Male lions don’t desire male lions, because lions don’t do philosophy.
ps-Lucian, c. 4th century ad
Sex in the ancient world
In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes tells a story about the origins of human beings. According to his myth, humans descend from creatures who had spherical bodies, genitals on the outside, four hands and feet, two faces each, and were divided into three genders: one group had two male genitals; the second group had two female genitals; and the third group, hermaphrodites, had one of each. Over time, the creatures became arrogant and uppity. To punish them, Zeus split them in two. In that state, they clung to their other halves, dying from hunger and self-neglect because ‘they did not like to do anything apart’. Zeus took pity on them, and invented a new plan, moving their genitals so that they could have sexual relations with each other. Each of us is a half of a human being, and each seeks his or her other half. Men who are split from the hermaphrodite desire women; women who descend from a female creature ‘do not care for men, but have female attachments’; and men who are split from a male body prefer to pursue males, and in their boyhood ‘enjoy lying with
and embracing men… because they have the most manly nature, and… rejoice in what is like themselves’.
Aristophanes’ speech became a famous myth of origin, but what does it mean? At first sight, it seems to suggest that the ancient Greeks thought that some people desired only members of their own sex. Many classicists disagree, however, and point out that it is not for nothing that Plato has Aristophanes, the comic poet who is always coming up with the most outrageous, playfully ironic, and ultimately absurd suggestions such as a parliament of birds or women entering politics, tell this story. Certainly, for most Graeco-Romans, the idea of classifying people according to the gender of the person they have sex with would have seemed downright bizarre. Antiquity was not a culture of sexual libertarianism. Sexual morality was highly regulated by moral and legal rules. However, moral preoccupations centred on sexual practices, not on the subject of desire. The ancients did not make sense of themselves in terms of sexual identities, whereas the policing of gender identity was of central importance to them, as we shall see. Consider the contrast with the ways in which modern subjects make sense of their sexual experiences. Categories such as heterosexual and homosexual are a central source upon which we draw in order to make sense of our own sexuality. It is in this sense that the classical world has been described as a world ‘before sexuality’ by historians such as Michel Foucault, Paul Veyne,
David Halperin, or John Winkler. The ways in which sex was conceptualized and the cultural meanings that were attached to it were radically different from today.
Sexual culture was far from homogeneous across the ancient world. Substantial regional and historical variations existed, which cannot be done justice to in the format of the present short introduction. In this section, therefore, we will concentrate primarily on classical Athens and Rome. Taking a closer look at the ways in which ancient Athenians and Romans made sense of sex will provide a useful backdrop and contrast against which
we can draw out critical questions about sex in the modern world.
Classical Athenian sexual culture must be located in its social and political context. Greek society was based on the political and social rule of a small elite of adult male citizens; citizen women and children occupied a socially subordinate position and had no political rights, and immigrants and slaves had no citizenship status. More precisely, Athenian women had the status of minors and were always under legal guardianship of a male relative. Reflecting the social power of male citizens, sexual culture was organized around male pleasure. The ancients adopted a phallocentric notion of sex, defined exclusively as penetration. While kisses, caresses, and forms of touching other than penetration were considered expressions of love, they were not considered part of the sexual domain. Sex was thus not construed in relational terms, as a shared experience reflecting emotional intimacy, but as something — penetration — done to someone else. The physical pleasure, or indeed collaboration, of the partner was broadly considered to be irrelevant. Men were encouraged to use penetrative sex for domination and control of the submissive partner. Sex reflected social and political relations of power, since men performed their social status as citizens in the arenas of war, politics, and sex.
Sexual culture was closely intertwined with notions of sex and gender. Medical knowledge of the time saw bodies as fragile, consisting of liquids in a precarious balance affected by age, diet, and lifestyle. Ageing and, ultimately, death was understood as a process of cooling and drying out of the body. Consequently, cultural preoccupations emerged with diet and other ways of maintaining a healthy equilibrium of fluids within the body. Following Galen, the 2nd-century ad Roman author of medical treatises, gender was similarly understood as a fluid state. Men were seen as active, hot, and strong; women as passive, weak, damp, and cold, losing body heat and vital energy through leakage
such as menstruation, and robbing men of their heat and energy through sex. Sex itself was conceptualized as involving heating of the body. Aesthetically, the Greeks seem to have had a preference for male bodies with puny penises, with the added benefit that they were less at risk in war.
As the historian Thomas Laqueur has pointed out, the classical model of gender involved a ‘one-sex model’: since gender was understood as fluid, men risked becoming more feminized if they lost heat, while women could become more like men if their bodies heated up. The psychological consequence of such beliefs was that gender did not appear as a stable, biological characteristic, but as an identity that was potentially under threat. Men risked feminization when losing vital body heat, as they might during excessive amounts of sexual intercourse with cold female bodies and loss of liquids through ejaculation. While sex was thought necessary for good health, too much of it was thus considered dangerous for men. In contrast, women’s cold, moist bodies needed male sexual heat to compensate for their lack of vitality. Even more crucially, women needed the liquidity of seed in order to keep the womb stable (which the Hippocratic school of medicine believed to be free-floating), so that it didn’t wander off in search of moisture elsewhere in the woman’s body and end up suffocating her.
Such medical beliefs were reflected in the view held by the ancient Graeco-Romans that all women were by nature oversexed, as echoed in the myth of Tiresias, which is best known in the version in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid tells the story of the man Tiresias who was, for seven years, transformed into a woman by the gods, before reverting back to his male body. Having experienced sex both as a man and as a woman, Tiresias was later asked to settle a dispute between the god Zeus and his wife Hera as to whether it is men or women whose sexual pleasure is more intense. When he declared that it was women, Hera struck him blind in retaliation for having given away this female secret.
Considered inferior creatures to men, women were seen as lacking the male capacity for sexual self-control. Female sexuality was therefore dangerous, since women’s sexual voracity could exhaust men or, worse, turn them into women. In a society where the social and civic status of women was extremely low, male anxieties centred on the need to stabilize masculinity by establishing and policing gender boundaries. Male gender identity was fragile, since masculinity was not founded on the possession of a male body (because the body was seen as unstable and at risk of slipping into femininity), but on the aggressive performance of masculinity in everyday life, including in the sphere of sexual interactions. In defending one’s masculinity against potential attacks, male sexual performance, rather than male sexual desire, was central. Flagging of male lust was consequently seen as a humiliating failure of masculinity, and was a frequent source of comedy in novels and plays. In one of the best-known passages on male sexual misfortune in classical literature, the hero of Petronius’s Roman novel Satyricon, Encolpius, attempts to have sex with the beautiful Circe, who has told him he must give up his 16-year-old boyfriend Giton for her, when disaster strikes:
Three times I whip the dreadful weapon out,
And three times softer than a Brussels sprout
I quail, in those dire straits my manhood blunted,
No longer up to what just now I wanted.
As suggested by the medical author Priscianus, erotic imagery was thought to be a cure for declining virility: ‘Let the patient be surrounded by beautiful girls or boys; also give him books to read, which stimulate lust and in which love-stories are insinuatingly treated.’ Failing that, dancing girls, or various aphrodisiac stimulants, catalogued at great length by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, were recommended. More generally, sexual imagery, and especially images of the erect phallus, a symbol of male power used to ward off evil, was present everywhere in everyday life in the ancient world.
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Archaeological evidence suggests that frescoes, wall-paintings, graffiti, and sculptures of the erect phallus and other sexual and fertility imagery would adorn the gardens and homes of wealthy households, as well as everyday household objects such as wind- chimes or pottery. Dildos and other sexual aids are frequently mentioned in ancient literature and depicted on pottery, while didactic sex manuals were popular, as were more general advice books such as the Ars Amatoria by the Roman poet Ovid which contained three books of advice to the prospective lover, followed by his Remedia Amoris which proffered handy tips to those suffering from heartbreak.
Normative ideas of masculinity valued aggressive, dominant behaviour, both in public speaking and in other areas of life, including sexual activity. Masculinity was identified with the active, penetrative sexual role. Sexual desire was seen as normal or deviant in relation to the extent to which it transgressed normative gender roles. Specific practices such as sodomy or masturbation did not give rise to moral anxieties in classical sexual culture. Questions of sexual etiquette centred instead on penetration. Penetration symbolized male as well as social status, but it mattered little whether the penetrated was a woman or a boy. What did matter was who penetrated whom. Penetration was seen as active, submission to penetration as passive. It was considered unnatural and demeaning for a free-born man to desire to be penetrated, since that would reduce him to the socially inferior role of a woman or slave. ‘Proper’ objects of penetration were women, boys, foreigners, and slaves, all categories of people who did not enjoy the same political or social citizenship rights as the free Athenian male citizens. Social status was negotiated around the active/passive distinction, not on the basis of heterosexual/homosexual categorization, which only emerged much later in history.
Rules governing sex were thus structured by the norms of political citizenship. As the classicist David Halperin puts it: ‘Citizenship,
for free Athenian men, was a sexual and gendered concept as well as a political and social one’, and antiquity promoted an ‘ethos of penetration and domination’ which conflated the sexual order with the political and the social order. Antiquity thus did not make a clear distinction between the public, political sphere and the private, sexual sphere. Accusations of sexual impropriety were commonly used weapons against political opponents. This widespread sexual abuse in public discourse could be very explicit, and could have important consequences for the abused, including loss of citizenship. Within the hierarchy of sexual acts, the most demeaning was the accusation of cunnilingus, closely followed by that of fellatio since being penetrated in the mouth by a penis was considered degrading for either man or woman (and therefore best practised with prostitutes or slaves). People from the island of Lesbos had the reputation of engaging in particularly depraved sexual activities. It is thus that for the ancient Greeks, the verb ‘lesbiazein’ meant ‘act like a lesbian’, or more particularly, ‘fellate’, with no gender specificity except for the recipient.
Relationships between men were socially acceptable, common, and widely reflected in the literature, art, and philosophy of the time. Attitudes on male-to-male sex were not homogeneous, however, and disputes on whether desire for young men or for women was superior abounded. Some argued that love for men was superior to that for women, since love between equals was preferable to that for inferior creatures. As the Erotes, an ancient Greek dialogue of uncertain authorship on the respective advantages of love for men and for women, puts it:
Marriage is a remedy devised by the necessity of procreation, but
male love alone must rule the heart of a philosopher.
The text goes on to argue that sex with women serves the natural need for procreation, but that once such basic needs are fulfilled and society develops to a higher stage, men would naturally want
to pursue forms of gratification which were all the more culturally superior for their lack of naturalness:
Just because commerce with women has an older pedigree than that with boys, do not disdain the latter. Let’s remember that the very first discoveries were prompted by need, but those which arose from progress are only the better for it, and worthier of our esteem.
Greek poetry promoted the idea that it was best to have armies composed of male lovers since warriors would fight hardest and be bravest in order to save and impress their lovers — an argument also put forward in Plato’s Symposium. Plato himself, however, was among those who expressed discomfort about male-to-male sex. Most criticism centred on men who enjoyed the passive, submissive role. Such men were seen as soft and effeminate, who were really women in male bodies. By their transgression of the normative models of gender, effeminate, submissive males who voluntarily adopted the socially inferior position of women by offering their bodies to be penetrated were seen as unnatural, and a shocking threat to the social order, in the same way as women who adopted the male role (called tribades).
Given the importance of the penetrative role for male social and political status, relationships between adult men were a source of great anxiety, since one of the partners would have to adopt the submissive role. Relationships with boys solved this problem to some degree, since adolescent men achieved citizenship status only when reaching adult age. Classical culture had a sexual revulsion towards the idea of hair growing on a young man’s cheeks or thighs. Boys were considered sexually desirable from the start of puberty until late adolescence, but stopped being so at the appearance of the beard and pubic hair. Athenians considered love affairs between adult and adolescent males as natural and honourable, on condition that sexual etiquette was respected.
The term used to describe the sexual pursuit of adolescent males by adult males was ‘paederastia’. In stark contrast to modern attitudes towards sex between teachers and students, paederastia was usually conceptualized as a pedagogic and erotic mentoring relationship between an adult male, the ‘erastes’ (lover), and a young, passive ‘pais’ (boy) called the ‘eromenos’ (beloved), usually between 12 and 17-20 years old (though professional teachers and trainers, often former slaves, were not allowed to seduce their students, nor were slaves allowed to seduce young free-born males). Often presented as a normal part of the education of a young man, paederastia institutionalized a relationship in which the mentor instructed the boy in philosophical matters and general knowledge, and prepared him for his citizenship role.
Despite general social acceptance of paederastic relationships, the fact that free-born boys were future citizens entailed a certain degree of moral preoccupation about social status. It was therefore crucial to observe sexual etiquette in this area. In particular, boys were not expected to experience sexual desire in the paederastic relationship. If they conceded sexual favours to the older man, this was expected to be out of ‘philia’ — friendship, respect, and affection for the suitor. It was thought proper that boys should submit only after a respectably long and sometimes expensive courtship. Deriving sexual pleasure from male-to-male sex could open the boy up to accusations of ‘feminine’ shamelessness and ‘less than male behaviour’ (given women’s supposedly voracious appetite for sexual pleasure).
Little material exists on sex between women, and historians of sex in antiquity such as Halperin or Foucault focus almost exclusively on male-to-male sex. The work of the 7th-century bc poet Sappho, born on Lesbos, is one of the rare examples of sources describing intense infatuations and love between women, though little of it survives. Male views of female-to-female sex in antiquity usually mention such practices in disapproving, contemptuous terms or,
alternatively, reflect voyeuristic interest. They habitually imagine women who have sex with women as having an enlarged clitoris similar to a penis, or as adopting the male penetrative role with the aid of strap-on penises.
Although male-to-male sex has been the most intensely debated feature of classical sexual culture, it was part of a much wider landscape of male sexual options, including commercial sex and marriage. Legitimate marriage, and sex within it, was expected of every citizen whether male or female, and was a fundamental obligation to society. Respectable women were out of bounds for sexual liaisons except in marriage, which formed the limits of their sexual horizons. Adultery, defined as sexual activity involving a married woman (with the marital status of the adulterer irrelevant), was the paradigmatic ancient sex crime, and an obsession in much ancient literature. Whereas most sexual misbehaviour in the ancient world was sanctioned informally, through public censure and social dishonour, adultery could lead to complex legal consequences. Seduction of a free Athenian woman was a crime which was generally deemed more serious than rape, because a secret liaison meant that a man could not be sure of the lineage of his children, whereas in the case of rape any offspring could be identified and killed. Rape was thus primarily seen as a crime against the husband, father, or male guardian of the woman rather than against herself, and as a threat to public order due to the risk of revenge from the aggrieved male party (who was legally allowed to put the perpetrator of any adultery — whether consensual or the result of rape — to death if caught in the act). The Roman lex Julia on adultery, introduced by the emperor Augustus in 17 bc, redefined adultery from being a family matter to an offence whose punishment — exile or death — was enshrined in law, and in which the whole of society had a stake. Indeed, if a husband or father failed to bring a prosecution within a certain time frame, any concerned citizen could do so.
Although spending money on dancing girls, ‘nightwalkers’, and other categories of prostitutes was seen as a regrettable sign of a lack of self-control, it was nevertheless considered a more respectable and certainly less risky alternative for men to illegal sex with free women. Commercial sex was freely available across the ancient world. In many Greek and Roman cities, prostitutes paid tax and thus made significant contributions to local economies. Clients were exclusively men, but prostitutes could be women as well as young and adolescent men (most often ex-slaves and other non-citizens). Sexual assignments seem to have been conducted openly both in brothels and in public spaces such as parks and cemeteries, and archaeological remains of sandals which left an imprint on the ground with the words ‘follow me’ illustrate forms of soliciting by streetwalkers. Men could also buy a sex slave for exclusive relations, or divide the cost among friends. For wealthy men, the use of sophisticated courtesans (hetairai) was an additional and socially acceptable option. As the prominent 4th-century bc Greek statesman Demosthenes put it: ‘we have hetairai for delectation, concubines for the daily servicing of our bodies, and wives to bear legitimate offspring and to be faithful protectors of the households’. Successful courtesans — most often former slaves and immigrants — enjoyed a much greater degree of autonomy than women from citizen families, and some of them achieved great wealth and public stature.
Sexual access to the submissive bodies of women or male adolescents by sexually assertive men was of central importance for the political order of classical Athens. Classical Greeks credited Solon, the founding father of Athenian democracy, with the democratization of access to sex slaves through the establishment of public brothels in which the price of prostitutes was kept affordable for any citizen, although the factual correctness of this account is disputed. As David Halperin points out, the importance of this story lies in the link it makes between prostitution and political democracy: all male citizens, rich or poor, should be
able to afford access to sexual pleasure. The provision of cheap prostitutes allowed free men whose poverty risked putting them in a socially subordinate, and therefore feminized, position to maintain their social dominance through sexual domination. Historical evidence, such as pricing information found on the walls of brothels in Pompeii, suggests that prostitutes were indeed generally cheap in the ancient world (with services in the lower price range comparable to the cost of a loaf of bread), though prices varied considerably across time and place.
The problematization of male prostitution illustrates the intricate link between sex, gender, and politics in antiquity; although male prostitution was not illegal, free men who prostituted themselves were seen to lower themselves to the level of women, immigrants, and slaves by accepting the role of sexual object.
Any male Athenian who had engaged in prostitution in his youth consequently forfeited his civil and political citizenship rights.
In addition to citizenship, sex in the ancient world was also intertwined with religious practice. Some public holidays, such as an annual religious festival in Canopus in Roman Egypt, were celebrated specifically by sex, dancing, singing, and other rituals. No convincing evidence exists of temple prostitution in ancient Greece or Rome, in contrast to the ancient Near East, where the practice of sacred slave-prostitutes serving visitors was widespread; but prostitutes did have their own religious festivals in Rome, and more generally attended religious festivals either as worshippers or to work the crowds.
However, it is important to remember that Rome and Athens did not form a single homogeneous, unitary culture. Whereas Roman sexual ethics were quite similar to those of classical Greece, the most marked difference was that sodomy was much more problematic within Roman culture, and paederastic relationships (and their supposed educational advantages) were not generally idealized. Relations with free-born men and boys were legally
prohibited in Roman morality laws such as the lex Julia, though it was legal for a free man to have sex with male prostitutes, slaves, or foreign young men (as long as he performed the active role), or to frequent brothels. Such laws were periodically re-enacted in the Empire to demonstrate the respective emperors’ concern for public morality; however, they were rarely enforced. Reflecting Greek cultural influence, revered Roman poets such as Catullus, Ovid, Horace, and Virgil wrote of love affairs between men, and one of Tibullus’ poems described his heartbreak at having been left for a woman by his young male lover Marathus.
The civic status of women was higher in Imperial Rome than in Athens, where women’s names were not allowed to be mentioned in public until after their death. Roman women (at least, those of the propertied class) showed greater independence than women in classical Athens. For example, although in law Roman women had to have guardians, in practice this was gradually phased out, and upper-class women could own and have control over property (after the death of their father). Sexual misbehaviour, especially by women, came to stand for wider anxieties over alleged corruption and moral decline in the Roman context. Sexual transgressions, such as adultery or sex with slaves, by upper-class women were declared criminal offences in the Roman morality laws (though again, rarely subject to actual legal prosecution), and literary material of the time reflects male anxieties about such female behaviour.
The historian and social theorist Michel Foucault has argued that Graeco-Roman rules of sexual conduct need to be located in the context of a wider set of concerns with how to be a good citizen, which included prescriptions on diet, exercise, and relations with subordinates such as wives and slaves more generally. He also pointed out that, in comparison, cultural anxieties over food were much more important than those over sex in Greek and Roman culture. Indeed, the ancient world, where everyday life was for many a struggle for survival, was ‘obsessed with food’, in the words
of ancient historian Peter Garnsey. Preoccupations with diet and regime intensified among the Romans. In a context where the social and political power of upper-class male citizens knew few bounds and cultural anxieties about moral decline were rife, Stoic philosophers such as Seneca developed an ethos of self-control that was intended to demonstrate male elites’ mastery over their appetites while also avoiding the supposed ill effects of food, drink, or sex binges. As Seneca put it: ‘Morality has collapsed, perversity reigns, humanity is in decay, crime is spreading.’ However, as he added in his letter to his friend Lucilius:
You are wrong, Lucilius, if you think that luxury, contempt for morality and other vices are merely vices of our time: vices for which everyone reproves his own age. They are the defects of humankind, not of the times. No era has ever been free from blame.
To counter such propensity for hedonism, an ethos of self-mastery was presented as a morally pleasing alternative, part of an aesthetics of existence which made one’s life beautiful. Leading a virtuous life meant self-imposed moderation and balance ‘in all things’. Sexual self-restraint was part of this wider ethos focused on the paterfamilias, to whom any member of the household — not just his wife — was potentially sexually available.
Drawing on Hippocratic medicine, Plato, and Aristotle, Roman physicians such as Galen further emphasized the dangers of ‘excess’ and the benefits of nutritional and sexual frugality. Regarding sexual ethics, whereas sexual intercourse in moderation was considered necessary for health reasons, sexual excesses should be avoided since they were thought to result in feebleness, impotence, and wasting diseases for men. The famous scholar Pliny the Elder thus pointed approvingly at the example of elephants in his Natural History, since ‘their intercourse takes place only every second year, and for five days only, and no more; on the sixth day they plunge into a river, before doing which they will not rejoin the herd’. But the concept of self-mastery also
had political relevance. Eros, the force of love and desire, was feared as being potentially disruptive of the social and political order. Tyrants were typically accused of uncontrollable sexual self-indulgence, and the management of personal appetites was thus seen as essential for the survival of democratic rule, as Michel Foucault has pointed out. In the words of the ancient historian James Davidson: ‘the Greeks… felt a civic responsibility to manage all appetites, to train themselves to deal with them, without trying to conquer them absolutely’. By the 5th century ad, a culture of self-mastery had thus established itself among elites. This culture valued sexual moderation and, intertwined with early Christian influences, forms of sexual renunciation. However, despite some continuities between classical and Christian ethics, the rise of Christianity would radically transform the social and political meanings attached to sex.