In the second century rom-com novel Leucippe and Clitophon, for example, the protagonist, Clitophon, reports that his passions were “inflamed” by a song about Apollo’s attempted conquest of the lovely nymph Daphne, and he explains that “even if you school yourself into self-control, an example incites you to imitate it, especially when that example is a divine one; in which case, any shame that you feel at your moral errors becomes an outspoken affront to the station of a higher being.”100 Later, when Clitophon is feeling apprehensive about his project to seduce the lovely Leucippe, his servant Satyrus reproves and encourages him. “[The god] Eros admits of no feebleness,” Satyrus urges. “You observe the military nature of his accoutrements, the bow, the quiver, the missiles, the flame: all manly things, and crammed with courage. And you are cowardly and timorous with a god such as that inside you?” The worldly-wise servant thus urges his wavering master to go forth and seduce “as a soldier in the service of a manly god.”101
But it was not only the male characters for whom sexual desire enjoyed a divine imprimatur. Harper explains that more generally, and especially through the female character Leucippe, the author Achilles Tatius conveys “an ambitious vision of conjugal eros, in which the most profound stirrings of the body not only connected man with the divine forces that replenished the earth but also offered personal transcendence.”102 More generally, Roman novels convey a picture of “a world keenly knit by the gods so that mankind might find in erotic fulfillment nothing short of salvation.”103
Peter Brown expresses the characteristic attitude in poetic language that might have earned the admiration of the Romans themselves:
The men we meet in the second century still belonged to the rustling universe of late classical polytheism. They knew that they had been knit, by the cunning of the gods, to the animal world. They felt pulsing in their own bodies the same fiery spirit that covered the hills every year with newborn lambs and that ripened the crops, in seasonal love-play, as the spring winds embraced the fertile ears. Above them, the same fire glowed in the twinkling stars. Their bodies, and their sexual drives, shared directly in the unshakable perpetuity of an immense universe through which the gods played exuberantly.104
This sacralization of sexuality helps explain the ubiquity of erotic imagery—paintings, mosaics, statues—in Roman culture. The explicit imagery within homes—on lampshades, in wall frescoes—has already been mentioned.105 Similar depictions adorned the public spaces. Summarizing the findings of archeological research, Keith Hopkins has his fictional time traveler Martha report:
Here in real Pompeii, in the only changing rooms of these upscale baths, used by women, men, and children, explicit pictures of sexual couplings confront you whether you like it or not. In [one depiction] the man was having the woman from behind, but [another] showed the woman on top, and [another] was a picture of a woman fellating a man, interrupted in his reading. These changing rooms were clearly aiming at an educated clientele. Then to balance matters, there was cunnilingus by a man. . . . The next picture was more conventional, except that the woman had one leg athletically over the man’s shoulder.
After all that, the sexual combinations became rather more complicated. . . . Anyhow the next two pictures showed a trio of two men and a woman, and then a quartet of two men and two women in a homosexual and heterosexual chain.106
The stimulation of visual art was reinforced by erotic literature and theatrical performances107—including, during the spring Floralia celebration, live inspirational sex shows.108 Hopkins’s time travelers report that “one local bar had a bronze bell hanging over the counter shaped as a hunchback pygmy, with several large penises and five bells. To get service, you just yanked on one of the penises. We saw bells like this all over Pompeii, and in grand houses too. Some quite artistically made.”109 Kyle Harper explains that “what modern cultures might regard as obscene or pornographic was an ordinary part of bourgeois and elite domesticity.”110
For the most part, Roman culture was indifferent to whether sexual fulfillment was achieved with a same-sex or opposite-sex partner.111 Sex with boys at the right stage of maturity was looked on with favor, and celebrated in romantic poetry;112 following Homer, boys were deemed most alluring in early adolescence, when the first soft hair appeared on their cheeks.113 Some writers regarded pederasty as more pure and virtuous than sex with women: that was because the “ ‘form, complexion, and image of the boy’s beauty’ was . . . a powerful reminder, sent by the gods, of heavenly beauty, a sensible impression of the incorruptible reality.”114 The emperor Hadrian, though married, was devoted to his young lover Antinous, who accompanied the emperor on his many travels; after Antinous’s tragic death, perhaps by drowning (or perhaps by suicide, or even in a religious sacrifice), Hadrian had his beloved elevated to the status of a god and also named a city after him.115
One major qualification on this acceptance of pederasty and homosexual conduct, however, was that Roman sexuality was subject to an ethic of manliness—of machismo, if you like—and this ethic put limits on the kind of sexual conduct that a man could honorably engage in. More specifically, men were expected to play the penetrative or insertive role.116 Conversely, “effeminate” men were reviled; it was disgraceful to be the passive partner in sexual relations, or to fulfill the function ascribed to a woman.117 Sarah Ruden reports that “to keep it unmistakable that he had no sympathy with passive homosexuals, a man would tout his attacks on vulnerable young males.”118
Another corollary of manliness was the imperative of self-mastery. Excessive sexual indulgence was thought to be enervating and, like passive homosexuality, effeminate.119 So sexual passions were to be gratified, certainly, but a man who allowed his sexual passions to gain control of him was to that extent less than virtuous, just as a man who could not control any other passion was worthy of criticism.
Civic Constraints. But if the ideal of manliness both encouraged and constrained sexual gratification, probably the most important constraints came from the demands of social life. In the Roman Empire, society was patriarchal and hierarchical.120 And the Romans were constantly concerned, even obsessed, with the necessity of reproduction121—of reproduction within the patriarchal family. Hence the imperative—and the function—of marriage. It might be hoped that marriage would lead to love, but this was a luxury; the institution’s understood purpose was “the reproduction of legitimate offspring.”122 This concern with reproduction was not merely neurotic, but was grounded in grim demographic realities. Peter Brown points out that the average life expectancy was less than twenty-five, and only four out of a hundred men, and fewer women, lived to age fifty.123 Given the high mortality rate, “for civic elites of the second century . . . wholehearted commitment to sex and marriage was a call to arms against death, in a landscape that always appears to contemporaries (overshadowed by so many tombs of children and young wives) to be trembling on the brink of demographic collapse.”124
The imperative of reproduction within the patriarchal family sponsored different roles for men (who worked, warred, and participated in politics and civic life) and for women (who tended to the household), and these different roles included radically different sexual standards for men and women. Men were expected to have sexual adventures before marriage—which typically occurred in their midtwenties—and to have ample opportunities for sexual expression thereafter.125 By contrast, the sexual behavior of women—or at least of respectable women—was governed by an ideal of chastity. This ideal dictated virginity until marriage—an event that occurred as young as age twelve but typically in the midteens, and that was effectively mandatory for respectable women—and complete fidelity thereafter.126 The norm against adultery was enforced by convention, by law (the so-called lex Iulia, titled after Augustus’s daughter Julia, whose profligate conduct prompted her imperial father to promulgate the prohibition),127 and, perhaps most effectively, by self-help. To have relations with another man’s wife was tantamount to despoiling his property.
At least in Roman literature, therefore, adulterers were subject to being killed, beaten, castrated, or raped at the election of the dishonored husband.128 Upon assuming the office of consul during the reign of Septimius Severus, Dio Chrysostom found that there were two thousand trials for adultery in progress;129 the number suggests that the prohibition was not a dead letter but also that violations were not rare.
Beyond its prohibition of actual adultery, Roman culture prescribed feminine modesty. “The Roman matron,” Harper explains, “should dress only so nice as to avoid uncleanness, she should always be chaperoned in public, she should walk with her eyes down and risk rudeness rather than immodesty in her greetings, and she should blush when addressed.”130 But these norms of chastity and modesty were not simply imposed on women by men; at least to outward appearances, they were embraced by women and promoted “with verve.” “Chastity was a badge of honor, separating the Roman matron from the slaves whose bodies she ostentatiously controlled.”131
The Political Economy of Sexuality. This last observation begins to answer a question that the preceding discussion must have provoked: If men were expected to indulge their sexual desires and passions (albeit not to excess, and only in the penetrative, not the passive, role), and if women were enjoined to virginity before marriage and to a chaste fidelity afterward, then who were the men supposed to have sex with (beyond, of course, their wives, and the limited demographic of comely adolescent boys)? The answer, basically, was: with prostitutes and slaves.
Thus, in Roman cities, brothels dotted the cityscape like Starbucks or Taco Bells in a modern American city.132 The historian Dio Chrysostom complained that brothels “are apparent everywhere in the city—at the governor’s porch, in the marketplaces, by the buildings both civil and religious, right in the middle of what ought to be most revered.”133 The emperor Caligula sponsored an imperial brothel, “stocked it with married women and freeborn boys” (as Suetonius observed), “and then sent his pages around the squares and public places, inviting men of all ages to come and enjoy themselves”—on credit if necessary.134 The brothels were supplemented by taverns, inns, and public baths that were well known as centers of sexual gratification.135 Prostitutes, recruited (or, perhaps more accurately, conscripted by necessity) from the poorer classes outside the norms of respectability, were “ubiquitous.”136
The other main source of sexual satisfaction was slaves, both male and female.137 Slaves were especially favored by the more aristocratic classes, who looked down on prostitution—not as immoral but as “squalid.” With their ownership of numerous slaves, fortunately, the well-off found it “unnecessary to share sexual receptacles.”138 Sex with slaves was deemed perfectly acceptable because, as one Roman author put it, “every master is held to have it in his power to use his slave as he wishes.”139
Given the culture’s elevation and pervasive stimulation of (male) sexual desire, it should not be surprising that Roman men sometimes found themselves unable to limit their gratification to the approved channels of prostitutes, slaves, consenting boys, and of course, their own wives. Though forbidden, adultery occurred; it is hard to know how frequently.140 According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the emperor Augustus, although he sternly forbade adultery and unflinchingly banished his daughter Julia for her delinquencies, regularly had affairs with the wives of Roman nobles—though more as a means of spying on potential rivals, Suetonius hastens to explain, than for lubricious reasons.141 Other emperors were notoriously less discreet, gratifying themselves in extravagant sexual orgies involving siblings, colleagues’ spouses, children and even infants, and multiple pairings.142
There also seems to have been a widespread practice of predatory sex with boys whom, because of age or social status or lack of consent, social norms deemed ineligible for such relations.143 Ruden reports that “it was . . . normal for a family of any standing to dedicate one slave to a son’s protection, especially on the otherwise unsupervised walk to and from school.”144 But safe arrival at school was no sure security; philosopher-teachers were widely suspected of taking liberties with their pupils.145
Through these various means, some deemed legitimate and some not, Roman culture contrived amply to satisfy the natural, divinely approved need for sexual gratification. Kyle Harper observes that “the Roman Empire was the most complete and most refined expression of a sexual economy that had its origins in the very birth of the classical Mediterranean city-state. If the disciplines of sexual self-knowledge were more rigorous in the high empire, the delivery of sexual pleasures was more efficient than ever.”146
Consecrating the City
As we have seen, religion was integrated into every aspect of Roman society, government, and culture (including sexuality), and it served to sustain the city that contemporary Romans and later admirers like Gibbon have regarded with admiration sometimes bordering on reverence. Nearly all Romans, educated or not, would have said or simply assumed that religion—the religion of the gods—was essential to Rome and Roman life.
This assumption will likely seem quite contrary to modern sensibilities, accustomed as we are to a “separation of church and state.” And so we might ask, and quickly review: Why did Roman society need religion? The question is crucial because it will bear importantly on the conflict between paganism and Christianity, to be discussed in later chapters.
At the crudest level, religion was deemed necessary because it helped keep the masses—and perhaps the elites as well—in line. A cynic might imagine that this was religion’s principal use, that (as Cicero stated the position, without endorsing it) “belief in the immortal gods was a total invention of the sages in the interests of the state, so that those who could not be impelled by reason should be constrained by religious awe to a sense of duty.”147 In a similar vein, in asserting the importance of religion to Rome, the historian Polybius emphasized its function in inducing people to comply with their duties and reducing official corruption.148
For devout Romans, however, religion was essential to society and state in a more important way. In this perspective, the gods were real, and powerful, and prone to intervene for good or ill in the affairs of mortals. The pagan epics, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, are full of episodes showing how imperative it was to cultivate the favor of the gods and, conversely, how disastrous to provoke the gods’ ire. Hence the vital importance of performing the rituals and sacrifices and auguries regularly and exactly. The Odyssey relates, for instance, how in his return from the Trojan wars, Menelaus sacrificed to the gods but was stingy in the quantity of animals offered up. He was accordingly blown off course and delayed by years; and he would have been destroyed altogether had he not charmed a nymph daughter of Proteus into telling him how he could stealthily seize her father and force him to grant a special favor.149 And we have already seen how a leader who disregarded the guidance of the gods—Publius Claudius, for example, the ill-fated general who disrespected the sacred chickens—could bring disaster upon himself and those under his command.
But religion was valuable for reasons that went beyond rendering the people submissive and law-abiding, and even beyond the imperative of enlisting the gods’ aid in battles and political decisions. Cicero suggested, more broadly, that the worship of the gods helped maintain the “sense of the holy”; without this, “our lives become fraught with disturbance and great chaos.”150 The gods “were not simply up in heaven,” as Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox explains, “but rather were all around—in the storm, in sickness, in battle, on the hillside, in the public spaces, in dreams, in stories.” They imparted to the world a “shining beauty and grace.”151 These themes point directly to the consecration function discussed in the previous chapter. Consecration, or literally, “association with the sacred,” prevents the world from falling into chaos and instead connects with ultimate meaning and sublimity.
This sense of beauty, and of a city that was consecrated to and by the gods, was surely essential to what gave the Roman world its sp
lendor—a splendor perceived by contemporaries but also later by Gibbon and other like-minded observers and recollectors. True, Rome had conquered many lands, but there have been other, geographically vaster empires (think of the Mongol Empire, for instance, or the Soviet Union). Rome in the first and second centuries experienced relative peace (although the philosopher-emperor Marcus, for example, was often at the German front, fighting off the barbarians) and commercial prosperity, but there have been other civilizations that have enjoyed these benefits. The Romans inherited the cultural and literary achievements of Greece and contributed some of their own, but there have been other ages of literary and cultural fluorescence—the Renaissance, or the Elizabethan or Shakespearean age. The Romans elaborated a system of law, but other communities and states have developed legal systems, and have enjoyed considerably more political freedom than the “image of liberty”—Gibbon’s deft phrase152—which was all the Romans could claim under the empire.
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