Homosexuality Ancient Rome

Homosexuality Ancient Rome

N.S. Gill is a Latinist, writer, and teacher of ancient history and Latin. She has been featured by NPR and National Geographic for her ancient history expertise.

Gill, N.S. "Male Sexuality in Ancient Rome." ThoughtCo, Feb. 16, 2021, thoughtco.com/standard-roman-sexuality-112735.
Gill, N.S. (2021, February 16). Male Sexuality in Ancient Rome. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/standard-roman-sexuality-112735
Gill, N.S. "Male Sexuality in Ancient Rome." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/standard-roman-sexuality-112735 (accessed July 1, 2022).

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Our modern preoccupation with sexuality has depended on a distinction between homo- and hetero-. That gender-changing operation and other, less dramatic transgender behavior are blurring our neat borders should help us understand the very different Roman attitudes. Today you can have a lesbian who was born a man and a gay male who was born a woman or a male in prison who behaves in ways that to the outside world appear homosexual, but to the prison, the community does not, alongside the more traditional homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual roles.

Instead of today's gender orientation, ancient Roman (and Greek) sexuality can be dichotomized as passive and active. The socially preferred behavior of a male was active; the passive part aligned with the female.

But before I go further, let me stress: this is an oversimplification .

To be an ancient Roman male in good standing meant you initiated penetrating acts of sex. Whether you did this with a female or a male, enslaved or free person, wife or prostitute, made little difference—as long as you were not on the receiving end, so to speak. Certain people were off-limits, though, and among them were free youths. This was a change from the Greek attitude which, again to simplify, condoned such behavior in the context of a learning environment. The ancient Greek education of its youth had begun as training in the arts necessary for battle. Since physical fitness was the goal, education took place in a gymnasium (where physical training was in the buff). Over time the education came to encompass more academic parts, but instruction in how to be a valuable member of the polis continued. Often this included having an older male take a younger (post-pubescent, but still unbearded) one under his wing -- with all that entailed.

For the ancient Romans, who claimed to have adopted other "passive" behaviors from the ancient Greeks , free youths were untouchable. Since adolescents were still appealing, Roman males gratified themselves with youthful enslaved people. It's thought that in the baths (in many ways, successors to the Greek gymnasia), freedmen wore a talisman around their necks to make it clear their naked bodies were untouchable.

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One of the best ways to visit an ancient city is to understand how life is nowadays and how it was long time ago…
The tour starts at the Oppian Hill, one of the famous Seven Hills of Rome. From above, you will see a beautiful view on the Colosseum. Afterwards we will visit the Colosseum with our skip-the-line tickets.
Get stunned by the amazing structure and discover about the history of the Colosseum and its protagonists the Roman Soldiers .
According to history, it is well known that these soldiers needed to show their self-discipline not only during a battle but also during their everyday life. In fact Augustus , considered first Emperor, did not allow soldiers to get married but they had to follow some sexual habits: having sex with prostitutes of any gender or with male slaves; war rapes and having same-sex relations were permitted.
Our guide will tell you the life inside the most famous monument in the world: the famous fights between gladiators. Then, we will have a little break at the Arch of Constantine , erected by the Roman Senate to commemorate Constantine’s victory over Maxentius.
From there, we reach the Palatine Hill, the most famous of the seven hills of Rome and where Romulus and Remus were found by the she-wolf. We can see the Imperial Fora and the Circus Maximus which was an ancient Roman chariot-racing stadium.
Nero was the last Roman Emperor of the dynasty founded by Augustus. Some stories about his sexuality had been recorded by some writers like Suetonius. These stories relate (“Nero”, 28-9) how Nero used to enjoy sexual relationships with men. He married Sporus and he treated him as a wife. Nero was also related to Doryphorus, assuming a passive role with him.
Then we take a walk along Via Sacra , the main street of ancient Rome, where we will find the Temple of Caesar , the site where he was cremated.
Julius Caesar was a Roman politician and military leader, he was known for having an affair with the king of Bithynia, from which he was referred as the “Queen of Bithynia”. Also some tellings say that when he won the battle against the Gauls the soldiers sang “Caesar may have conquered the Gauls, but Nicomedes conquered Caesar” and he was also known as “Every woman’s man and every man’s woman”
We will also see Piazza Venezia and the Pantheon during the tour.
We suggest you to have lunch at the Coming Out, near the Colosseum, in the gay area of Rome .
For reservations from 5 people on, please write to booking@quiiky.com or call +39 02 78622532 (from Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 18:00 UTC+1) for a taylor-made offer.
15 minutes before beginning the tour
A tour to discover how the Homosexuality in the Ancient Rome was and what Romans used to think about that according to the historical remains.
Our Gay Friendly guide will take you on a tour that will unveil the secrets of the past.
Most of the time, Romans used to write about love for instance:
Ovid (43 B.C.E.-17 C.E.) talked about “a boy or a girl” ( aut puer aut … puella ) or Lucretius (94-55 B.C.E.) didn’t determine: “whether boy or woman” ( sive puer … seu mulier ) was a love of him.
Visit the most beautiful attractions of the Eternal City !
We will meet at the entry of Metro stop called “Colosseo”.
We will wait you with our signage, the Quiiky logo and your name written below. Since it is a walking tour around the city we won’t take any bus.
Fantastic company to work with. Very easy and simple…..and good value. Will definitely book with them again!
It was easy to schedule our tour. Everything was explained in great detail, so there was no confusion on the day of the excursion. The vans were spotless and comfortable. Our guide for the Colosseum was exceptional in every way. He was cute, knowledgeable, witty, flexible and engaging. We met so wonderful folks and shared a wonderful lunch with the guys from our group. Could not have been happier with Quiiky.
Do you think you know everything? Untoldhistory is a range of tours tied to a single narrative strand that will take you on a journey through the hidden truths that lie behind the famous people of the past and their deeds or their art. By important leaders up to photographers of our time to find the deepest roots of the LGBT culture.
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Historical Views of Homosexuality: Roman Empire
Historical Views of Homosexuality: Roman Empire
Thomas K. Hubbard Thomas K. Hubbard Department of Classics, The University of Texas at Austin
Subjects Groups and Identities History and Politics

Copyright © Oxford University Press
2022.

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Politics. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
The practice and social construction of homosexual relations in the Roman Empire were particularly important as the immediate background to the early Christian and patristic responses that determined the widespread suppression of same-sex behavior in subsequent Western civilization; this suppression was already manifest in influential Roman legal texts of late antiquity. Although to some degree influenced by earlier Greek and Etruscan models, particularly in the realms of literature and art, Roman culture evolved its own distinctive set of practices and moral responses. Whereas classical Greek elites exalted voluntary pederastic relations between adult males and freeborn adolescents, framing them within a pedagogical context, Romans viewed any form of passivity as unmanly and fundamentally incompatible with the conquering warrior ethos required by the expansionist Roman state. Hence, pederastic attentions were legitimate only when directed toward current or former slaves. Despite the coercive character of such relations, they sometimes became tender and affectionate, leading to the favored slave’s manumission and even inheritance of property.
While literary references in Augustan-era poets like Vergil, Horace, and Tibullus are decorous and idealizing after the Greek style, the treatment of homosexuality in much Roman literature is markedly different, manifesting an anatomical frankness and obscenity seldom found in Greek texts outside of Attic comedy. Accusations of the most extravagant sexual depravity became commonplace in political rhetoric of the late Republic and escalated in the many defamatory biographical accounts of Rome’s emperors, most of whom engendered posthumous infamy from patrician critics. Whether true or not, such accounts contributed to popular perceptions of a hedonistic ruling class more innured to pleasure than the public good.
Not surprisingly, Rome evolved a strong tradition of morally inflected satire and ethical critique of homosexual indulgence. In the early period, this took the form of treating it as a foreign, Greek-inspired vice. More serious was the philosophical response of later Roman Stoicism, which advocated a highly restrictive sexual economy and sought to liberate the soul from enslavement to appetitive desires, particularly if not tied to the providential demands of Nature. Other sources, however, regarded same-sex desire as itself a manifestation of inborn dispositions, and Roman imperial literature features several polarized debates between advocates of boys and women as superior objects of sexual affect, presaging modern conceptions of sexual identity.
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