Sex In Roman Times

Sex In Roman Times
Sheila is determined to help Christians find BIBLICAL, HEALTHY, EVIDENCE-BASED help for their marriage. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8

Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 29 years and happily married for 24! She loves traveling around North America with her hubby in their RV, giving her signature "Girl Talk" about sex and marriage. And she's written 7 books. About sex and marriage. See a theme here? Plus she knits. Even in line at the grocery store.
Copyright 2008-2020 Sheila Wray Gregoire. Images via Getty Images.
I’d like to spend April doing some romps through history looking at how we’ve seen libido, the role of sex in marriage and culture, women’s sexuality, and more. Sometimes we get to assuming that our way of thinking about sex is just “the way things are”, and just “that’s the way our bodies are made.”
But when we see from other points in history that it actually wasn’t assumed to be that way, then we can understand how much our culture has also played a role in shaping how we see sex!
I picked that time period because that was the culture into which Paul was writing, and in which Jesus was living (though Jesus focused more on the Jewish culture of His day than the Roman side of it). That can help illuminate what Paul may have meant by different passages that he wrote about sex, too!
I asked Connor to comb through the history sites and books on hand and find out a few facts that we may not realize about how the Romans saw sex! Now, Connor wants you all to know that he’s not a historian, but he only including stuff here if he found it from multiple sources! So let’s take a look at 8 things he discovered, and then I have a big overarching thought I want to share.
But first, here are my girls in front of the colosseum several years ago!
In certain periods of Roman history, visiting a prostitute was considered normative for men, even if they were married, so long as it was a legitimate establishment. Brothels would often be located near upper class residences for convenience.
While prostitution was common, it was not prestigious. Being a prostitute carried a negative stigma with it, but prostitutes were not alone in this. Any profession where one made a living by using their body to entertain was in the same category as prostitution. This included stage actors and gladiators.
Sexual gratification was considered to be reserved for the husband in a relationship. For wives, their consolation prize was the opportunity to produce offspring. Wives were also expected to remain faithful while allowing their husbands to philander with any unmarried and agreeing women or boys they desired.
The Romans did not look at people in terms of sexuality, but in terms of sexual roles. So long as a man was only ever the penetrat or , and never the penetrat ed, he was still considered strong and masculine. But in the eyes of the Romans, if a man was on the receiving end he was adopting the role of the woman, and was reviled as effeminate.
Because sex was generally framed in this dynamic of dominant and submissive roles, which carried social implications and ramifications, power differentials were baked into the fabric of sexual life. A man with status had a lot of license to engage in sexual liaisons outside of his marriage with anyone who held a lower place in society. In fact it is generally the most powerful people in Roman society who have the longest list of varied exploits and specific fetishes. Even wealthy women are reported to have had sexual appetites for lower-order men like dancers and gladiators.
Our family in the stadium in Ephesus in 2012.
Most of the knowledge we have about sex in Roman culture is from the viewpoint of wealthier, upper-class citizens, since they were more likely to be literate, to have the time and inclination to write, and to have other people care enough to preserve their writings. The image we sometimes get from these accounts is that everyone was having sex with everything all the time right out in the streets. But there is historical evidence suggesting that many of the common people looked down on the sexual debauchery of the higher classes, and that the non-wealthy majority had far more reserved sexual practices. Which makes a kind of sense. If extramarital sex is reserved mostly for using those far below you in social status, then people at the bottom of the hierarchy would not have the same array of sexual outlets.
As much as sex involved power differentials, rape was strictly prohibited, and victims (either male or female) were found blameless, and received no stigma. In fact, rape was one of the few things automatically punishable by execution, with no statute of limitations. All of this being said, of course, with one major caveat: It only applied to the rape of Roman citizens in good standing. If a slave was raped, it was charged as property damage, with reparations paid to the slave-owner.
There are plenty of rumors and myths about ancient sex toys, including the idea that Cleopatra would fill a vessel with bees and use it as a vibrator, but the source of these stories are often iffy (and Rebecca says–“I seriously hope that’s not true, because that is one part of my anatomy I would not want anywhere near bees!”). With the Greco-Romans, though, there are plenty of illustrations and literary mentions of–how shall we put this?– things which mimic the male anatomy 🙂 . They could be made a number of ways, including stuffed leather, stone, and even carefully shaped bread! Since the culture only conceived of sex as a penetrative act, the expectation was still that whoever assumed the female role was going to at some point need to have something penetrating them.
Sex was about power, and about animal appetites, and even about spirituality or attaining a new state of being. But it wasn’t about cementing intimacy in the way that we would think today.
It isn’t only that upper class Romans were promiscuous (we know less about the lower classes!), but that this idea of an intimate marriage is somehow missing. Marriage was a contract of convenience that allowed property rights and status, but not relationship.
And when intimacy is divorced from sex, then ideas like power take over.
That’s a good reminder to us of the gift that we have in our heritage–that sex is an ultimate “knowing”, as it’s talked about in Genesis 4. Sure, we may have gotten that really messed up, and the Old Testament patriarchs certainly were not great examples of real intimacy. But we see in the Bible these glimpses of how things were supposed to be.
When sex is focused on power, ugly things happen and intimacy flees. That’s a good lesson from the Romans. And tomorrow, let’s see how Paul’s words about sex, written to this culture, would have rocked them!
Does anything stand out to you? What do you think our biggest similarities are? Let’s talk in the comments!
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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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Winifred Mary Beard, OBE, FBA, FSA is an English Classical scholar. She is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College, and Royal Academy of[…]
Cambridge professor and author Mary Beard explores the mythical sex stories of the Roman Empire, before she lays down the realities.
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One thing is well known about Ancient Rome – it was a sexually free time, where Emperors had mind-boggling orgies, sex competitions, and halls and vases were covered in erotic artwork.
What is known about the free-wheeling sexual environment of the Roman Empire comes mostly from the artists and writers of the time, and while the stories are usually fantastical and hilarious (or terrifying) Mary Beard, author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome and professor of classics University of Cambridge, points out that it is not known how historically accurate these erotic visualizations were. They could easily have happened only in the artists’ imaginations – or perhaps they were based on a seed of truth, or perhaps they’re entirely true certain Romans really were alarmingly kinky. The writer or artist inflating a fantasy is not a far-fetched idea, it’s still done today – look at sexualized anime or manga, or the darker corners of Deviant Art. People draw out or create things from their imaginations that they wish could happen, in a small form of self-gratification. While it may have been harder to do so on the side of a clay pot with only rudimental Ancient Roman engraving technology to help, it is still doable, and artists had the time to make it all work. Such was their commitment to the cause. Bravo. So while the veracity of the more grandiose sex myths of the Roman Empire are up for debate, what we can be sure of is that men generally did enjoy a free-flowing sexual lifestyle, possessing both male and female concubines for entertainment, and sleeping with slaves or mistresses on the sides of their marriage, as they desired. Women, on the other hand, had significantly less sexual freedom than their husbands. While Ancient Rome was still more free-thinking than other cultures of its time, there were nonetheless clear boundaries for the genders. It was a married couple’s duty to have children and further the family name. As sex and cultural critic Dan Savage pointed out , men have generally always been allowed to stray from marriage, especially in Ancient Rome. Women were not allowed such freedom, and the prime reason there was ego and lineage, as the husband had to make sure whatever children he was raising were actually his children, and not the wife’s bit play thing. To combat this persistent fear about the authenticity of a son, the possibility of there ever being a play thing was simply wiped out, and the polygamist culture became a strictly one-sided practice. If anything can be said, at least today’s culture is marginally more equal in its expectation of monogamy than in Ancient Rome. Mary Beard’s book is SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome .
Mary Beard: Sex is one of the things that has always absolutely enticed us about the Roman Empire. And the Roman Empire is always represented as the place where people did frightful things and where in a sense there were no sexual rules. Anything went. Everybody had a good time. And there are indeed wonderful stories about the excesses of Roman emperors and their wives. One of everybody’s favorites is the story of the Roman Emperor Tiberius who used to go off to his villa in Capri where he had a great swimming pool. And he had specially trained little boys who swam underwater while the emperor was swimming and nibbled his genitals. And he called them his little minnows. And it wasn’t just the emperors. There was a very famous Roman Empress Messalina who’s the wife of a slightly doddery old emperor Claudius. And she was supposed to have challenged the prostitutes of Rome to a competition to see how many men they could sleep with in a single night. And of course Messalina beat all the prostitutes.
Now some of this might be going on some of this but I suspect that just as those kind of exploits of Roman emperors are all fantasies, can we think of the most amazing things that people can get up to. So also they would have fantasies of Roman writers too when they kind of invented these stories about people in power. And, you know, I think there are very, very important differences between ancient sexual behavior and our own. But not quite so clearly in the level of absolute excess. And I think for a woman the biggest thing, the biggest difference you’d see is a complete double standard. That’s to say in an ordinary Roman household the woman was expected to be absolutely faithful to her husband, no sex with anyone else. The husband it was quite all right for him to sleep with the slaves, male and female, anybody he fancied. There was no such restraint on him. And of course that relates in a way back to basic anxieties and worries of a very patriarchal community such as Rome.
But the man’s anxiety was always that his wife’s child was really his. So you make sure that your wife sleeps with nobody else. But as for you it really doesn’t matter. And I think one of the bleakest places actually that you can go to in the whole of Roman world now is the one surviving purpose built brothel in Pompeii. That’s certainly a brothel, there’s absolutely no mistaking it. You walk into the front door, there’s five little cubicles, narrow, dark, just a single bed in them. Sort of wide single bed. And one lavatory out the back. And very crude but erotic paintings all over the walls. And it’s the biggest tourist attraction naturally now in Pompeii and people go in and they tend to think of their clients coming here and visiting, choosing which girl to have. And there’s lots of graffiti on the walls explaining in quite graphic detail what they got up to, what kind of good time they had. And I go in and I think gosh, you know, some people were working here. The working girls were spending their life attending to the sexual freedom, allowing the sexual freedom of the male population while they lived in what was essentially a cupboard – dark, gloomy cupboard. I think it’s quite an eye opener when it comes to ancient sexual norms which is a bit more down to earth than the sexual exploits of Roman emperors and their wives.

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Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies , blogger, author, and book reviewer.
Whatever else you know about the Bible, I’m sure you know this: It lays out a sexual ethic that displays God’s intent in creating sexuality and that challenges humanity to live in ways consistent with it. Yet today we are experiencing a sexual revolution that has seen society deliberately throwing off the Christian sexual ethic. Things that were once forbidden are now celebrated. Things that were once considered unthinkable are now deemed natural and good. Christians are increasingly seen as backward, living out an ancient, repressive, irrelevant morality.

But this is hardly the first time Christians have lived out a sexual ethic that clashed with the world
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Sex In Roman Times

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