by León, Vicki
Greek men were partly right.
Lonely housewives in Athens, off-duty courtesans in Corinth, widows in the wilds of Arcadia, gay couples everywhere, females seeking same gender Many-Splendored for soulful get-togethers, playwrights producing satyr plays that featured comic genitalia, and event organizers for processions that featured oversize phalluses all made use of objects that would be called sex toys today. The Greeks slangily referred to dildos as “sliders” or “strikers.”
Everywhere you looked in ancient Greece and other locales around the Mediterranean, phallic symbols were proudly on display. Temples were rife with rocket-shaped monuments to testosterone. Standing at every crossroad and street corner in Athens were stone markers called herms, each sporting the head of Hermes (the god Mercury among the Romans) and his perky phallus, but they were sacred boundary markers, not incitements to lust. Standing in gardens, temples, and other sites throughout Rome and Italy were ferocious images of Priapus, his oversize red erection a warning to thieves. These phallic symbols, however, were warding-off measures, apotropaic objects to deflect the evil eye and protect humans from malign forces. (Learn more details at the entries for Priapus, hymen, and marriage.)
For personal lovelife aids, ancient Greek consumers turned to the experts in the tannery industry, who obligingly took the softest leather, formed it into a hot-dog shape, stuffed it with wool, then polished it to maximum smoothness. Greek dildos, called olisboi, did not vibrate or possess any bells and whistles. But padded leather in the shape of a male organ, lavishly anointed with good-quality olive oil, did have a lively, humanoid feel to it (or so it was said).
Discerning shoppers knew that the best olisboi were made in Miletus, a prosperous Ionian city-state on the coast of Asia Minor (Turkey today). Specialty items included ones carved from ivory, wood, and marble.
From the abundant materials that have survived, including satyr plays and comedies by Herodas, along with thousands of portrayals on painted Greek pots, vases, and cups, it’s clear that dildos came in all sizes. There were dildos-for-two models, some joined end-to-end, others strung together with woolen ties. Dildos could also be attached with soft leather straps to satisfy oneself or one’s partner. A more expensive model, called a baubon, was made of red leather, as most of the dildos used in comedies were. Besides being festive and highly visible, they imitated sexual arousal.
In Herodas’s popular play Mime, a courtesan of Miletus asks where her friend got her bright red dildo made—which leads to the other gal’s fury, because her new dildo was loaned out before she even got to use it. The purpose of the plot was to exaggerate excessive female lust, but it also reveals interesting details about such devices and how they were used. Or lent. And even how sex-toy manufacturers of long ago kept their enterprises secret to avoid taxes.
Somewhere in the fifth century B.C., a historic breakthrough occurred within the dildo industry—one that might resonate today as well.
The inventive Greeks had surprisingly modern ideas about recycling. Around the fifth century B.C., a Greek baker invented the first biodegradable sex toy: the breadstick dildo.
It was a slow day at the bakery. An unknown Greek, a genius at baking who also happened to be an outside-the-box thinker, started fooling around with some extra bread dough. She was kneading the dough; and kneading brought to mind the Greek word for masturbation, dephesthai, which evolved from a word meaning “to mold” or “soften by kneading.” So her mind was already in the gutter, and one thing led to another.
After a while she saw what she had wrought. And it was good.
Thus was born the olisbo-kollix: the breadstick dildo.
With that vivid image in mind, it’s easy to fantasize further scenarios. A Greek matron serving lunch to her often-absent husband, for example. She brings him a salad and a breadbasket, remarking with a twinkle in her eye, “Nothing says lovin’ like something from my oven!”
While this entry might sound fanciful, the discovery in question came about through a neat bit of research by a Greek professor named Alexander Oikonomides. In 1986 he rediscovered this remarkable, edible, easy-to-dispose-of invention of ancient times after seeing a jocular reference in an inscription to kollix (“breadstick” or “baguette”) with olisbos, the Greek word for dildo. He later found the word olisbokollix in a lexicon of classical Greek that dated to the fifth century A.D.
Further confirmation came from pictorial evidence. Certain Greek vases bear artwork, heretofore puzzling, that depicts women with baskets filled with phallus-shaped breadsticks. One famous illustration shows a nude female taking part in a religious procession, proudly carrying a gigantic phallus (ceremonial, we hope!) clearly made from bread dough.
Outercourse B.C.:
Foreplay & backstabbing
Long ago near the Dead Sea, several raunchy little cities competed to see who could take the top spot as the lowest places on Earth. They already were the lowest, being 1,388 feet below sea level, but the low they were going for was depravity. Although their original sites may now be under the Dead Sea, their infamy remains. One was Gomorrah. The other, called Sodom, gave its name to a class A felony. The locals were fond of the back-door sexual approach, the rougher, the better. In time, their predilection became known as sodomy.
The Sodomites did other creepy things. In Genesis 19: 5-8, when a wrathful God wants to destroy Sodom and neighboring cities for their grievous sins, the prophet Abraham offers to find some decent people worth saving—such as his nephew Lot and family. So two male angels disguised as humans show up at Lot’s house, his wife and daughters fix dinner for everybody, and things seem cool. Soon, however, an ominous mob of local men surround the house, shouting, “Where are the guys who came here tonight? Bring them to us—we wanna get to know them.” “Know,” as in the Biblical sense: assault them sexually.
So what does Lot do? To protect his guests, he throws his young daughters to the wolves! He says, “Behold now, I have two daughters who’ve not known men; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you—and do nothing to the guests [the male angels].”
Small wonder that God got disgusted and destroyed Sodom, Gomorrah, and two neighboring cites with fire and brimstone. As Jude 1:7 notes, “Sodom and Gomorrah, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth as an example.” Scholars have wrangled over the “strange flesh” epithet, some interpreting it as illicit sex with strangers, or sex with angels, but most labeling it same-sex relations between men.
As luck would have it, almost no one in ancient Greece or Rome read the Old Testament. Or even wanted to. Thus sodomy, or pedico as the Romans called it, again became popular. Anal sex had quite a few loyal adherents among women: housewives who didn’t want to get pregnant (again); female prostitutes and sex workers, who didn’t want to get pregnant (ever); female slaves (ditto); and many a ruler’s wife, who preferred her spouse to stick it where the sun didn’t shine—just not in hers. Once Spartan women reached age eighteen and formed intimate attachments, they routinely engaged in anal sex, to preserve virginity and to prevent pregnancy.
According to the Old Testament, Sodom gave its name to sodomy, a sexual practice that enraged God so much that he destroyed the city as Abraham’s nephew Lot and family fled.
Sodomy also became a common practice among young Greek and Roman brides; to “spare” her from being deflowered on the wedding night, hubby put his mentula up her bum. How thoughtful can you get?
As Greco-Roman art illustrates, the sexual position called “the lioness” was a classic pose for rear entry; to get into position, a woman crouched, lifting up her buttocks at the same time.
Males in a variety of relationships represented another demographic who enjoyed or routinely preferred rear-end action—gay couples, male prostitutes, and other men with homoerotic bonds. Sometimes it was ritualistic, such as those grooms on their wedding night. At others, it was punitive—male adulterers who’d gotten caught, for instance. In Greece, adulterers and male
s known to be erotically passive were often made fun of by Aristophanes; in his comedies, he called them “wide-assed” and was fond of “roasting” local individuals, such as Athenian politician Cleisthenes. In the Roman Empire, however, sometimes the adulterer was ceremoniously sodomized by the cuckolded husband.
Plenty of slaves served as objects for sodomy—and took active roles as well. So did many Roman emperors, along with their wives, girlfriends, and boyfriends. Sexually addicted emperors such as Nero, Caligula, Tiberius, Elagabalus, and Commodus got deeply involved in sodomitic giving and receiving. Other couples outed as sodomy aficionados included Greek orator Demosthenes with Cnosion; Pompey the Great with his wife Julia; and Caesar assassin Brutus and his wife Portia.
Although the literature (and the graffiti) is contradictory, it does appear that men who preferred anal sex to the exclusion of other sex practices were called cinaedus in Latin, a borrowing from the Greek word kinaidos. A blunt term, it implied effeminacy.
Oddly enough, long-ago sodomy got much more favorable press than oral sex did. The array of actions which nowadays are often thought of as Many-Splendored pleasurable, gender-friendly foreplay (or even considered “not sex at all” by many younger participants) were called abominations. And worse. Why? It may have been linked to a widespread custom among the upper classes in the Greco-Roman world, where men and women routinely greeted each other with a kiss on the lips, irrespective of gender.
To the Romans especially, os impurum or “filthy, impure mouth” was a repellent notion—and a term of abuse. Men and women rumored to be fond of fellatio or cunnilingus were never invited to dinner parties—people claimed that their perverse behavior gave them hideous bad breath.
There was a nastier side to fellatio, too. Men sometimes forced other males (slaves or free men) to fellate them, an act called irrumatio. In a Roman male’s mind, nothing could be more degrading than to be a receptacle for oral sex. The vicious verses of Martial, Catullus, and other poets of sexual invective made that very clear. To drive home its depravity, irrumatio was sometimes the penalty inflicted on an adulterer, or on a male found guilty of other crimes.
Nevertheless, both practices were cheerfully on tap, as easy-to-find commercial propositions (graffiti “ads” for both services still cover walls in Pompeii and elsewhere) and as part of the personal erotic repertoire of countless sexually active persons.
Kissing:
Loving lips versus foul mouths
The Greeks and Romans of old could really be negative about innocent pleasures. Kissing, for example. As Greek historian Plutarch fiercely noted in his essay called Precepts for Conjugal Life, “It is shameful to embrace and kiss and caress each other in the presence of others.”
Crusty old Senator Cato of Rome, the one who continually shrilled, “Carthage must be destroyed!” was quite a cold fish as well, when it came to marital relations. One day in the Roman senate, he ejected the man who was due to become the city’s next consul—simply because the fellow had kissed his wife in broad daylight.
Not all men or women were that reserved or frigid. After Athens’ famed leader Pericles got divorced, he and his philosophy-spouting girlfriend Aspasia began to live together, and their behavior scandalized the city. The scandal wasn’t the presumed sex they were having. To the utter horror of the neighbors, Pericles ardently kissed Aspasia on the lips when he left each morning to attend to business. When he returned, he warmly smooched her again. And the two of them misbehaved in this revolting way, year after year! Twenty, to be exact.
Another reason for kiss phobia? An old wives’ tale that suggested that old Greek wives (and possibly young ones) also imbibed to excess. Playwrights from Euripides to Aristophanes deplored the female propensity to take a nip: “O feverish women, ever ready for a drink, inventors of all kinds of schemes to get at the bottle! O great blessing for the wine merchants, and a curse in turn for us!”
Maybe those matrons had cause. Their Athenian husbands often spent a hard day socializing at the agora marketplace, followed by a lively evening at an all-male symposium, with plenty of tipple and titillation from the female entertainment. Invariably, they did kiss their wives when they finally got home. Instead of affection, however, the kiss was a breathalyzer test.
In later centuries, societal restrictions on kissing (but not on wifely wine consumption) may have eased. By good fortune, we still possess Achilles Tatius’s wonderfully trashy novel Leucippe and Clitophon, which describes long-ago kissing in vivid, juicy detail. His novel, written in the second century A.D., was very popular.
In this excerpt, one character defends the joys of male-female kissing. “A woman’s body is moist in the clinch, and her lips are soft in response to kisses. On account of this she holds the man’s body in her arms, with it completely joined to her flesh, and he is surrounded with pleasure when he has intercourse with her. She stamps her kisses on his lips like seals on wax … and when she has experience, she can make her kisses sweeter by not only wishing to use her lips, but also her teeth, grazing round her lover’s mouth and biting his kisses … At the height of orgasm she goes mad with pleasure and opens her mouth in passion. At this time tongues keep company with each other, and so far as possible they also make love to one another; you can make your pleasure greater by opening your mouth to her kisses.”
Famed writer Ovid, a fervid lover of women, employed lots of osculation in his Art of Love and other poems, as in this line: “What wise man would not mingle kisses with coaxing words of endearment?”
Poets and writers also sang the praises of male-to-male kisses and, more rarely, female to female. Here is an excerpt from Lucian’s Dialogue of the Courtesans, with two call girls discussing the party the night before.
[Clonarium]: “Did you sleep? What happened?”
In Greco-Roman times, kissing wasn’t always an innocent greeting. Upper-crust folks were phobic about “impure mouths” since oral sex was looked upon with loathing.
[Leaena]: “At first they [two women] were kissing me just like men, not only pressing their lips but opening their mouths a little, and they were embracing me and feeling my breasts. Demonassa was also biting me while she was kissing me. I didn’t know what to do with it all.”
As noted in the prior entry, Romans tend to greet each other, males as well as females, with a brief kiss on the lips. That may be why they were so paranoid about foul breath—fastidious about where mouths had been, and doing what to whom. For example, after 201 B.C., when the Hispanic peninsula became a Roman province, the larger world learned about the favorite dentifrice and mouthwash of many a Spaniard: human urine. That practice provoked an Eeeeeeeeeeoooouuuuuw! heard around the Mediterranean Sea.
Anthropologists have long suggested that kissing evolved from earlier primate behavior—either because human lips look and behave a bit like female labia when aroused; or because human mothers used to premasticate food for their young, then feed the infant mouth-to-mouth (just as birds and many animals still do).
Straight from the Source:
Love candids
In spite of the obstacles of lower literacy, a do-it-yourself postal service, and a shocking lack of Internet matchmaking sites, long-ago folks of all ages, social status, and genders did find true love. They did manage to meet their “second half,” as the philosopher Plato called it. Or, alternatively, they found deep happiness in the love of siblings, of children, of grandparents, of lifelong friends.
Here’s the epitaph of an eighteen-year-old, written by her husband, a humble construction worker in Roman France; they lived near the Seine River. “To the eternal memory of Blandinia Martiola, a most faultless girl, who lived 18 years, 9 months, 5 days. Pompeius Catussa, a citizen, a plasterer, dedicates [this] to his wife, who was incomparable and very kind to him, who lived with him 5 years, 6 months, 18 days without any shadow of a fault. You who read this, go bathe in the baths of Apollo, as I used to do with my wife. I wish I still could.”
Here is an excerpt from a l
onger letter to a male friend, written by Pliny the Younger, a wealthy Roman aristocrat. He (aged about forty) is describing Calpurnia, his third wife, who would have been eighteen to twenty years old. “And she loves me, surely an indication of her virtue. She has even, because of her affection for me, taken an interest in literature. She has copies of my books, she reads them over and over again, and even learns them by heart … She even sets my poems to music and sings them, to the accompaniment of a lyre. No musician has taught her, but love itself, the best of instructors.”
This is a graffito found on the exterior walls of what most probably was an inn, located in the Roman city of Pompeii: “Vibius Restitutus slept here, alone, and longed for his Urbana.”
This letter is written from one brother to another; the writer lived in Greco-Roman Egypt in the second century A.D., and his brother was a tribune in the Roman army. Their mother was recently widowed. “Sempronius to his brother Maximus very many greetings. Before everything I pray that you are well. I have been informed that you serve our mother and lady grudgingly. I beg you, sweetest brother, do not grieve her in anything. And if any of our brothers gainsay her, you ought to cuff them; for you now ought to take the name of father. I know that without my writing you are able to humor her, but do not be offended by my letter of admonition; for we ought to revere our mother as a goddess, especially one as good as ours. This I have written to you, brother, because I know how sweet a possession our revered parents are. Goodbye, brother.”
