient civilisation. This was a really fun chat. LJ was wonderful to talk to. And just before we get into it, I thought I'd also let you know very quickly that I've also now just joined Instagram. I know, right? Finally. But if you're at all interested in seeing behind-the-scenes footage of these ancient interviews,

little hints at what future episodes are going to be, as well as behind-the-scenes footage of ancient history documentaries that we are shooting at History Hit, then why not give me a follow at Ancients Tristan. But back to the podcast at hand, because here's LJ to talk all about sex in ancient Rome. Sex in Ancient Rome. LJ, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Sex in Ancient Rome, quite a topic.

And LJ, to really kick it all off, the Romans, they certainly weren't shy about talking about or showing stuff very much related to sex. Well, that's the kind of impression that we've been left with from what we found that's come down to us. In people's houses, you find pictures in the shape of frescoes of couples at it. It's depicted on objects they own. It's on cups. It's on oil lamps. It's on plates. It's on jewellery even. The political discourse that happens involves a lot of kind of sexual references to people's private lives. We have some very blunt, almost brutally blunt poetry that's come down from the likes of kind of Marshall and Catullus. Suetonius writing his biographies of the 12 emperors alongside their kind of laws and the

battles that they won and lost, dedicated a portion to their sex lives as well. So it appears that it's everywhere. But I think what's quite interesting about ancient Rome is it's also quite a moralistic society. It's quite conservative. And there's a lot of hand-wringing that goes on about public morals and improving them to the level at which the state gets involved and starts passing kind of morality legislation to try and encourage and force people into what they see as proper sexual behavior and proper moral behavior so i kind of think that contradiction between the in your face images versus these laws that are trying to control people's behavior is quite fascinating absolutely and you mentioned their two key names catullus and Marshall we definitely could not

cover this podcast without mentioning those figures and it really leads into the next question which really is our sources for this topic because LJ we seem to have various forms of literature from ancient Rome which really talk about sex yeah I mean with the book I tried to pick up as many sources as I could and just kind of lob them at the wall, the wall being the reader, in the hope that some of it stuck. So, I mean, there's all kinds of sources. As we mentioned, Suetonius has biographies, there's histories, there's medical texts, there's poetry. But the fundamental problem with Roman literary sources is they tend to be from one slice of society. They're all male and they tend to be of the elite class. So we're kind of seeing everything through a prism of their eyes, through a very male, and they tend to be of the elite class. So we're kind of seeing everything

through the prism of their eyes, from a very male point of view. And that matters quite a lot, especially when you're looking at sex and sexuality, because we've got a lot of missing voices. We don't have the voices of women, for example, or slaves. And those two groups of people are on the sharp end of morality laws and legislations. So it matters quite a lot that we don't have their voices. So it's always important to bear that in mind with Roman literary sources. And there's also the kind of issue of how much of it is true. So that's something to bear in mind as well. Even reading histories, when they talk about battles and the number of soldiers that were there, military historians today will go, no, that's implausible. That's not possible. Or,

you know, the number of animals that were killed in the Colosseum and people have gone and looked at the numbers and gone, no, no, there's no way they could have killed that number of animals that number of times. It's physically impossible for them to import them all across. So it's always worth bearing in mind how much is true and how much is gossip even Like Suetonius will present very factual information that you can check alongside what reads like gossip. And so they're the kind of two fundamental problem with our sources. They come from one slice and it's how much is exaggeration, how much is hearsay and how much is actually true. So is this therefore what makes in particular archaeology and depictions of the sexual imagery, which there seems to be lots of from ancient Rome, so important for this subject? Yes, because it opens it up a bit.

And, you know, you see women depicted in images and a lot of the art is not aimed at the elite. I mean, we have the beautiful frescoes in Pompeii homes, obviously cost a lot of money. of money. But we also have a lot of kind of cheap earthenware pots that were produced as well that tell us that people were interested in having depictions of sex on their crockery for whatever reason. Do you mention the word Pompeii, Pompeian Herculaneum? Is there a large range of objects with sexual imagery that have been found from these two very well preserved sites? Yes, I think that's really kind of informed how we've seen the Romans. And obviously in Naples Museum had the famous secret cabinet, which was all the kind of dubious stuff that they found,

that a lot of the frescoes were chipped off the walls and hurried away and hidden away. The same for the wheelbarrows full of terracotta penises. They were all chipped out and taken away from public eyes because it kind of ruins the image, doesn't it, of people that had other Romans or these great statesmen, these orators, the likes of Cicero, you know, making noble speeches at each other and producing high culture and art and collecting penises everywhere. It just caused issues. But I think the issue with the imagery is that we look at it from a very 21st century point of view. The issue with the imagery is that we look at it from a very 21st century point of view.

And we look at these images of, say, couples making love. And we see it, if we're feeling classy, as erotica. But it looks like pornography to us. And pornography to us is something that's private, that's secret, that is, you know, someone would do private for their own gratification or with a partner. But it's not something that they would discuss. It's not in the wide discourse. It's not public behavior. But in Pompeii and Herculaneum, these images, some of them are in bedrooms, but some of them are in public rooms where visitors would have seen them. And also if you take, say, the god Priapus, who is the god of fertility and

bounteous food, and he's portrayed with a grossly oversized erect penis. And you can't show an erect penis on British TV, you know, you would get censored. It's against regulatory laws. But you find these statues in people's gardens, painted within the first room that people entered. So there's no kind of adults only view here. People would have seen these images. It's not something that's private. It's something that's in a public space I think that's quite hard for us to get our head around it's very perplexing absolutely we'll get back to penises in due time and I would never be able to say that in any other podcast apart from the one today but we keep on wall paintings and the like just for a moment there LJ because you mentioned it sounds very much like in Pompeii and Herculaneum you have these wall paintings

this sexual imagery depicted in private homes, sometimes in places where there'd be entertaining guests. But it's not just in private homes, is it? We sometimes see it in some pretty public buildings too. Yes, there's some baths which are just outside the city walls in Pompeii, which are quite nice baths. They're not cheap baths, they're for a discerning customer. And there's, I think it's a series of five images. Eight have been lost to us, but it's five images. And they've been found in a dressing room,

what they've identified as a dressing room. And in Rome baths, both men and women bathed. So we would need a dressing room. And there's only one. So women would have changed in that room as well as men. So you've got these images, which are viewed by both men and women. And they're a peculiar mix.

They depict what is actually quite taboo subjects in ancient Rome, sexual positions that are quite taboo that you shouldn't be doing. So scholars have kind of looked at it and tried to work out what's going on. So the first image is of a man and woman making love. And then the second image is of a man performing oral sex on a woman, which is taboo in Roman society because the mouth is sacred and you don't pollute the mouth. And the third one is of two women together. And then we up the ante to a threesome.

We've got two men and a woman. And then we go even better than that. We've got a foursome. We've got two men and two women having grand old time. And all of this is contrary to Roman customs and morale. So you're kind of thinking, what the hell is going on here? And then the last image is of a guy with grossly overlarge testicles. And he's sitting and he's wearing a garland, a laurel leaf garland, and he's reading a scroll.

And what people think, what scholars will look to this, they think you're meant to laugh at it. It's deliberately provocative. It's showing you all the most extreme sexual behavior. And then the last image is of what looks like from what he's wearing, a laurel leaf and a scroll. That's a personification maybe of a poet or a scholar. And he's sitting there reading rather than partaking in what's happened before. And they've tried to work out what's written on the scroll he's reading because it looks like originally there was writing. So there's speculation of whether he's reading some sort of sex manual and reading about it rather than partaking in it. So it's a joke. And a lot of Roman sexual imagery is that jokiness as well.

You know, there's a very famous kind of wind chime, lucky phallus of a gladiator. And he's fighting his oversized phallus with a sword so it's a kind of joke so there seems to be a lot you can laugh at as well which we wouldn't expect that takes us by surprise and there's a very famous statue which is quite stupendous which is of the god pan having sex with a goat and this was in a garden of a very well-off man in herculaneum and in our culture you don't expect to walk into someone's garden and see a scene of bestiality. It just wouldn't happen. It's just so far beyond the pale that it'd be interesting to know what would happen if you went to a dinner

party and you walked around the garden and you saw that. But this was on display. And again, people think it's a kind of joke because Pan the god is looking so lovingly at the nanny goat and the goat is looking so lovingly back at him. And it's a joke. It's meant to be funny is what people think. So, again, it's that kind of looking at sex in a way that we probably don't. The grossly overinflated and exaggerated kind of sexual behaviour is funny and something to laugh at in a public space, which it's difficult to get your head around, I think. Absolutely, from a 21st century viewpoint. And it sounds as if perhaps a key reason why there is so much public sexual imagery

is for comedy, for comedic value. Yes, a lot of it is for comedy value. You're meant to laugh at these things. You know, the grossly oversized penis is a kind of running gag in a lot of Roman comedy and literature and art. If you think of going back to ancient Greece and the satyrs on the vases, you know, they've got their grossly enlarged penises and they're balancing things on it. Or they're, you know, having their way of a wineskin. It's a joke. It's something to laugh at.

Well, keeping on that, you mentioned penises right there. And I said we would go back to them. Well, keeping on that, you mentioned penises right there, and I said we would go back to them. So we're going to go back now because it seems as if not just in Pompeii, but wherever you go, you visit in the Roman Empire, whether it's Chester's Roman Fort or Vindolanda by Hadrian's Wall or Pompeii or in the East or whatever, you seem to find carvings, reliefs, depictions of the penis, of the phallus in Roman places. And it begs the question, LJ, why are there so many penises everywhere? I think, first, we have to say it is a very patriarchal society. It is a very male-dominated society, and that's always worth bearing in mind.

But the thought is that they're lucky. They're lucky penises. Quite why the penis is lucky and not any other part of your body, maybe is down to, again, it's a very male dominated society. But yes, they're lucky. They're meant to ward against the evil eye and bad luck, which is why you find them outside shops in Pompeii. They're helping, presumably, good luck for their business. You find them on rings that people wear and pendants as charms to protect themselves against misfortune. So they're lucky things. And in a kind of world where the gods are unknowable and their plans for you are unknowable, you need all the luck you can

get and all the amulets and all the magic and everything to protect yourself. So that's probably why there's quite so many of them. I think there's one isn't there in the coliseum someone scrawled one on the wall which presumably is to help their favorite gladiator get through the next round we'll definitely get back to gladiators in very short time indeed and it's quite interesting you said that because i mentioned vinderlander because at vinderlander you find all of this early christian archaeology and actually among all this early christian archaeology in the fourth fifth centuries a.d you do find a carving of a penis and it was almost as if what andrew burley was saying up there he was saying well actually because they were so associated with good luck with fortune this person whoever owned it although he was maybe he'd converse to christianity he was still holding on perhaps to the old gods a little just in case he wanted

that good luck, he wanted that fortune. And the way he seems to have done this, or she seems to have done this, is to keep hold of this carving. So it's extraordinary in that way and form when you think of it like that. I've also got to ask about your Twitter and your Phallus Thursdays, because this kind of feels like the epitome of how many there are across the Roman Empire. Yes, yes. I have a Twitter hashtag called Phallus Thursday, which is dedicated to depictions of penises from antiquity. Though we take medieval ones as well, you know, anything historical is acceptable.

I think it's been running for a ridiculous number of years, like five years. And so far, I haven't run out of images and people haven't run out of images. And I think it's a kind of epitome of that difference of culture between our culture and their culture. Because on Fallas Thursday, you see a load of images that make you go, what the, you know, what is going on? And it's this gap in perception to the Romans. So this is an everyday image. This is, as you say, it's everywhere. It's so familiar to them. There's nothing shocking about it.

But to us, the images that we find, they're just mind-boggling and we can't quite get our heads around it. And I think that I like that gap in perception. That's what Fallas Thursday for me is all about. It's about kind of unveiling that gap between our two cultures of, as you say, the common, the everyday to one culture. And we just don't understand it do we we just can't get our heads around it and i like that gap in perception oh it's really

interesting and it also seems why it's so pivotal why it's so important to do a podcast like this all about it and if we therefore move on to the next section of this episode which i've got subtitled how to find a lover slash courting the Streets of Rome, having read your book. And LJ, if there was a young Roman lad in Rome, how could he go about finding the love of his dreams? Yes, well, we've got to split this really into wife, love of his dreams, because they're very different things. Because marriage is an ancient Rome. I think Serenus, the gynecologist says, oh, women are married for the purpose of children and securing succession, not for enjoyment, is how he puts it. And that is why you get married. You get married to have children for the Roman state to send off into battle or

whatever, or bulk up the treasury. So marriage is generally arranged. It's generally a contract between two families. You get a lot of political marriages at the very high end, at the elite end, senatorial class. People are married for alliance purposes. Take Pompey and Julius Caesar. Pompey married Caesar's daughter to cement wealth together. Love is something completely different. And finding love is quite problematic for the Roman male, because there's a lot of people who are off limits to him. And the main people who it's not acceptable to have, say, an affair with or to have sex with is freeborn women, because they're protected under something called, it's a word that pops up a lot, which is stuprum, which I've probably pronounced wrong, which means shameful act. And there's laws relating to it that they're quite sketchy. And we think they refer to maybe sexual assault or sleeping with freeborn women or boys or messing around with a vestal virgin. But there are kind of legal consequences to having a fling

with a married woman, particularly, or a freeborn woman. So his main sexual partners really should be the lower classes. They should be slaves particularly or prostitutes or the lower classes or freed slaves. They're the sort of people that are open to him, that are acceptable within the culture for him to sleep with, have sex with, etc. So yeah, finding love. There is Roman love poetry, which is not really about love. It's more about suffering and pain and misery.

It's generally, you read Propertius, who is pursuing a woman called Cynthia, who he seems to be absolutely terrified of secretly. And she treats him very badly and he keeps going back for more and more and more so he can whine about it in verse. And so Roman love poetry, they seem to be going after kind of free-born women and it's interesting and they talk a lot about the

impediments to those kind of relationships and the kind of servants are protecting a woman for example and you know how to get around them the door which is metaphorical door and an actual door that they can't get through because their lady love is at home and the doorman won't let them in and the maid's keeping her safe so there's all these kind of impediments to love affairs. But Ovid, the poet Ovid, writes a very funny, very witty take on this about how to pick up women on the streets of Rome and has several ideas. You can sit next to them at the circus, the chariot races, and basically be a bit of a sex pest. Offer them a cushion and take the opportunity to touch up their bum, you know, whatever, get a bit of a sex pest. Offer them a cushion and take the opportunity to touch up their bum,

you know, whatever, get a bit of fluff off their dress for a quick feel. But his text, it's a political work as well. It's a dig at Augustus because he's writing under the Emperor Augustus who just brought in a kind of series of morality laws, which were all about proper behaviour, getting married, having children, no adultery, and then Orvin's writing this guidebook to how to pick up women. And several of the places he suggests, like the Portico of Livia, where Livia is Augustus's wife, the theatre of Marcellus,

Marcellus is Augustus's nephew. So there's a little bit of a dig going on there and a kind of deliberate thumbing up of the morality laws and the sweeping changes that Augustus was bringing in. But as we've all Roman poetry and kind of satire and that, a lot of it's exaggerated, but you kind of think there's probably a kernel of truth there somewhere that they're taking and running with to make it funny. So what you get from Ovid and the others is that women aren't in their homes shut away. They go to the Circus Maximus, they go to the circus maximus they go to the games they're at the

theater they go to dinner parties all of which obviously suggests a good pickup joints but you it's just you know banquets get the woman drunk and all this sort of thing you know obviously sounds absolutely bizarre indeed it's also quite bold of him to do that to the emperor augustus if he was poking his finger at augustus the most powerful man in rome when he's still alive we just get exiled of it and okay there's lots of debate about why he gets exiled and whether it's because of these poetry the art of love which is the you know how to find a woman how where to pick her up how to keep her how to woo her how to sleep with her and whether that is the reason why he gets exiled or whether it's a political undercurrent or something. But yeah, nobody really knows,

but it could quite well be this book that did not chime with the official morals of the time. Absolutely, absolutely. Now, just quickly before we go on, I've got some of my notes by eye, or by eye. Does this kind of feel like an Ibiza of ancient Rome? Yeah, it's kind of, yeah, Sin City by the sea. People go there for the summer. There's a quote, isn't it? It's where old men go to be boys and boys go to be girls. So it has this reputation. Seneca talks about going to buy and there's lots of drunken boat parties and people singing raucously. And, you know, he says to his correspondent, can you ever imagine Cato the Elder in this pleasure palace?

Which tells you one thing is it was a lot of fun, obviously. He has his reputation, Prepercious of Cynthia goes off to buy and he's devastated because he knows all kinds of shenanigans are going to get up to there. So, yeah, it has that kind of feel of people let their hair down and relax and drink and hang out together on boats and sing raucous songs in the street and annoy Seneca, which is always good fun. And on that coast, they found some whopping big villas, you know, huge, humongous homes. So it was where the elite went to get away from the hot summer in the city. Absolutely. Ideal house parties there indeed. Now, we've talked quite a bit about the men. So let's talk about the women.

Who could a Roman woman, a freeborn Roman woman, who could she have sex with? What was acceptable? Her husband. And that's it, basically. They bring in a series of adultery laws, which are very unfair on women in that they class as adulterers. They sleep with anybody who's not their husband. Whereas with men, it's only three-born women or other married women. They are okay to sleep with, as we said, slaves, prostitutes, lower-class women. That doesn't count as adultery. So yeah, so there's a great emphasis on chastity in ancient Rome, on women's chastity, and a lot of hand-wringing about it, which is why you get these morality laws in to try and enforce chastity. They have this image, and all Romans go on about this, of a golden age where men were men.

Men went out and fought wars and were soldiers, and women stayed home, and they were chaste, and they were decent. And the time we live in now is not like that. And they say it wherever they're living. So you go far back as kind of Cato the Elder thinks he's living in a time of terrible moral decline. Whereas a few centuries later, someone else is saying, oh, the time of Cato the Elder was the best. Now we're living in the moral decline. And the moral decline, they never seemingly get out of this moral decline. They're always convinced that they're living in just the cesspit, as dark as it gets, as bad as it gets in this kind of cesspit of lack of morals

which is probably why you get all these laws brought in to try and correct that well yeah as you said it feels like the late republican period is when we seem to see lots of these characters you mentioned cato the elder you mentioned augustus of course but as you say there this supposed golden age that they want to hearken back to, it seems dubious as to whether it even ever existed. Yeah, it seems to be some point in the early Republic when they were winning wars, but they hadn't got too much money. It seemed there's this link between kind of sexual immorality and luxury. And wherever you find laws about sexual behaviour, you find laws about luxury and limiting spending on things.

And the price of mullets gets ridiculously expensive at some point. And so Tiberius tries to limit how much people can pay for mullet fish and things like that. And the elder, bless him, is just, he's so angry and upset about, you know, people using purple dye on their dining couches when it only used to be used for like the emperor's cloak or whatever. on their dining couches when it only used to be used for like the emperor's cloak or whatever. You know, he's so upset about that. And he believes that the sea is bringing about the moral decline because that's where you get to die from the sea snails. So this golden age seems to be at some point before they all got too wealthy. And that's what they're looking back at. But as we say, they've still got an empire when they're going on about, oh, this is the end of days. This is awful. Women are not chasing what's going to bring about the end of rome well the empire keeps going so they still

keep going despite being in a dreadful moral decline and it being awful and how this is going to destroy everything so i think all societies have that kind of golden age don't they that they look back on fondly which bears no resemblance to the time at all when it occurred i think you're absolutely right you can only look back to maybe like Athens in the 5th century BC for interesting parallels and people hearkening back to that in that ancient city-state. We've talked about suitable partners in Roman eyes for Roman freeborn men and women, but let's go on to the fun stuff. The unsuitable partners for these figures, who and what professions were considered unsuitable partners for these figures who and what professions were

considered unsuitable partners to have sex with well there's a class of people called the infame which there's suitable sexual partners but you can't marry them in fact you forbid nobody can marry the infame they're off bounds so senators can't marry freed slaves, but lower class people do. But the infame, nobody can marry. They're kind of restricted in law. They're subject to things that they can be beaten in the street. They haven't got all the rights of a citizenship. Roman citizenship protects you for corporal punishment, because that's what happens to slaves. But the infame don't have those kind of protections. So it's a class of people and you can become infame either by your profession or by some shameful act. So women who get prosecuted under adultery law kind

of fall into this category. Or if there's a very shameful court case that you were prosecuted under, you might find yourself being infame for a bit. But the professions that come under this banner are things like prostitutes, actors and actresses, and gladiators are those three main classes who come under these criteria. In particular, let's focus on prostitutes and sex work, first of all, because what did the Romans think of sex work? For a young Roman man, you kind of hinted at it earlier, it was fine, there was no stigma attached to it at all well prostitution is legal and it's taxed which gives you some indication there's also a festival in april dedicated to venus in which prostitutes play a part they have a day in which they give

offerings to the god and that's part of a festival so they're kind of including public life in that sense but prostitutes many visiting prostitutes are unlikely to be of the elite classes because they have slaves, which is a very sad fact of life. They have slaves for having sex with. Slaves are brought for that purpose. That is part of their situation. So your elite male has no need to visit a prostitute. He can buy in a very beautiful slave if he wants one, and he's got a household full of slaves and freed women to do whatever he wants to and he can do that. So the people visiting prostitutes are going to be lower class men and of the brothels that they found in Pompeii, I mean these are dingy, dingy places. They're really awful. They're kind of stone beds separated by a curtain, no natural light, just lined up with a load of graffiti on the wall about who was the best screw, I did this to so-and-so, and, you know, these are nasty places.

Suetonius, as well as writing biographies of the emperors, he wrote a now sadly lost book called On Famous Halls, which suggests that there might have been an upper-end courtesan type in sex work, and you get the odd mention of the odd high-end prostitute. Pompey has a high-end mistress called Flora who gets a mention. So there's a odd mention of this, but most of it seems pretty seedy, really. And so why, therefore, do actors, actresses, and particularly gladiators, why do they also fall into this same category?

Actresses get a bad rep. They're akin to prostitution. That's how they're thought of. But it seems to be something to do with public performance and giving pleasure to others. Public performance, if you think of the Emperor Nero and the horror about him performing publicly, Tastos has a line about, you know, because various members of the elite took part in Nero's games, and he has the line about he's not going to name them, because although they're dead, their ancestors are still alive. So you get this feeling that there's a great deal of shame to having performed publicly to the level of which it affects your ancestors. But yet it seems to be about this idea of public performance and giving pleasure to others, which is a very Roman thing and maybe linked back to the anti-oral sex thing as being the worst thing you're giving pleasure to

someone for lating someone is utterly taboo in ancient rome for the elite male so yeah again they're giving pleasure to others while not receiving it so it's complex but yeah it seems to be the very public nature of it that you're standing up and performing for people that they find a porro which is a hard thing to get our heads around because, you know, actors and actresses have a very prestigious role in our society. They're kind of heroes and legends and we look up to them, but it doesn't seem to be the case, though obviously they're very popular for people to watch. There's a line that shouldn't be crossed. Even though it is this sort of en-Romanised, this moral line, you shouldn't cross, I mean,

the truth seems very far from that, the reality, because, LJ, it seems like we know that Roman men and women, they formed over these people in these professions, these actors, these actresses, these gladiators, and had affairs with them. Yeah, I think it's probably something to do with a kind of taboo, isn't it, of being a bit naughty. It's a line about being excessive. So you could have a fling maybe with a gladiator or an actress, but if your passion for them was excessive, that crosses a line. A lot of Roman society is about, there's a concept of vertus for men, which is a whole series of virtues and attributes of how they should behave and how they should be. And it's a very judgmental

society. It must have been terrible to be an elite Roman male because you're constantly being judged on how you behave and how you act. And there's a notion of nothing in excess. You have to do things exactly right. Not too little passion, not too much. So no excessive sex. Sex is okay, but not excessive. That's too much. Not excessive drinking and not excessive passion for people you shouldn't have. So Mark Antony has an affair with an actress, a very famous actress, and he gets ribbled for this. And it seems to be because he takes it too far as an affair. He takes her out on official business when he's inspecting towns as part of his role, and that's crossed a line because she's become too much to him.

It's like she should be a bit of fun fun she should be just a bit on the side or whatever but that excessive passion that showing off somebody who is of that class that crosses the line juvenile mentions is epia the woman who runs off of a gladiator i mean obviously women shouldn't be having flings with anybody but it's that kind of excessive passion of running off with somebody and you know there's a line that gladiators are very alluring. They're all kind of juvenile, all pig ugly kind of thing. But, you know, women kind of fall for them because they're gladiators and they have this sex appeal. Absolutely. And you also mentioned there, it seems like you said that,

that excitement of doing something out of the normal, out of the very restricted lifestyle that they would have had. Yes. And the actors, there's a lot of kind of texts about women going to the theatre and becoming overexcited by the actors to fawn over them as if they've got little fangirls like groupies and actors are dangerously sexy they get expelled from rome for their kind of being dangerously sexy in that their fans end up having brawls in the street and tiberius kicks a load of actors and their fans out of rome for a bit because they're causing trouble. Wow well I think we need to get on to Tiberius and the Sex Lives of Emperors in due

course maybe another podcast but it is really interesting to hear and I love that idea of ancient Roman groupies you heard it here first everyone Hello, I'm James Rogers and over on the History Hit Warfare podcast, we're marking the 20th anniversary of 9-11. We welcome Joe Dittmar, who was on the 105th floor of Tower 2. He takes us through his personal experience of surviving 9-11 and his escape on that day. We also welcome Jessica DeLong, who provides a different perspective. She served at Ground Zero, and she tells us about the efforts to fight the raging fires and evacuate thousands of people via boat. We're also joined by world-leading experts on the history of terrorist hijackings and the history of terror attacks on New York City going back to the 1920s.

Join us for this special commemorative week on the History Hit Warfare podcast. if we then move on to sex itself and in particular focus on virginity first of all because you mentioned earlier how with roman free women you're expected to have sex it was acceptable to have sex just with your husband but when we go to marriages, the Roman relationship with virginity, virginity was not expected at the start of a marriage, was it, LJ? Well, I mean, it would be for a first marriage, because we think most Roman girls are getting married around sort of 12, 13, 14. So they're going to be virgins when they get married. But what Rome has that a lot of society don't have is divorce.

You can get divorced in ancient Rome, and it's relatively easy, and men or women can initiate it. I mean, there's a bit of wrangling over dowries and kind of property and children, etc. But compared to now, it's relatively straightforward. So you do get quite a bit of remarriage. Not as much as you'd maybe believe from the sources. If you look at the late Republic, people seem to be getting married and then that political alliance isn't working, so then they marry somebody else for a new political alliance and then they get engaged to somebody else.

It appears there's a lot of bed-hopping and marriages, but it could just be because we have Cicero's letters and they're very well detailed on that era. But yes, I mean, emperors marry women who've been married before, sometimes several times. So virginity in ancient Rome, it's looked at differently, probably to Christianity, where it's a kind of exalted state. Virginity isn't exalted in the same way. It's all more about chastity. I mean, you have the vestal virgins who have to remain virgins, but when they finish their 30 years, they can get married. So it's not like a permanent state. You know, they get married after they've served their time. And discussion about virginity in medical texts, it's more about the kind of health benefits or not of remaining a virgin rather than any moral purity, exalted state, as we said, that you might find in some of the christian writings it

there's a big discussion about whether it is harmful to remain a virgin for women or whether it's helpful and there's a kind of medical debate of it could be helpful because of this or maybe it's not because of that so it's more geared up to medicine than purity as such but chastity is the main thing women should be chased so lj one of our key literary sources shall we say for understanding sex and sexuality in ancient rome can be medical texts discussing the subject and its possible health benefits yeah i mean the medical texts are quite interesting because if you look at the kind of hippocratic ones which are obviously greek they have real case studies so aside from reading biographies and

histories, these are ordinary people in ordinary situations. And Serranus writes a whole treatise on gynecology, which has some great lines in it, which, you know, at one point he's discussing what other medics think about the female body. And he just says, all of this is wrong. And you want to go, yes, you're right. It's all wrong. So he's very interesting for that kind of thing. He talks about women with certain complaints, they shouldn't be reading erotic literature or looking at pleasing pictures, you know. And so you get these insights and, you know, he has a good discussion about what you should look for in a midwife, you know, they should have soft hands and nice, short, clean nails, and they should be sober and they

should be literate. So there's kind of interesting bits of information that come out of this about particularly women's lives. And he has a very chilling passage to us, which is a checklist of whether a child is worth rearing, what you should look for, which gets us onto the exposure of babies, which did happen in ancient Rome. So they're interesting texts because they give you a different viewpoint you know women don't appear much in biographies and histories they pop up every now and then but their everyday lives are not discussed much whereas in the medical texts you get a bit more insight into their world. I mean absolutely do these texts also therefore shine a bit more light on let's say if a free woman didn't want to get pregnant do we know anything about contraception about preventing pregnancy in ancient rome yeah there's various

ways they tried it some probably more successful than others yeah i mean the tendency with ancient medicine is always to pull out the kind of the worst stuff the horrible stuff that makes your teeth grind and but a lot of ancient rome medicine is quite nice it's all about kind of lying down and taking nice walks and you know having hot baths but contraceptive wise there's a few things that come out there ones which might have been successful kind of a barrier method of wool soaked in something like olive oil and put up and that would maybe block semen going which seems quite sensible and then you get recipes like boiled mule testicles mixed with willow and vulture dung as a kind of remedy and then you get onto weirder ones which are kind of more amulets rather than medicine which are very strange things and plenty of the elder has one

about or if you find a certain spider and cut open its head there should find some little worms in there and if you take them out and tie them to you then that will prevent pregnancy i mean you know it's more of a magical amulet type prevention rather than anything you think they practically were but you know they had the river method which probably wasn't very successful because they weren't really clued up to when the best time to get pregnant was and not so the advice probably wasn't great on that score their contraceptive is split into kind of pre-sex barrier method type ways or ways of stopping getting pregnant and then post-sex ways of expelling the sperm which could involve kneeling down and sneezing and you know jumping

up and down and having a nice ice cold drink kind of immediately after sex which you have to imagine which was a bit of a passion killer really so what did the romans therefore think of abortions was this very much accepted especially when we consider how dangerous childbirth was in ancient roman times yeah they've looked at tombstones and there does seem to be a higher death rate for women within those child bearing years so yeah and we probably we haven't mentioned is one form of contraceptive was sadly slaves. You know, men had slaves to have sex with, they didn't have to have sex with their wife. And that was a way of limiting births. But yeah, there was abortion. And again, there's all manner of concoctions of ways of achieving it that get listed. So it was available. There was some

disquiet about it, but not a movement or an anti-movement towards it. But yeah, I mean, it would be dangerous and you'd want to go for it if you didn't have to, I don't think. Just before we start going on to the last few sections, you've mentioned it during the podcast, so I don't want to hang on it too much. But in regards to what the Romans considered good sex and what they considered bad or unacceptable sex, did it really hang around this idea of mutual pleasure? There's lots of mention of women enjoying sex and taking pleasure in sex. Ovid, in one of his works, he talks about the benefit of mutual pleasure. The women and the men both experience pleasure. pleasure. The women and the men both experience pleasure. It comes up in medical texts as well about the women experiencing pleasure, and it's considered good to conception. The woman is in a

good state of mind and enjoying herself when she has sex. So it is there that it should be a mutually enjoyable pastime rather than anything else. And the kind of women depicted in frescoes, etc., they look like they're having fun they don't look they don't look miserable necessarily they're partaking and so on the opposite end of the spectrum then if we talk what the romans considered bad sex i've got a certain figure in my notes which is a certain artemidorus he seems to shine some light on this yeah artemidorus is a fascinating guy he's a a dream interpreter. And he treated it very much almost like a science. He went round, travelled around the empire, and he interviewed

people about their dreams, and then what happened to them. And so he produced from these massive interviews, he produced a kind of encyclopedia of what dreams mean, which you can use to look up your own dreams, as long as they don't involve cars or televisions or the internet. You know, there are a few things that you can look up. So he has a series of sex dreams, and they're all about, as Roman society is all about, if you're male, you're the penetrator, not the penetrated. So if you have a dream where you penetrate your slave, that's auspicious. If you have a dream where you're penetrated by your slave, that's inauspicious.

So the kind of Roman culture kind of comes down in some of these dream interpretations. But he has a whole section on sex dreams and he divides them into sex, which is aligned with law and nature and culture. And then he has sex, which is contrary to law and then sex, which is contrary to nature. And it's a quite difficult passage to read. The sex which is fine, which is appropriate, is sex with your wife, sex with somebody you know, sex with prostitutes, sex with slaves. So it's very much aimed at the male reader. The sex which is contrary to law is all around incest. And he has a whole section on dreams about having sex with your mother. Yeah. And then he splits them into different sexual positions

as to how auspicious they are, which it's enlightening in that it gives you an idea of what were kind of acceptable sexual positions that they felt were proper. Whether people stick to this is a whole different story, but the missionary position with your mother is the least inauspicious, I can say that. And the most inauspicious, I can say that. And the most inauspicious, the one that's going to bring you the worst luck is being fellated by your mother. And your children will die, your business will falter, you will lose all

your money. And Artemidorus then says, oh, he knew two people who had this dream and ended up getting castrated. So it's as bad as it can get. I mean, with all of this, I mean, Rome is a massive city. There's a million people living there at its height. So the idea that a million people will have exactly the same viewpoint on any subject, let alone sex, is debatable. So it's always worth taking with a pinch of salt of when people say this is a culture of people really sticking to it. But it's an passage and then the final category after we've gone through all that the ones which are country to nature you know it involved lesbian sex involve having sex with yourself somehow and it involved necrophilia and bestiality and they're all terribly inauspicious terrible terrible things will happen to you be dreaming about any of of that. Okay, moving on. Yeah, quickly, quickly.

I think if people want to learn more about that, go and read Altamodorus if you want. But moving on to something very different to what we just discussed there. We're going to adultery next because having talked about pregnancy and talked about contraception, abortion, etc. When it comes to adultery, LJ, it seems as if the Romans, they take adultery extremely seriously. Yeah, the Roman state does. The Roman state takes adultery extremely seriously. And there's a whole series of adultery laws that come out successively over centuries that get tightened up and amended to. And Augustus brings in the

first load of these, which, you know, as we said before, the women get the raw deal out of adultery laws. If a woman is caught in adultery, she loses, I think it's a half a dowry, third of her property. Her husband is forced to divorce her by law. And if he doesn't divorce her, then he gets into trouble for that. She's not allowed to wear the stola, which is the gown of the kind of respectable married woman. She's not allowed to travel in a litter. That was a later addition from Domitian. And she's exiled and her status is effectively reduced. So it's pretty hardcore bad for women. But then people try and get around these laws because they have to keep amending them. And Tiberius, who's the emperor after Augustus, has to close a loophole because

apparently some women were registering as prostitutes to get around the adultery law, so they could have sex with whoever they wanted to. I can't imagine this was a huge amount of women, but obviously a number of maybe elite women, there's one that's named, were using this loophole. So they closed that loophole to make sure that doesn't happen and you get successful ones and domitian brings in further ones relating to adultery and in later areas it gets even harsher where you're you can get prosecuted for allowing people to use your home for adulterous purposes and then it's kind of interesting because it's going to paint where it's a badly written law so they have to keep amending it or whether there's some kind of legal skullduggery because you get all these amendments to that so the law says you know you

cannot leave your house for adulterous couple to have a liaison in and then there's a further amendment that says by house we also mean apartment so you wonder whether somebody's gone well it's not a house i live in an apartment then it's like oh it doesn't have to be the house you own if you're renting it or whatever that that still counts. And then you get another amendment, which includes bathhouses and fields for some reason. I don't know if somebody's renting out their field for adulterous liaisons, but that gets added to it as well. It also gets amended to say, oh, the adulterous couple don't actually have to have sex for it to count. It's just your intention that they should. So

whether it's just a poorly written law and they have to keep amending it to tighten it up, or whether there's a lot of people trying to get out of these laws by going, well, you know, it's not my house. I live in an apartment. Oh, I'm renting out a field. Or they didn't have sex anyway, so it wasn't adultery. So, you know, it's kind of interesting. LJ, what time periods are we talking about with this amending of this law? Are we talking about over centuries or are we talking about all in the reign of Tiberius, shall we say? He keeps trying to fix the adultery laws that he has problems with. These are the later ones. The ones about renting out your house is slightly later, which I think is sort of second century, third century.

So it's a bit later on. And then later on, when we get into more Christian era, you get much harsher penalties where people get executed for adultery, and the language changes to be much harsher. So yeah, so over the whole period of the Roman Empire, there's this concern about adultery and particularly women's chastity and controlling it. Also, a lot of these laws are linked to a falling birth rate. There was a lot of concern about the birth rate and encouraging childbearing. So alongside adultery laws, you get incentives to have children, you get a tax break if you have three children and things like that. And there's also penalties if you don't get married. For women, I think it's between 20 and 50, and for men it's 25 to 60. If you're not married, you can get fined. So there's a kind of emphasis on marriage and producing children and not having affairs. So it's all cryptic legislation trying to enforce this kind of ideal state of how people should behave. And I suppose that they have to keep bringing these laws to suggest that people aren't behaving or whether it's still a moral cesspool. Absolutely. People keep harkening back to a time which may well have never existed. If we jump forward then just quickly, because you mentioned there how in the Christian period,

attitude towards adultery changes. Is it quite significant when you were looking at this subject, LJ, how does Roman attitude towards sex, does it change quite significantly with the coming of Christianity? Yeah, the language gets harsher. I didn't look into christianity too much just because i had a limited number of words and it's a massive subject and it's a subject of several books on its own but yes they're kind of not toleration but attitudes

towards same-sex relationships start to get harsher the language gets harsher towards them as we get into the christian era you've got edicts that come out very anti starts off with male prostitution is the first call where they start to crack down on and then it comes into or anybody acting as a passive male will be executed will be burnt alive whatever so the language changes and it gets a lot harsher and i think it's between sort of the year 200 and 400 the number of offenses for which you could be executed quadruples so the law in general gets a lot harsher and that could be down to the state of the empire at various points it's not very coherent there's lots of kind of civil wars and changing emperors and whether that's connected with that of people trying to stamp that mark or

whatever and control things and so then if we go back to the pre-Christian era, we kind of touched on this throughout the podcast, but we need to ask about it. What did the Romans think of same-sex relationships? Yeah, they don't have a word for homosexuality or heterosexuality in Latin, in the sense of exclusively sleeping with somebody of the same sex or the opposite sex. They don't have these compartments. We would label ourselves as straight or gay. They don't seem to have that. How they label people is by the sexual act they're committing.

As we said before, the kind of elite Roman male should always be the penetrator and not the penetrated. And there's a lot of kind of smears thrown about, particularly in politics, accusing your opposition of having been sodomized by whoever. There's a smear. And Julius Caesar was meant to have submitted to King Nicomedes. And Suetonius would say this is something that stuck to him throughout his whole career, this allegation. And he says it was the only blemish on his chastity, which is quite something given the number of affairs that he had with married women and his friends' wives, which again shows a double standard of Romans, you know, no blemish on his chastity. You know, he was a complete whore.

Julius Caesar, if you think about it, he was putting it about everywhere, you know. But yeah, this particular rumour was constantly referenced and thrown in his face. You know, his troops sang ditties about it. You know, Cicero brought it up in a legal trial in front of the Senate. You know, people talked about it for decades afterwards. So it really stuck. And you find this with most Roman politicians get this and Roman emperors get this thrown at them as a slur that as a young man, they submitted to whoever. So yes, the idea is that you are the penetrator you're not the penetrated and when we get into same-sex relationships it's a very different concept of it in that acceptable sexual partners of the same sex are not somebody your own age and certainly not the same class because then one of you is going to have to be the penetrated which is not done for a roman male

so the liaisons which are semi-acceptable are people of a lower social class, so slaves, basically, or freedmen, and people a lot younger than you, so adolescent boys, which is not nice. But you find reams of poetry dedicated to boys, to soft boys, you know, before they get their first beard. You know, Catullus writes very beautiful poems to young men, and Tbilis writes poems about boys and marshall does and it's an aspect of roman society and they'd like to be slave boys because freeborn boys are protected by their stupend law but yet slaves freedmen are fair game and you get a lot of stories of emperors having relations with their freedmen seneca has the line it was sexual passivity is a necessity in a slave. It's a crime for a freeborn man. And it's a duty for a freedman. So you get this issues of consent. And this is where the lack of voices really matters. Because all we've got is the voice of the penetrator as such. We don't have the slave voices. We don't have the freedman voices to tell us what they felt about this. They're entirely absent. what they felt about this they're entirely absent absolutely as you say it's an aspect of roman society and as you say we need to remember what our sources are for this all the time with it keeping on julius caesar and prominent public figures just a bit longer because it sounds like

from what you're saying particularly with nicomedes that sexual insults on public figures, particularly men it seems, these insults, they could very much seriously, severely damage a person's reputation and their suitability for public office. Yes, because the Romans have this idea that your private life is indicative of your public life. And it's quite interesting if you read Suetonius, who is Roman, writing about Julius Caesar, and you read Plutarch, Plutarch doesn't mention the Nicomedes incident. He doesn't mention hardly anything about Julius Caesar's private life, and he's a kind of Greek biographer. But Romans consider, yeah, your private life is a way of assessing your character, which is why in Suetonius, you get in the biographies, you get what the emperor looks like, what they did, and then all the allegations about their sex life.

And it does smear them for good. If you take Tiberius, for example, he will regularly pop up in the 10 worst emperors, you know, any kind of 10 worst emperors of ancient Rome, he will be like number two. And it's solely because of these stories that get attached to him when he goes to Capri, which, you know, are likely nonsense. But that stuck to him for like 2000 years. And his record on good administration and keeping the treasury ample are completely overwhelmed by these particular stories. But yes, I mean, it does stick to it. Like we said, the Julius Caesar, Suetonius is writing this down 100 years later. It's still a story. But yeah, it's about suggesting all manner of things

about your rival when Cicero does the second Philippic speech, which he doesn't deliver, or Marc Antony, which completely rips apart his character, where he's a drunk. He hangs around with actresses too much. He was a rent boy in his youth. It is quite a lot he's packed into a short period of time. I mean, these insults, they largely sound steered towards men in particular but is that just because of the

nature of our sources it's yeah it's nature of the sources and again it's this competitiveness and judgmentalness of roman political life but yeah women get smeared and it's all down to their chastity and imperial women particularly you get to their chastity. And imperial women particularly, you get, there's a number of stories about imperial women who apparently turned to basic nymphomaniacs. So, you know, Julia, Augustus's daughter, gets all manner of allegations about touting for sex on the rostra, where her father pronounced his morality laws. And Messalina, of course, is the most famous one, who was humping her way around Rome, if you believe our sources. And Agrippina the Younger, she did marry her uncle,

which is quite something. But, you know, she's apparently sleeping with everything and using sex to control her son Nero. So they get those kind of insults and in late Republican times, Clodia, who's the lover of Catullus, I mean, Cicero completely demolishes her character, all based on going down to Baia again

and having fun on boats and, you know, with young men. So they they get smears but it's very much down to loss of chastity whereas the men it's about being soft it's about being the penetrated not the penetrator it's about not being manly it's about acting like a woman. Oh Jay this has been a wonderful eye-opening chat very interesting topic finally your book on this subject is called it's called sex and sexuality in ancient rome and it's a kind of whistle-stop tour through a lot of what we've talked about some stuff we haven't talked about so it's an introduction to the subject for you know a taster of all the worst bits yeah an introduction and i can assure everyone that there is a lot more in that book as well that we haven't discussed awaiting your reading.

So, LJ, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. It's been fun. It's been fun. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton.