An erotic painting preserved at Pompeii/ Wikimedia Commons
Orgies. Free love. Wide-spread acceptance of homosexuality. Those are the things that spring to mind for most people when it comes to ancient Rome and sex.
When the gay marriage debate was raging in the U.S., some people even argued that embracing homosexuality was what brought down the Roman Empire.
Of course, it was a pretty false comparison. Not only did homosexuality have little if anything to do with the fall of Rome, but the Romans were never really as accepting of it as you might think.
That’s just one of the many false beliefs surrounding how the Romans approached sex. So what did the Romans really think about love and sex?
Sex and Love In Ancient Rome
The Romans liked sex as much as anyone does today. Judging by their writings that have survived and some of the erotic paintings preserved at Pompeii, they also spent a lot of time thinking about it.
The Roman poet Martial rose to fame largely on the back (*ahem*) of his ability to write a truly filthy poem. Consider this passage from his collection of work, Epigrams:
And so, I guess I naturally assumed
That you were what you seemed: a chaste Lucretia.
But hell no. Why, you shameless little tramp,
You were an active humper all the time.
For the sake of decency, that was one of the least graphic pieces of the work. Other lines mention how Lucretia was so desperate for love she had to make do with a few girlfriends and an abnormally large clitoris when there were no guys around.
In fact, there’s a lot of similarity between the way we treat sex now and the way the Romans treated it. It was considered a natural, and desirable, part of life. But any particularly graphic representation of it was a little bit scandalous. Martial himself was frequently accused of obscenity by less appreciative audiences.
A “proper” Roman kept any mention of sex between close friends or in the bedroom.
If the Romans treated sex differently than we do, it was largely in the sense that they were more particular about who was allowed to have it in too public a fashion.
Patria Potestas
Roman slaves/ Wikimedia Commons
Rome was all about power. Who had it and who didn’t. And if a Roman didn’t have it, he did everything he could to get it.
That’s because power had real benefits in Rome.
In the family, the ultimate power was the father. Under the Latin principle of Pater Potestas, or the “power of the father,” a man could do anything he wanted to the people who lived under his roof.
He could kill his wife or children if they dishonored themselves, and by extension, him.
Of course, that rarely happened in practice. But it shows that there were serious consequences for wives or daughters who behaved “immorally.”
To the Romans, morality and sex were always linked. A woman was supposed to be chaste until she was married. She was, after all, the property of her father until that day. And anyone who had sex with her was damaging his property and sense of honor.
Julius Caesar famously divorced his wife after she was accused of adultery, even though he himself was a serial adulterer and absolutely denied that anyone else had slept with his wife. When someone asked why he was divorcing his wife if she was innocent, Caesar had an answer that explains how the Romans viewed sex and honor.
“Caesar’s wife,” he said, “must be above suspicion.”
Even Caesar’s nephew, Augustus, exiled his own mother when there were rumors that she had been having sex a little too freely.
So with that kind of prudish attitude towards sex outside of marriage, where does the idea that Rome was a sexual free-for-all come from?
Free Love
Roman prostitutes/ Wikimedia Commons.
For the Romans, what kind of sex was accepted was less about what you were doing and more about who you were doing it to.
The main distinction in Rome was between who was free and who wasn’t. Citizens had a certain degree of legal protection, while non-citizens had relatively few rights under Roman law. Slaves, of course, had almost no rights. So really, you could do anything you wanted to them, as long as you compensated their owner for damaging his property.
Essentially, if a man had sex with a female slave, he wasn’t really committing adultery. He was just enjoying something he owned.
So a concept like rape was treated very differently in Rome. If a man raped a free-born citizen, he could (and likely would be) executed. If he raped a slave, he probably just be fined. The crime was considered to be against the slave’s owner, not the slave themselves.
In Rome, you could only violate people who had rights.
At the same time, people who were born free but chose to pursue livings that were thought of as “improper” gave up some of their protections under the law.
Actors and prostitutes, for example, couldn’t be raped, legally speaking. In the Roman mind, both sold their bodies and honor for entertainment.
So what a Roman man chose to do with these types of people was really seen as their own business. If he wanted to attend orgies with actors and prostitutes, that was fine as long as it didn’t keep him from carrying out his duty to his family. In that way, the Romans, particularly the rich, did sometimes trend towards sexual excesses. They had the money and opportunity after all.
But as in all things in Rome, someone with a reputation for being too sexually adventurous could be criticized by others for a lack of proper Roman restraint.
And Roman men were always expected to carry out these kinds of activities with people who were not free citizens. There were different standards for sex depending on the social status of the people involved.
Emperor Hadrian, who famously had a male lover named Antinous/ Wikimedia Commons
For instance, homosexuality was considered relatively normal for a man to want to have sex with other men. After all, men were supposed to want to have sex with anyone they could. It was part of what the Romans considered virility.
But that doesn’t mean that homosexuality was “accepted.” There were some strings attached.
A man who exclusively pursued other men instead of a family didn’t fit into Roman ideas about marriage and citizenship. So a man who liked having sex with other men would also be expected to want to have sex with women. Someone we would consider gay today would not have fit into the Roman conception of what kind of sex was normal exactly.
It wasn’t considered especially shameful, but the average Roman would have probably thought it was a little strange if a man only had sex with men.
More importantly, a Roman citizen could not be penetrated by another man. If a Roman was the active partner, then that was fine. But if he was passive or receptive, then he was letting his honor as a Roman be violated.
For that reason, homosexual relationships were usually conducted by an older Roman citizen and a younger prostitute, slave, or foreigner.
Also for that reason, implying that a fellow Roman enjoyed being the passive partner in a homosexual pairing was considered a serious insult.
To the Romans, sex was about power. Men were supposed to conquer anyone they could with sex. But a true Roman would never allow anyone to conquer them.
The laws surrounding marriage and sex were meant to keep that urge to conquer in check and protect free citizens from the sex drive of the men surrounding them. Everyone in Rome had an assigned place in society, and the way they had sex was supposed to reflect theirs.
Antinous, eventually made into a god by Hadrian in Egypt/ Wikimedia Commons
Pedophilia, another part of the popular imagination of Rome and sex, was regulated in the same way.
To begin with, the idea that Romans widely engaged in having sex with younger boys is a little exaggerated. The idea likely comes from confusion with ancient Greece, where these kinds of sexual relationships between boys and older men were a part of the structures of power. A family would send their young sons to be mentored by an older man. There was sometimes an expected sexual element to the dynamic, and in exchange, the man would look out for the boy’s career when he came of age.
This kind of arrangement was a little less common in Rome. But the idea that men would be attracted to young boys was more-or-less accepted.
Once again, for the Romans, it was more about who you were having sex with. If it was a slave boy, then that was normal. But if it was the child of a citizen, then you were violating his rights as a freeborn son of Rome if you didn’t have permission from his father, which often meant the death penalty.
Many of the ways the Roman’s looked a sex bear a similarity to the way we do now, but obviously, there were some pretty significant differences. And some of Rome’s sexual attitudes are downright disgusting to us today.
And it’s a mistake to draw too direct a parallel between Roman society and ours. Rome was a very different place in many ways, with very different ideas about the sorts of rights people had. The way they looked at sex was inevitably tied up in their cultural ideas about power and freedom.
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