by León, Vicki
Remember the ominous “fortune cookie” message that Balas received at the oracle? While in his service, the newly male Diophantos may have even witnessed Balas’s demise. He was assassinated by supposed friends in Abae, the town that had indeed seen the birth of a “two-formed one”: Herais.
Infibulation:
Genital lockups, male & female
Greek and Roman slave owners tried various methods to prevent sexual activity between their slaves, or between slaves and members of the household. Substances, such as hemlock juice, for instance, would be applied to the male testes of slaves at puberty.
Far more often, though, they employed a sadistic means of genital control called infibulation. On the uncircumcised phalluses of boys approaching puberty they made a series of perforations in the foreskin, using a needle. After the holes healed, they inserted a fibula, a large bronze forerunner of the safety pin, through the foreskin. Sometimes the luckless wearer was fitted with larger bronze rings that were welded shut by applying red-hot charcoal.
This horrendous practice is on visual display at the Louvre Museum in Paris, where two larger-than-life, very nude statues of Roman slaves can be seen. They clearly show infibulation and what it did to phalluses—as well as what infibulated life must have been like.
Believe it or not, infibulation was thought to be the more “humane” approach. Masters ordered male slaves to be infibulated rather than subject them to castration, given the much higher likelihood of their death in surgery. It was also a common practice to infibulate gladiators—the rationale being to preserve their vigor. (Three-quarters of all gladiators were slaves and thus had no say in the matter.)
Flesh-crawling as it sounds, in Roman times a few free men actually infibulated by choice, to be hip and desirable. Comedy actors, dancers, and musicians did it, hoping to attract well-heeled sexual partners who would pay to play by unchaining them temporarily.
Members of religious sects, including the early Christian church and ascetics of various persuasions, also used infibulation to control their earthly desires.
From Greco-Roman times forward, the practice of infibulation has had staying power. Some statuary and art from the Renaissance, for example, depicts piercing of the male genitalia, often with oversize metal rings.
In the eighteenth century, population control advocates like Malthus and his followers lobbied for compulsory infibulation for anyone over fourteen years of age who was deemed unfit to procreate. His list included criminals, those with chronic diseases, beggars, unmarried servants (!!), apprentices, and rank-and-file soldiers.
During the Victorian era, prudish Western societies went hysterical over masturbation, again warming to the idea of locking up the sexual organs in a variety of ways.
The age-old desire to control or ruin the sexual capacity of others still exists today—now, however, mainly aimed at crippling women. From Greek times forward, there were reports of female slaves being infibulated with small metal rings but little in the way of evidence, other than some suspicious-looking metal remnants found in the graves of female slaves from Britain’s Roman era.
In Europe during the Middle Ages, prior to departure the crusaders often installed chastity belts on their wives. The name sounds more humane than the object. “Chastity belts” had chain-mail metal parts and locking mechanisms.
In today’s world, in parts of Africa, Asia, India, and the Middle East, a procedure even viler and more extensive than infibulation or chastity belts continues unabated. Operating under the guise of religion or tradition to protect chastity, this pharoanic or Sudanese circumcision, as it is known, produces dreadful mutilation in millions of young girls. Those who perform it completely remove the clitoris and labia minora, roughly sewing what’s left of the sexual organs together. Alternatively, they bind the victim’s knees and thighs together until the tissue heals into a scar. Often carried out under filthy conditions with unsterilized instruments, the operation has a high mortality rate. Females who do survive often suffer severe health problems, social shunning, agony during sexual activity, and high risk during child-bearing years.
Most of these women are not slaves, as the majority were among the infibulated victims of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Nevertheless, they are far from free to control what happens to their own bodies.
Marriage:
No shotguns, but everyone from Sparta to Rome had to get married
Interesting, how ancient Athens is always viewed as the glorious, creative, democratic society, and its bête noir, Sparta, as the drear and repressive military society. If you were born back then, your opinion just might have depended on which gender you were.
Although the Spartans had a rep as glumly laconic folks, growing up in ancient Sparta was a far from gloomy affair. For girls, anyway. From toddlerhood, they got acquainted with little boys as playmates, engaged in competitive sports with them, went swimming (and dancing) in the nude. Girls even got to drive chariots in various annual festivals. Spartan girls didn’t marry until age eighteen, and they ate a healthy diet—unlike their counterparts in Athens, who were kept indoors, fed poorly, and married off as soon as they menstruated.
It wasn’t that the Spartans were progressive. They had eugenic reasons in mind: healthy young women produced healthy babies—and male babies were needed to feed the Spartan war machine. (Male babies were examined at birth; any with physical defects were immediately exposed or put to death outright.)
Although boys left their mothers at age seven to live in literally spartan barracks, eat meager rations of wretched food, and train insanely to become the toughest soldiers alive, they still had male urges. Unlike Athens and other Greek city-states, these urges could not be satisfied at the corner brothel, because Spartans did not allow prostitution inside their small city of 8,000 citizens. Growing boys had no access to slaves male or female, either, who in other locales would be obliged to submit to free men. The Spartans had Helots to do their grunt work; these unfree individuals were slaves of the state, not owned by individuals. Helot families lived in the country, and thus were less vulnerable to sexual abuse.
The Spartans devised a rather clever sexual escape clause; free males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, and unmarried females over eighteen could engage in what books on Spartan history sometimes euphemistically call a “secret abduction” but was more like an elopement. Their first assignation took place after dark (flaunting the boy’s curfew, since he lived in the barracks). After shaving her head boy-style, and dressing in a tunic like the ones preteen boys wore, the young woman would await her new lover. These “secret” meetings were not between strangers; these girls had known these boys all their lives, since they’d played together as youngsters.
Few paintings of real-life couples have survived, making this portrait remarkable. These two are middle-class successes, not aristocrats, who likely perished in Pompeii during the A.D. 79 eruption.
This arrangement could last until the young man turned thirty and retired from active service, at which time he was permitted to establish a household, called a kleros. He and his partner then moved in together. There was no bride price or dowry payment; no religious ceremony either. At this point, unlike other places in Greece, wives ran the household and may have handled the family finances.
Since procreative sex was the main object of marriage, a Spartan wife who remained childless was ordered to do something to remedy the impasse. To find a more fertile mate, Spartan law required her to sleep with another man straightaway! This might sound jolly—or ghastly—depending on your point of view. Being sparse in numbers, the Spartans made certain that every Spartan was paired up. No bachelors or spinsters allowed.
How did these Spartan Greek marital customs compare to the Roman style of marriage?
In the earlier Roman centuries B.C., there were three kinds of marriage, divided by social class. Nobility generally wed with a confarreatio, a bread-sharing ceremony, while plebians married by bride-purchase (a reverse dowry, s
o to speak) or by living together in mutual cohabitation.
Later, the Romans scuttled all three types in the early republic, instead going for the manus agreement, a one-sided affair that simply transferred the bride from the manus or hand of her domineering father to the hand of her bossy new husband. Fortunately for Roman women, marital agreements got more equitable around the second century B.C., under a new statute called the “free” marriage. The bride brought a dowry; but if they were divorced and no adultery was involved on her part, most of the money was given back to her.
Romans did not practice speed dating, but they did have speed remarriage—especially popular among elite families. New widows (or divorcees) could get hitched again without social condemnation or penalty, since the wedded state was considered the most desirable status for any adult, male or female. It worked out better for the woman as well, since—unlike the first time around—she had much more say in the matter of the bridegroom number two.
(You can learn more about Athenian and other Greek customs in the entries on Thargelia, adultery, divorce, and Aspasia & Pericles.)
Adultery:
The stinging price of ancient hanky-panky
Adultery was a ferociously big issue in ancient times. Merely the word adulterer was an insult among Greek men, and a favorite one-liner in the comedies of Aristophanes. Roman men had equally strong feelings about adultery— and many laws to prevent the act or punish it.
The most important element of Greco-Roman marriages was the legitimacy of offspring. Married men wanted to have children, particularly sons, to inherit and carry on the family name. They needed to know: Is that kid really mine? (If not, the injured party, since he considered his wife “property,” felt righteous rage over property theft as well.)
Most gals, even teens whose husbands did not meet their needs or dreams, remained faithful. But some did not. If a woman slept with someone other than her husband, it was adultery—regardless of her partner’s rank or marital status. Predictably, a married man who cheated only got into trouble if his co-conspirator was a freeborn married woman. Or someone else’s unmarried daughter, for example. Otherwise, Greek and Roman husbands had a free pass to get intimate with slaves, concubines, prostitutes, and even sexually available adult men.
Adultery was a very dangerous game long ago. Don’t judge it by the films you’ve seen about the ancient world; think in modern terms. Contraception and protection against STDs were a roll of the dice. There were no condoms; no diaphragms; no “morning after” tablets. Nor were affairs easy. There were no motels; no vehicles available by the hour; few if any convenient apartments to be borrowed from obliging friends. The houses of the guilty parties, where such naughty deeds would likely take place, were swarming with slaves and household members. Privacy? Forget about it. Furthermore, husbands didn’t commute to work or spend long hours at the office. Adultery was even trickier for women, whose freedom of movement was often curtailed.
In the earlier era of the Roman republic, husbands sometimes claimed the “right” to kill wives caught in the act. Most of the time, though, adultery was grounds for divorce but not justification for homicide. Beginning around 18 B.C., however, Rome’s first emperor made a strong attempt to legislate morality. To cut down on sexual hijinks and hanky-panky, Octavian Augustus introduced laws to punish married women who had extramarital affairs. Ironically this put the spotlight on several flagrant examples in his own family, namedly his daughter and his granddaughter, both named Julia.
Another decree gave a cuckolded husband the right to legally slaughter the male adulterer as long as his rank was lowly: a slave, a freedman, or someone with a job labeled “infamous,” such as a gladiator or an actor. On the other hand, prostitutes could legally have sex with married men—and that exemption encouraged some randy, quick-thinking patrician women to register themselves as hookers to avoid prosecution!
Greek playwright Aristophanes gained stardom for his ribald comedies, which often involved adultery and the adulterer’s punishment: sodomy!
The Augustan laws also affected the huge numbers of men in Roman military forces. Men convicted of adultery could not enlist; furthermore, if a soldier was caught in an adulterous situation, he received a dishonorable discharge.
Over in Greece, societal rules and laws against adultery remained draco-nian—a word that derives from Draco, the legislator whose laws included one that enraged husbands who caught adulterous wives and lovers in the act could carry out justifiable and legal homicide on both. The laws enacted by early Athenian leaders Solon and Draco were literally set in stone, word for word, upon plaques installed in public settings for anyone to consult. Furthermore, the same laws applied to men who had long-term relationships with mistresses who were free women—such as concubines or heterae, the highest-ranking sexual companions. Fathers whose daughters were unfaithful could kill both lovers with impunity.
All of this sounds rather grim, since humans have always been prey to temptation and sexual misadventures. But not all scenarios ended in bloodshed or murder of the in flagrante couple. For a male caught trifling with someone’s wife or exclusive mate, the Greeks (and later the Romans) came up with a most humiliating punishment. The sinned-against husband was legally allowed to sodomize the adulterer! Many times, this took symbolic form. For example, in Greek comedy, the adulterer is often punished by having a radish inserted into his rear end—at times, with witnesses guffawing at the act. You might call it an ancient sting operation, since Greek radishes evidently grew to a healthy size and had a good “bite” to them.
In one bizarre, possibly jocular case mentioned by Roman writer Juvenal, a wronged husband in Rome chose to sodomize the adulterer using a fish instead of his own member.
Adultery carried other penalties. The unfaithful wife or mistress could be exiled from her home and could not be buried in the family tomb. All parties had responsibilities, even the betrayed husband; if a Roman failed to report the crime of adultery, he was guilty of being a procurer or pimp.
Given the extreme secrecy with which affairs must have been conducted, the adultery statutes must have been equally hard to enforce. In later, more lax centuries, when sexually louche emperors and empresses set the tone, attitudes softened. Infidelity—at least among the patrician smart set— became at times amusing, the subject of piquant murals, ribald poetry, and jests in plays.
Divorce:
No fault, no fees, no attorneys!
Even though marriage in those long-ago centuries could be challenging, divorce, by comparison, was a breeze. Divorce proceedings today often resemble an arena in which blood is spilled and combatants are scarred; in contrast, the Romans restricted most of their bloodshed to the gladiatorial amphitheatre.
Romans tended to be anal and legalistic in many regards, but they treated divorce in a casual, almost informal way. Although men—and a tiny handful of women—studied law, there were no lawyers (divorce attorneys or otherwise) for hire as we think of them. Marriage therapists and family counselers? Nope.
Although sources disagree on the year, the first recorded divorce in Roman history probably occurred around the year 230 B.C., when a certain Spurius Carvilius divorced his wife. The reason given? She was unable to have children. Infertility (even though it might have been the old man who was sterile) was the only legal reason for divorce given in the Twelve Tables, Rome’s oldest written code of laws. The original tables, destroyed by the barbarian invasion and burning of Rome in 390 B.C., have only survived in jumbled, incomplete form.
Over time, three other “serious marital faults” besides infertility became justifications for Roman men to divorce their wives: adultery; consuming wine; and most heinous of all, making copies of the household keys.
Eventually women got to sue for divorce as well.
The actual “ceremony” was unceremonious. After a couple declared their intent to live apart in front of witnesses, they were divorced. In some cases, if the husband had initiated the divorce, he simply t
ook away her household keys and turned her out.
The most outlandish aspect of Roman divorce? Unless the wife could prove that her hubby was worthless, he generally got to keep the kids.
From the second century B.C. on, husbands and wives kept their property separate during marriage, so “community property” became an oxymoron. Besides her dowry, a well-to-do woman or an heiress might own rental property or a business; generally, however, she didn’t have a hands-on role in her investments or business transactions. Her male guardian (her father, brother, husband, or other male kin in the background) did.
The wife and her dowry (except in the case of adultery) would return to her father’s household, who as pater potestas, all-powerful dad, had an obligation to find her a new husband. When it came to remarriage, though, Daddy’s domineering hand was not the final word—hers was.
When it came to the Greeks, separation was a far likelier scenario than divorce, especially if infertility seemed to be the cause. In causes of abuse, the wife had some legal protection—although in high-status marriages, look out. (See the entry on Alkibiades for an ill-fated attempt to divorce.)
If a Greek wife committed adultery and was found out, and if upon discovering it, her husband did not murder her or her lover in so-called justifiable homicide, Athenian law prohibited the couple to continue to live together. So in essence, the couple was already divorced. If a Greek husband committed adultery, what then? Didn’t count, of course.
