by León, Vicki
Did the two marry and live happily ever after? Roman historian Livy, that old spoilsport, didn’t say, although he did cover the story in vivid detail. As a postscript, however, Livy noted that the Bacchanalians were immediately restricted to holding their sacred rites in groups no larger than three women and two men—which really took the wind out of the defiling ceremonies.
By that time, enthusiasm for Bacchus bashes was flagging fast, since the authorities had rounded up everyone from the top-ranking orgiasts to the rank-and-file members of the “Bacchanalian conspiracy,” imprisoning and/ or executing more than five thousand men and women.
Nevertheless, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the rockin’ Bacchantes rose again. Centuries later, during the reign of Emperor Titus at the time of the Vesuvius eruption in A.D. 79, it was no longer a felony to explore the mysteries of Bacchic worship. In fact, the most stunning villa found in Pompeii, dubbed the Villa of the Mysteries, contains wraparound murals and male and female Bacchanalians carrying out their solemn (possibly felonious) rites.
The Egyptian goddess Isis became very popular in Rome. A loving mother, she was often depicted with her baby son or with a sistrum, a musical rattle.
The Isis Sex Scandal:
Anubis loves ya, baby!
In Rome during the first century B.C., the Egyptian cult of the goddess Isis took root quickly, especially among humbler folks and women of all social classes. Isis, a compassionate and loving goddess of fertility and motherhood, was often portrayed nursing her infant son Horus, a composition that would soon be echoed by the Christians and their Virgin Mary with her baby son.
Like other mystery cults, the cult of Isis required initiation and baptism and had a professional priesthood on staff. The Isis temple in Rome, built in 43 B.C., sat next to the temple of Serapis in Mars Field. Although Isis took human form, she was often worshipped in conjunction with other Egyptian deities, including Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead.
In Rome around A.D. 19 lived an outstanding follower of Isis called Paulina, a Roman matron described as virtuous, well-to-do, and easy on the eyes by the Jewish Roman historian Josephus, who related her story in his book called Antiquities of the Jews.
It seems that Paulina had an unwelcome admirer, a Roman called Decius Mundus, who peskily plied her with a great many gifts, all of which she refused. Desperately in love with Paulina, he finally offered her 200,000 Greek drachmas if she would sleep with him. (Author Josephus discreetly called his offer “for one’s night lodging.”)
When Paulina indignantly refused, Mundus went into a tailspin. Seeing no love in his future, he resolved to starve himself to death. Ide, a freedwoman who lived in his household, was horrified. Being a gal prone to mischief and possibly sweet on Mundus herself, she offered to help. Soon she’d convinced the lovelorn man that she could persuade the object of his obsession to get into the sack with him. “Of course I’ll need some money to make the arrangements,” she said, adding, “Fifty thousand drachmas should do it.”
Much heartened, Mundus started eating meals again, while Ide went about her nefarious plotting. Well aware that Paulina was not swayed by money but by her faith, Ide hit up a couple of the most dubious individuals in the Isis priesthood. At length they came to a mutually agreeable deal. They would get half the loot if they helped snare the luscious parishioner for Decius Mundus.
The older of the two Isis priests then asked for a private audience with Paulina, telling her, “I’ve been sent by the god Anubis, who admires your faith and who’s fallen in love with you. He invites you to come to him for a private prayer session.”
Paulina, whose gullibility quotient would make her a prime target for televangelists these days, went for it. Smirking with pride at her specialness, she told her husband about being singled out by the god Anubis. He might have frowned a bit when she got to the part about dining at the temple and a sleepover with the jackal-headed god, but he trusted her implicitly.
Accordingly, Paulina put on her best “virtuous but sexy” ensemble and headed for the temple of Isis. During dinner, the god Anubis remained invisible and inaudible, which obliged Paulina to make small talk with herself. Afterward, she was shown to a private chamber. The priests then left, dousing the light and closing the doors as they did so.
It wasn’t long before “Anubis” made his appearance. With alacrity, Mundus closed in on Paulina and began to make love to her; she seemed equally engaged. She didn’t even question his lack of a jackal’s head. Before daylight, he crept away and a disheveled but serene Paulina headed for home.
The Egyptian god Anubis often accompanied the goddess Isis. Anubis had a human body and the dark head of a jackal.
She couldn’t wait to tell her husband and friends about her intimate new status with the god. They were dumbfounded; knowing Paulina’s innate modesty, however, they were forced to believe her story. For three days, she gloried in what she thought of as her spiritual adventure.
On day four, Decius Mundus showed up at her door. “You’ve saved me two hundred thousand drachmas, madam,” he told her. “Even though you rebuffed my love gifts and reproached me, you liked me pretty well when I called myself Anubis.” Paulina was floored. And furious. Crying, ripping at her garments, she immediately became hysterical about the wicked trick that had been played on her. “It was horrible!” she sobbed to her husband. “He came at me again and again. I want you to take my cruel deception to the highest level! To Emperor Tiberius, in fact!”
Her uxorious husband took Paulina at her word; he repeatedly nagged at the emperor, asking him to inquire into the matter. To everyone’s shock, Tiberius did so. The outcome? The guilty priests and Ide, the evil little enabler, were crucified, and a large number of Isis worshipers were deported to the malarial island of Sardinia. Tiberius also ordered the temple of Isis to be razed to the ground and the goddess’s statue to be thrown into the Tiber River.
But what about Decius Mundus, the secret adulterer, whose avatar-sharp portrayal of Anubis was obviously spot-on? Tiberius merely banished the man from Rome. As the emperor explained, the crime Mundus had committed was done out of the passion of love.
Abduction, Seduction, Rape:
Unwilling partners
Our term rape looks as though it came from the Latin raptus but long ago the word meant kidnap, abduction, or even elopement. Greco-Roman mythology is rampant with raptus episodes, starting with that incessantly horny king of the gods, Zeus aka Jupiter. In addition, legends about early Roman history, such as the raptus of the Sabine women, generally signified the forceful takeover of one cultural group by another through mass co-mingling in marriage. (Elsewhere in this book, check out the entries on the Amazons and on marriage for other perspectives on raptus.)
Sometimes the assault on a woman, the violation of her sexual integrity, became a symbolic catalyst for social or political change. A classic example? The often-told tale of heroic Lucretia. She and her husband lived in Rome, in their day a small town ruled by a king and filled with Roman newcomers struggling to eliminate the original Etruscan inhabitants.
The wife of Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, Lucretia was a model spouse and mother. One afternoon, her husband and his pals, including an Etruscan guy named Sextus, son of the very last king of Rome, were having dinner together (no wives invited, of course). They began bragging along the lines of: “My sword’s bigger than yours! Well, mine’s sharper than yours!” When that debate got old, they began to boast about the virtue of their wives, with Lucius maintaining that nobody could measure up to his spouse.
Before the arguments got physical, the men agreed to go together unannounced to check on what their wives were doing. Off they galloped, making the rounds. At each house, they discovered their wives yakking it up, maybe sipping a little wine while the men were out.
The rape of Lucretia and her suicidal method of provoking her menfolk to avenge her honor was a favorite story in Roman households.
They ended up at Lucius’s home,
where they found Lucretia working away, spinning wool while barking out orders to her household slaves. By acclamation, she was declared the winner in the virtuous matron competition. Lucius beamed.
Unbeknownst to all, the provocative sight of Lucretia caressing her spindle made one of the men extremely aroused; it was that blackguard Sextus. Several days later, when he knew that Lucretia’s husband was away on business, he came over. He put the moves on her and when rebuffed, assaulted her sexually.
“If you tell anyone who did this,” he warned, “I’ll kill you in your bed, and then I’ll put the naked body of a dead slave beside you.”
That threat and the rape she’d just endured left Lucretia in shock. After Sextus left, she reached a quick decision. Calling an urgent family meeting, she summoned her husband, dad, and uncle. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” she said. “My heart is still pure but my body has been violated by that blackguard Sextus. I want all of you to swear that you’ll avenge me!”
With that, she drew out a dagger, accurately stabbed herself in the heart, and died.
Galvanized by the attack on Lucretia and her actions, her husband and uncle speedily organized a revolution, nailed that blackguard Sextus, threw out the king, and founded the Roman republic in 509 B.C.
It wasn’t until 184 B.C., however, that the Romans officially recognized rape as a sexual crime, which they called raptus ad stuprum. Both the Romans and the Greeks developed laws against rape and other assaults but the acts they legislated covered a narrow set of circumstances. The victim’s lack of consent was secondary. Rape could sometimes mean sex by seduction, by coercion or threats, or by physical violence.
It became a capital crime if the victim was a citizen in good standing, a female virgin, or a freeborn child. Sexual predators of children received the death penalty and the rape of a boy was considered especially heinous. On the other hand, sexual assault or even gang rape was not a crime if the victim was a prostitute of either gender, a gladiator, an entertainer, an actor, or anyone who worked at a job defined as “infamous” by the Romans.
Sexual assault of a slave was a crime—but of property damage, not personal harm. Believe it or not, the slave’s owner was the injured party and could sue the rapist!
Men and women around the Greco-Roman world may have worried more about the possibility of sexual assault during times of war. Mass rape was a standard practice when enemy forces sacked a rebellious city, or conquered an island nation. Just as dire was the treatment of war captives; sexual violence to them did not count as a crime.
Looked at in modern terms, we might even conclude that not just rape but a large percentage of sexual activity during the Greco-Roman millennium was non-consensual. Slaves male and female were used and abused by owners at their whim; wives (and sometimes children) were used and abused by their husbands or fathers when they saw fit. These are disquieting reminders of how far we’ve traveled from those times, when individuals— more especially women, slaves, and people considered low status—could be sexually assaulted, often with impunity.
Imperial Julia:
“Baby on board” was her all-clear sign
Emperor Octavian Augustus pulled a few sly sexual shenanigans in his earlier years; during the five decades of his marriage to the eagle-eyed Livia, he even managed the occasional indulgence with a concubine.
As he aged, however, Augustus grew offended at the moral laxity of Roman patricians and their increasing refusal to procreate plentifully within the bonds of marriage. With that convenient memory lapse that humans often have, he wallowed in memories of the “good old days” and what he saw as the ethical standards and marital fidelity of those times.
His most egregious lapse? His own progeny, which consisted of a single daughter by his first wife Sempronia: Julia. He and Livia had no children. Julia, who was kind, motherly, well educated, and far wittier than her dad, also had his strong sexual drive. She, however, lacked a way to sublimate it, as Augustus did, with the prerogatives of power.
Although willful, she obediently married her first cousin Marcellus, only to lose him to death in two years. A widow at eighteen, at her father’s behest she married his forty-two-year-old right-hand man and general Marcus Agrippa. In classic Roman “musical chairs” fashion, he in turn had to dump his current wife.
When not traveling with her husband Agrippa on his assignments outside of Italy, or entertaining in their glorious villa near Pompeii, Julia birthed five children in nine years: three boys and two girls, all of whom survived childhood.
Julia was quite a multitasker. Although still wed to Agrippa, she began to entertain a string of witty young noblemen who better suited her lively personality and sensuous needs. When a friend asked how she managed to avoid exposure while producing children that all resembled her husband, she quipped, “Passengers are never allowed on board until the ship’s hold is full.”
Julia and her father, however, were on a collision course. In 18 B.C., Augustus, gung-ho about his legislative plan to reform the lackadaisical marital and childbearing habits of the upper class, introduced an elaborate suite of new laws—some of them incentives and others quite punitive. Named (ironically, as it transpired) after his own exemplar of good behavior, his daughter Julia, the Leges Iuliae offered tax breaks for people in the senatorial class who got married and got busy procreating.
Men and women between the ages of 20 and 60 who remained unmarried and childless forfeited their inheritance rights. Other Augustan laws slammed adulterers with a criminal offence. It also allowed fathers to kill married daughters who dallied outside their marriage.
Freeborn women, on the other hand, who gave birth to three surviving children earned the “three kids and you’re out of bondage to male guardians!” bonus.
In 12 B.C. Julia’s husband Agrippa died, and straightaway she was pushed into marriage with Tiberius, the morose thirty-year-old who was Livia’s son from a previous marriage. (Again, in the patrician divorce-go-round, Tiberius was obliged to divorce Vispania, the wife he really quite adored in his own grumpy fashion, to wed the now-notorious Julia.)
The false front of their marriage soon crumbled. Five years into wedlock, Tiberius announced he was “retiring” to the island of Rhodes—sans Julia—supposedly stepping aside to let Julia’s sons by Agrippa assume public office. This greatly angered Augustus, who saw it as desertion. The “perfect family values” of the imperials were being mocked by the hypocrisy of actual events.
Octavian Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, called the marital shots for his kinfolk. His only daughter, Julia, dutifully wed a string of men picked by Daddy, including Marcus Agrippa, Octavians right-hand man.
When the emperor learned the sheer number of times that his own daughter Julia had broken his new morality laws, he went insane with rage. In the year 2 B.C., on the heels of an ostentatious citywide celebration of the emperor’s twenty-five years as “first man in Rome,” Augustus grimly announced to the Roman senate that he was disowning his treasonous daughter for committing adultery with a long list of men. The juicier statements made by them alleged that she’d even had sex on the Rostra, the platform in the forum where daddy had originally proclaimed his new laws on marital reform.
Since Augustus had made the new rules, he had to abide by them: he also announced that Julia would be exiled to the wee island of Pandateria, forbidden wine and male visitors.
After some years, Augustus allowed Julia to move exile sites, newly banishing her to the city of Regium on the toe of Italy. He never spoke to her again. Julia was disinherited and forbidden burial in the family mausoleum. When Tiberius, always one to hold a grudge, became emperor at Augustus’s death in A.D. 14, he continued to punish Julia by cutting off all financial assistance to her. She died of malnutrition the same year.
In recent years, classical historians who’ve studied the matter feel certain there was more to Julia’s banishment than sexual folly. They theorize that the adultery charges against her cloaked a more serious ma
tter: a political plot, possibly a coup, against her father. Several of the men named (and exiled) as her co-adulterers came from high-ranking families. One, the son of Mark Antony, who’d been the young Octavian’s greatest enemy, was executed.
Catullus the Poet:
Doomed love was catnip for the X-rated poet
Gaius Valerius Catullus came from a well-to-do family in Verona, Italy, and owned a villa himself near fashionable Tivoli, but as a young man soon settled into a decadent life in Rome. As a poet in training, he idled with other ink-stained scriveners and lowlifes, striving to integrate a scruffy, streetwise vibe into his work.
He succeeded. His small book, preserved within an anthology of 116 carmina, is still around today, thrilling new generations of college kids with its smutty verses. The amazing thing is how much loftier salacious porn sounds in Latin. Reading Catullus increases the reader’s vocabulary, especially useful for conjugating difficult verb forms for unmentionable activities. Bonus points: Latin porn allows the reader to feel studious, even virtuous, reading it in a dead language.
Catallus got a great deal of his raw material (and I mean raw) from his gut-wrenching affair with Clodia Pulchra, which probably began when she was still the wife of Quintus Metellus Celer. Clodia was about thirty-five, Catallus perhaps twenty-five. He called her Lesbia in his poems.
