by León, Vicki
Equally fascinating are the other facts Mayor has assembled. Sixteen years after Mithradates’ death, Julius Caesar came to the Black Sea region. At the coastal city of Amisus in Pontus, he supposedly freed a prisoner of war named Hypsicrates, who, as the Oxford Classical Dictionary says, “may have served Caesar … as Theophanes served Pompey.” As a historian, in other words.
This man Hypsicrates was alleged to have written various works on Pontus and the kingdom of the Bosporus. So far the works haven’t turned up, but Hypsicrates is quoted by various historians, including Strabo, Josephus, and Lucian of Samosata.
As a piquant P.S., in a work attributed to Lucian, called Macrobii (Long Lives), is a sentence that reads: “Hypsicrates of Amisenum, the historian, who mastered many sciences, lived to be ninety-two.”
Empress Messalina:
Lost her head over excess husbands
On both sides of her family tree she was a Julian—that was the blue-blooded claim that eventually gained Valeria Messalina the title of Roman empress in the first century A.D. It didn’t hurt that she possessed a hot little tush and a way to look seductive and adoring by turns. Fertile Valeria had luck in her pregnancies, too, first giving birth to a girl and, a year later, to a healthy boy—a result eagerly desired in royal circles.
In A.D. 39, Messalina, all of fourteen or fifteen years old, had married the man thought to be a stuttering, drooling fool by almost everyone, including his closest relatives: Claudius, a Julio-Claudian and a grandson of Livia, Rome’s first empress.
Just a few months before Messalina gave birth to her son, another stroke of luck occurred: Caligula, the nephew of Claudius, was bloodily assassinated. Afterward, the Praetorian Guard found Uncle Claudius hiding behind the drapes in the palace, and acclaimed him their emperor. Everyone was stupefied—but everyone went along with it, Messalina as well.
The now-elated third wife of Claudius, a gray-haired man in his mid-forties, Messalina had to admit that he actually seemed brilliant some days. Two years after his accession, Claudius and his army invaded Britain and conquered it—something that the sainted Julius Caesar had been unable to do, despite strenuous efforts. Since expectations for Claudius had been so low, his feats as emperor were praised all the more.
It deeply pleased Messalina that Claudius spent so much time meeting with senators or conferring with his advisers, most of them freedmen and eunuchs, or fussing about, writing his excruciatingly long history of the Etruscans. That gave her plenty of time for self-expression. Messalina loved sex and exploring the naked truth about her own desires. Claudius went to bed early, allowing her ample time to select one of her golden wigs, gild her nipples, and put on a wanton outfit to hit Rome’s brothels as “the she-wolf.”
Messalina, whose ambition and sex drive matched her beauty, became a mother and later an empress by marrying Claudius.
She cosied up to her husband’s own confidential freedmen, eventually using them to arrange her assignations. One night, she might command them to organize an orgy; another, to bring her an actor or two to warm her bed. Once she ordered them to identify the most infamous whore in Rome. Messalina then challenged her to a contest of sexual acts. Which wanton woman could service the most men in a twenty-four-hour period? Messalina beat the professional, having sex with twenty-five men.
Then something untoward occurred: she genuinely fell in love with someone. His name was Gaius Silius, a nobleman next in line to become consul of Rome.
Emperor Claudius gamely married four women, unlucky matches all. Pictured on the cameo above are Claudius and Agrippina the Younger, the spouse who would see to his fatal demise.
In the fall of A.D. 48, she did the most outrageous thing she had yet dared: she forced her lover to divorce his own wife, then publicly married the man while Claudius was out of town. As she and the members of her drunken wedding party whirled in bacchant frenzy, the watchful freedmen who up until then had concealed her lascivious ways sold her out. They informed the emperor of her actions—and provided a list of her sexual partners.
Claudius, more frightened of conspiracies than enraged at his pretty young wife, immediately asked, “Am I still emperor?”
Messalina thought it would be child’s play to once again win Claudius over; she’d done it so many times already. But the emperor’s top freedmen were having none of it. They kept her from Claudius and sent executioners, who cut off her lovely head in her beautiful gardens that very night.
The name of this imperial orgy queen received a damnatio memoriae from the Roman senate, an official act that meant that the words “Valeria Messalina” would be immediately chiseled off all her statues and inscriptions in the realm.
Her promiscuity was bad enough. But her downfall was the illicit marriage and the political coup it could have represented. Her faithless behavior represented a failure of control on Claudius’s part. An emperor who could not keep his own house in order would surely fail to keep his empire in order.
Poor luckless Claudius; despite his stature as a ruler and as a fairly decent human being, he would have four wives in his life, none of them his comfort and joy.
Orgasms:
The climax of the mating game—& life
Greek and Roman mythology can be disheartening. What terrible role models most of the ancient deities were! Whether goddess or mortal, the women in those early soap operas were often subjected to bestiality, rape, infidelity, and incest, with little say-so about their own bodies.
But then we encounter Teiresias the Greek soothsayer (more on him in a prior entry), who becomes a woman as well as a man during the course of his mythical life. As such, he learns firsthand that mortal females have been granted an extraordinary gift: the lion’s share of sensual pleasure, so potent that it measures nine times that which mortal males feel.
As we now know, this lovely tale is no myth. Scientists in the twenty-first century have discovered that female orgasms have shock-and-awe Olympian powers. Besides the ability to reach the heights multiple times, a woman with the right partner may experience what’s called sustained orgasm, her body contracting pleasurably for many seconds.
Despite the encouraging example of Teiresias, at first glance it appears that neither Greek nor Roman mortals got the message about fully pleasuring their women. As the entries in this book reveal, most females had restricted freedom, zero sexual initiation, and romance-free arranged marriages. Other entries reveal the mind-boggling male ignorance of female biology—plus masculine insistence on penetrative intercourse as the only road to satisfying sex.
This brutish trend was exacerbated by any number of Greek and Roman writers who specialized in invective and sexual aggression to engage their readers, a gratuitous nastiness that reduced the private parts of men and women to acts of degradation.
But there are clues to the more satisfying, loving side of Greco-Roman life if we look carefully enough.
In researching this book, I’ve found evidence of abiding adoration in countless marriages. I’ve stumbled on the fierce fidelity and passion that kindled many a relationship between males, and learned of lesbian couples who bonded and loved long-term, just as they do today.
Good fortune has left us with written evidence as to how certain men felt about their wives, from the touching inscriptions on the tombs of long-wedded partners to the words of ones cruelly separated by a mate’s early death.
For instance, the words of Pliny the Younger, an aristocratic orator and author, in a letter to his wife, Cornelia: “I am seized by an unbelievable longing for you. The reason is above all my love, but secondarily the fact that we are not used to being apart.”
Another example, a humble graffito left on a Pompeian wall: “Methe of Atella, slave of Cominia, is in love with Chrestus. May Venus of Pompeii [patron goddess of the city] be propitious to them with all her heart, and may they live in concord.”
Males in cultures around the Mediterranean had (and still have) a sensual appreciation for life. At times they eroticall
y admired masculine youth, the epitome of what they used to be. They also had a special gleam in their eyes for that glorious creature, the female of the species.
Thus love and orgasmic fulfillment could be found in other relationships besides marriage. Take the example of Ovid, often called the last and greatest of Roman love poets. He pursued erotic rapport as wholeheartedly as he pursued poetry. And wrote about the happy result. Married three times while giving the conquest-a-night playboys of Rome a run for their money, he put the highest priority on the feminine right to derive pleasure from acts of intimacy.
He knew, as did the ancient Egyptians, that orgasm was the source of life, a sacred act that also allowed men and women to experience life, and love, in a more stunning and complete way. As he put it, “Let the woman feel the sexual urgency, released from the very depths of her marrow, and let that be equally pleasing to both.”
Another clue I’ve run across regarding long-ago beliefs in sexual completion comes from the Latin language itself. Rather than one word, the Romans had two beautiful terms for orgasm. They called it delecto for the pleasure a woman experienced when her lover delivered that gift to her. And they used the word voluptas (from which comes our word voluptuous) to describe the explosion of joy felt by the man at his climax.
Ovid also had bisexual relationships but evidently preferred women, as his extant writings show. His loving advice about sharing the joy of orgasm, however, could just as easily been aimed at same-sex couples. Being a man of his time—that is, a regular at the circus racetrack and athletic competitions—he couched his words in sports metaphors: “But don’t you fail your lady, hoisting bigger sails, and don’t let her get ahead of you on the track either. Race to the finish together; that’s when pleasure is full, when man and woman lie there, equally vanquished.”
The Romans had a Latin word for it: delecto, the pleasure that a woman reached when her lover delivered sweet release to her.
Bibliography
Curious history buffs, be forewarned: A vast haystack of material from ancient times has survived, with more coming to light periodically. The sheer size and geographic disarray of this historical haystack is daunting. The study needed to understand the context of what you’re reading as well as get a rough sense of its trustworthiness is equally challenging. Nevertheless, the quest is worth the eyestrain.
Primary sources for this book include Aristophanes; Arrian; Athenaeus; Aulus Gellius; Cicero, especially his letters; Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers; Dio Cassius; Diodorus Siculus; Euripides; Galen; Herodian; Herodotus; Hesiod; Josephus; Juvenal; Livy; Lucian; Lucretius; Martial; Ovid; Pausanias’ Description of Greece; Petronius; Phlegon’s Book of Marvels; Plato; the works and letters of Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger; Plutarch’s Lives and Moralia; Seneca; Strabo’s Geography; Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars; Tacitus; Xenophon; playwrights and poets Aesop, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Apuleius, Catullus, Hesiod, Horace, Menandar, Pindar, Plautus, Sappho, and Sophocles. These works and more can be found in the Loeb Classical Library collection published by Harvard University Press. In recent years, Pantheon Books has begun publishing its Landmark editions of Herodotus, Xenophon, and Thucydides, with others in the pipeline. Highly recommended.
Other priceless material comes from ancient coins, period artwork, and a cornucopia of archaeological sources; from primary and secondary sources online, as noted elsewhere in this section; and from letters, inscriptions, and primary-source compilations found in books such as Shelton’s As the Romans Did, Pompeii’s Erotic Songbook, and the Loeb Library two-volume set called Select Papyri, translated by Hunt and Edgar.
The following resources (most of them secondary) offer a variety of facts, theories, perspectives, and visuals on love, lust, and longing and the stories of long-ago men and women who felt those emotions. Since sexual subject matter is often a high-voltage topic, what is presented as fact in a given book may at times be rife with prejudice and opinion. Whether you’re examining primary or secondary sources, keep in mind what noted author and distinguished historian Michael Grant had to say in his 1995 book, Greek & Roman Historians, Information and Misinformation:” The one thing certain about history is that what we are told is by no means always true.”
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Johnson, Marguerite, and Ryan, Terry. Sexuality in Greek and Roman Society and Literature. (Routledge, 2005.)
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Keuls, Eva. The Reign of the Phallus. (Harper & Row, 1985.)
Kraemer, Ross, ed. Maenads, Martyrs, Matrons, Monastics. (Fortress Press, 1988.)
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Licht, Hans. Sexual Life in Ancient Greece. (Covici Friede Publishers, 1932.)
Longrigg, James. Greek Medicine from the Heroic to the Hellenistic Age: A Source Book. (Routledge, 1998.)
Luck, Georg. Arcana Mundi. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.)
Maines, Rachel. The Technology of Orgasm. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.)
Majno, Guido. The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World. (Harvard University Press, 1975.)
Matyszak, Philip. Gladiator, the Roman Fighters’ (Unofficial) Guide. (Thames & Hudson, 2011.)
__________. Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day. (Thames & Hudson, 2008.)
__________. Ancient Athens on Five Drachmas a Day. (Thames & Hudson, 2008.)
Mayor, Adrienne. The Poison King. (Princeton University Press, 2010.)
__________. Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs
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Percy, William A. Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece. (University of Illinois Press, 1996.)
Richlin, Amy. The Garden of Priapus. (Oxford University Press, 1992.)
__________. Richlin, ed. Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome. (Oxford University Press, 1992.)
Riddle, John. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. (Harvard University Press, 1992.)
Roach, Mary. Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. (W. W. Norton, 2008.)
Salmonson, Jessica A. The Encyclopedia of Amazons. (Anchor/Doubleday, 1991.)
Scholz, Piotr. Eunuchs and Castrati. (Markus Weiner Publishers, 2001.)
Shelton, Joanne. As the Romans Did: a Sourcebook in Roman Social History. (Oxford University Press, 1988.)
Smith, William. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, second ed. (Little, Brown, 1859.) Most of the Roman entries are also available, searchable, and annotated with acerbic wit online at Bill Thayer’s LacusCurtius website. Another by Smith, also recommended: A New Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology, and Geography. (Harper & Brothers, 1888.)
