I've been watching the first couple seasons of the BBC series Rome, checked out from the library.  Covering the period of Caesar and Octavian, it's pretty entertaining, especially considering the various antics and tribulations that Vorenus and Pullo, two non-historical characters whose supposed lives we follow through the history, get into (I won't spoil it for folks by detailing them).

Rome as a production does appear to go to some effort trying to get its portrait of classical history and civilization basically correct, but can be seen to fail on occasion.  I was amused by a scene in season two where a high-status woman who is having an affair with a man is quite offended when he attempts to offer her money, rejecting it as portraying her as a prostitute — which it turns out is quite ahistoric, merely projecting modern attitudes onto a very different antique society.

As Paul Veyne writes in his chapter “The Roman Empire” in Volume I of A History of Private Life: ¹

The social and institutional character of the Roman economy was so different from that of our own that it is tempting to call it archaic.  It sustained, nevertheless, a high level of production and was as dynamic and ruthless as capitalism.  For, if Roman aristocrats distinguished themselves by their culture and their interest in philosophy, they were still avid for profit.

The greatest nobles talked business.  Pliny, a senator, in letters intended to be specimens of the finest in the genre, held up his behavior as a wealthy landlord as an example for others to follow.  When a noble wished to get rid of old furniture or building materials, he held a public auction.  (Auctions were the normal way for private individuals to sell their used belongings; the emperors themselves auctioned off unwanted palace furniture.)

Money was not supposed to lie idle.  Even loans to friends and relatives earned interest (not charging interest on such loans was considered a mark of special virtue).  A woman's father had to pay interest to her husband if transfer of her dowry was delayed.

Usury was a part of daily life; modern anti-Semites might have made ancient Rome the object of their obsession instead of the Jews.  In Rome commerce and money-lending were not left exclusively to professionals or to any one class of society.  Any toil, no matter how pleasurable, merited payment.

One picturesque aspect of amorous customs among the Romans was that the female partner in a high-society affair was paid for her trouble.  A matron who deceived her husband received a large sum or, in some cases, an annual income from her lover.  Some cads reclaimed these gifts when affairs were broken off, and on occasion the courts became involved.

The practice of accepting gifts from lovers was considered not prostitution but work for hire.  The woman did not give herself because she was paid, the jurists held; she was rewarded for giving herself of her own free will.  She who loved best was most handsomely paid.  Women sought the wages of adultery as eagerly as men sought dowries.

¹ Paul Veyne, Chapter 1: “The Roman Empire,” Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, edited by Paul Veyne, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, A History of Private Life, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987; pp.  146-147.  Originally published as Volume I: De l'Empire romain à l'an mil, of Histoire de la vie Privée, Editions du Seuil, 1985.  Additional paragraph breaks added to the quoted text.

UPDATE:  2009-09-08 17:40 UT:  See also the earlier posted “Sex in Antiquity I” and “Sex in Antiquity II – Moral hypochondria.”

UPDATE:  2009-09-06 16:00 UT:  University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse had a posting this last week “From an expert on ‘the etiquette of open marriages’,” quoting that “expert” as saying, “I'm a class act in infidelity.”  Note that I have no reason to think that Althouse (who was only just married herself a few weeks back) supports this “class act's” position in this regard (quite the contrary, I think), but a poster on that Althouse thread made a comment which enhances my point above concerning the profound differences between cultures, ancient and modern, in this connection.

As “cubanbob” put it in that thread (emphasis added):

Years ago when I traveled to Taiwan extensively on business it was expected that a successful man have a mistress.  Indeed if he did not have one it would almost [be] a loss of face.  However the rules were very clear:

1 — never be seen in public with the mistress, especially with by people who know the wife.  Under no circumstances can the wife be subject to embarrassment.

2 — no outside children or STD's.

3 — home every day at a reasonable hour and on weekends [to] spend time with the kids.  The wife must be able to maintain the fiction that there is no affair indeed it is the desired goal that [she] should not even be aware there is a mistress.  Only the close circle of the boys at the club can know.

4 — money is always left on the night stand by the bed after sex with the mistress.  If she refuses to take the money the affair is to be ended immediately.  Even if she loves him, she must take the money otherwise he must end it.  As long as she takes the money she has no claim on him.

5 — If the wife is publicly humiliated by the husband due to his having an affair, the punishment for the husband is to be left essentially penniless as she can never remarry (or at least in socially acceptable circles) and the money is her compensation.

It's been a while since I [have] last been there, I wonder if those unwritten rules are still in effect.  As for the woman in the article, she should know that discretion is the only way something like that can be made to work.  So why openly comment on your marriage and embarrass your husband?  She will find her herself divorced soon enough.

Labels: adultery, ancient Rome, Ann Althouse, antiquity, BBC Rome series, open marriage, Paul Veyne, Roman law, sex, Taiwan, usury

Glenn Reynolds the Instapundit transmits a “Message to Derbyshire,” pointing to this little piece:

JERANGDU [John Derbyshire]
A reader:  “Mr. Derbyshire — One group where spouses do not share a marital bed is New Guinea's Sambia.  Male potency is seen as a strange power called Jerangdu.  It is kind of like the Maori's manu in that it can be transferred around.  If you run out of it you die.  Anyway, jerangdu is found in the semen.  Women are always trying to steal the man's potency so the man must be cautious.  Men sleep in the men's hut and visit the wife sparingly, less they age too quickly.  It gets weirder from there…”

[Derb] Thank you, Sir.  Er, excuse me, guys, but don't we all sort of… believe this?

Instapundit's message shot right back at 'em?  “No, we don't all believe this.”

Amusing as this is, one needn't go nearly as far away as New Guinea to find examples of that kind of ‘jerangdu’-istic thinking: indeed, peoples right here in northern California (Impearls' own home turf) subscribed to notions not dissimilar to those laid out above, which we'll report on separately (see, for instance, here, here, and here); meanwhile, as yet another stupendous example, Greco-Roman civilization was rife with the idea — yes, our classical heritage was just as into this kind of mumbo-jumbo sociosexual theorizing as any New Guinean Sambia.

Impearls' readers will recall last year's feature on “Sex in Antiquity.”  It's worth noting that there's much more to this perplexing subject than that earlier piece could get into, so to inquire into yet another intriguing aspect of Sex in Antiquity, please scroll down, or just follow this link to teleport there.

UPDATE:  2009-09-06 18:00 UT:  Added links pointing to examples in A. L. Kroeber's The Civilization of California's Far Northwest here in Impearls.

Labels: ancient Rome, antiquity, California Indians, New Guinea, sex

What could almost be called “moral hypochondria” formed a firm barrier between the elites and their inferiors.  The harmonious person, groomed by long education and shaped by the constant pressure of his peers, was thought to live at risk.  He was exposed to the ever-present threat of “moral contagion” from anomalous emotions and actions, inappropriate to his own public status though acceptable in the uncultivated society of his inferiors.  I use “hypochondria” advisedly, for this was the age of great doctors — most notably, the doctor Galen (a.d. 129-199) — whose works circulated widely among the wellborn.

A specific body image, formed from a conglomeration of notions inherited from the long past of Greek medicine and moral philosophy, was the physiological anchor of the moral codes of the wellborn.  In this model personal health and public deportment converged with the utmost ease.  In it the body is represented as a delicately maintained balance of complementary humors, whose health was upset by excessive losses of needful resources or by excessive coagulations of detrimental surpluses.  The emotions that were held to disrupt or deplete the carefully balanced deportment of the well-groomed man could be traced in large part to the effects of such imbalances.  The body, therefore, was regarded as the most sensitive and visible gauge of correct deportment; and the harmonious control of the body, through traditional Greek methods of exercise, diet, and bathing, was the most intimate guarantor of the maintenance of correct deportment.

The status-based, inward-looking quality of a morality rooted in an upper-class need to demonstrate social distance by means of an exceptional code of deportment is immediately apparent in the moral concerns of the Antonine age.  Relations with social inferiors and sexual relations, for example, are regulated in terms of an exacting code of public deportment.  To beat a slave in a fit of rage was condemned.  This was not because of any very acute sense that an act of inhumanity against a fellow human being had been committed, but because the outburst represented a collapse of the harmonious image of the self of the wellborn man, and had caused him to behave in a manner as uncontrolled as a slave.

Similar concerns determined attitudes toward sexual relations.  Homosexual and heterosexual love were not distinguished.  What was perceived as an underlying continuity between the two was the fact of physical pleasure.  Sexual pleasure as such posed no problem to the upper-class moralist.  What was judged, and judged harshly, was the effect of such pleasure on the public deportment and social relations of the male.  Any shame that might be attached to a homosexual relationship resided solely in the moral contagion that might cause a man of the upper class to submit himself, either physically (by adopting a passive position in lovemaking) or morally, to an inferior of either sex.  The relations of men and women were subject to the same strictures.  Inversions of true hierarchy through oral sexuality with a female partner were the most condemned and, not surprisingly, the most titillating, forms of collapse before the moral contagion of an inferior, the woman.  Fear of effeminacy and of emotional dependence, fears based on a need to maintain a public image as an effective upper-class male, rather than any qualms about sexuality itself, determined the moral codes upon which most notables conducted their sexual life.

The fear of social subservience to an inferior was subtly buttressed by physiological anxiety.  A man was a man because he moved effectively in the public world.  He did this because his fetus had “cooked” more thoroughly than had a woman's in the hot womb; his body, therefore, was a reservoir of the precious “heats” on which male energy depended.  Although the difference between men and women might be securely fixed, in the case of the woman by the low ceiling of her heat and the consequent frailty of her temperament, there was no such security for the active man.  His heat could be lost.  Excessive sexual discharge might “cool” his temperament; such a drain on his resources would be betrayed with merciless precision in a loss of momentum on the public stage.  That orotund voice of the public man that Quintilian and his contemporaries so dearly loved to hear echoing through the noisy public spaces of the city was the fine fruit of a masculinity carefully preserved by “abstinence from sex.”  The very real puritanism of the traditional moralities of the upper classes of the Greek and Roman worlds rested heavily on those who subscribed to them.  Such puritanism did not rest on sexuality; it rested on sexuality as a possible source of moral contagion.  For sexual indulgence could erode, through the effeminacy that could result from excessive sexual pleasure with partners of either sex, the unchallenged superiority of the wellborn.

Hence the unquestioning particularity of the sexual codes of the age.  They did not apply to everyone.  The notables might tend to subject themselves and their families to a code of dour masculine puritanism, closer to that still current in Islamic countries than to the puritanism of modern northern Europe.  Yet, having drawn the carapace of deportment around themselves, they found themselves all the more free to exhibit the other side of their public selves: their popularitas.  In their relations, as givers of the good things of urban life, to their inferiors, they lavished on those assumed to have cruder pleasures than themselves a succession of displays, amenities, and paintings that flatly contradicted, in their cruelty and frank obscenity, the orderly self-control these men had arrogated to themselves as the badge of their own superior status in the city.  Highly cultivated aristocrats patronized the appalling bloodshed of the gladiatorial games in the Greek cities of the Antonine age.  Nor did the rise of Christianity greatly change this aspect of their public life.  If a modern reader remembers anything about the emperor Justinian, it is likely to be Procopius' portrait of the youthful career of his wife, Theodora: a striptease dancer in the public theater of Constantinople, geese used to peck grain from her private parts in front of an audience of thousands of citizens.  What is important to bear in mind is the venomous precision of this sketch.  Here was a woman of the people, to whom upper-class codes of moral restraint did not apply.  Theodora is the exact inversion of the respectable upper-class wives (soberly shrouded and even secluded in Constantinople, by that time).  Yet as notables, the husbands of such respectable lades had for centuries donated just such performances, to the everlasting glory of themselves and of their city.

Nor is there anything surprising in the long survival of indifference to nudity in the Roman public life.  This was not a society bound together by the implicit democracy of sexual shame.  Athletic nudity remained a mark of status for the wellborn.  The essential role of the public baths as the joining point of civic life ensured that nudity among one's peers and in front of one's inferiors was a daily experience.  The codes of deportment, as we have seen, reached down into the body itself; as a result, the clothes of the upper classes of the Antonine age, though expensive, lacked the ceremonial magnificence of later ages.  How a man carried himself, in the nude or otherwise, was the true mark of his status — a mark all the more convincing because understated.  As for women, the social shame of exposure to the wrong person, rather than the fact of exposure itself, was the principal anxiety.  Nudity before one's slaves was as morally insignificant as nudity before animals; and the physical exposure of the women of the lower classes was yet another token of their disorderly inferiority to the powerful.

¹ Peter Brown, “Late Antiquity,” Chapter 2 of: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, edited by Paul Veyne, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, volume I of: A History of Private Life, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987; pp. 241-246.  Originally published as De l'Empire romain à l'an mil, volume I of: Histoire de la vie Privée, Editions du Seuil, 1985.

UPDATE:  2009-09-08 17:50 UT:  “Sex in Antiquity III – the Wages of Adultery” was posted on 2009-09-06.  See also the earlier posted “Sex in Antiquity I.”

Labels: ancient Rome, antiquity, Peter Brown, sex

People nowadays have a conception of the pre-Christian era as free from the hangups about sensuality and especially sexuality that we're familiar with today, that we think began as a result of the advent of Christianity and the sexual strictures that it brought.  Little could be farther from the truth in terms of attitudes during Classical Greek and Roman times towards these subjects.

We return again to that fascinating multi-volume historical series A History of Private Life, which we have had occasion to refer to here at Impearls in the past.  From the title one might be inclined to think that the series is just a light-hearted, ribald catalog of sexual escapades from the past.  The series scope extends across much more than that, however.  Volume I, for example, titled From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, edited by Paul Veyne, includes a terrific chapter, almost 100 pages in length, delving into manifold aspects of the Roman home or domus, including detailed analysis of the architecture of various Roman homes, how the domus functioned as house and economic unit, and the manner in which “private” and “public” spaces were laid out both within it and the Roman city as a whole.

The book also considers deeply how and why the concept of the “private life” of individuals came to be distinguished from their “public life” and the consequences of that fateful division; and later on, how the barbarian invasions of the West scrambled these hard-won distinctions, turning the entire state — a res publica or “public thing,” an incomprehensible concept to the barbarians — in effect into a private estate to be exploited mercilessly by the invaders.  Despite their significance and interest, we will not consider these important matters at this point; see the volumes of the series for much more on the distinguishing of “private” versus “public” in history.

In this series we will delve into that other vital aspect of “private life,” sex and, later on, its institutionalized companions, marriage and “the couple,” in classical antiquity.  As Paul Veyne writes in his chapter “The Roman Empire” in Volume I: ¹

[I]ncoherences and baffling limitations are found in every century.  In Greco-Roman culture we find them associated with another pleasure: love.  If any aspect of ancient life has been distorted by legend, this is it.  It is widely but mistakenly believed that antiquity was a Garden of Eden from which repression was banished, Christianity having yet to insinuate the worm of sin into the forbidden fruit.  Actually, the pagans were paralyzed by prohibitions.  The legend of pagan sensuality stems from a number of traditional misinterpretations.  The famous tale of the debauches of Emperor Heliogabalus is nothing but a hoax perpetrated by the literati who authored that late forgery, the Historia Augusta.  The legend also stems from the crudeness of the interdictions:  “Latin words are an affront to decency,” people used to say.  For such naive souls, merely uttering a “bad word” provoked a shiver of perverse imagination or a gale of embarrassed laughter.  Schoolboy daring.

What were the marks of the true libertine?  A libertine was a man who violated three taboos: he made love before nightfall (daytime lovemaking was a privilege accorded to newlyweds on the day after the wedding); he made love without first darkening the room (the erotic poets called to witness the lamp that had shone on their pleasures); and he made love to a woman from whom he had removed every stitch of clothing (only fallen women made love without their brassieres, and paintings in Pompeii's bordellos showed even prostitutes wearing this ultimate veil).  Libertines permitted themselves to touch rather than caress, though with the left hand only.  The one chance a decent man had of seeing a little of his beloved's naked skin was if the moon happened to fall upon the open window at just the right moment.  About libertine tyrants such as Heliogabalus, Nero, Caligula, and Domitian it was whispered that they had violated other taboos and made love with married women, well-bred maidens, freeborn adolescents, vestal virgins, or even their own sisters.

This puritanism went hand in hand with an attitude of superiority toward the love object, who was often treated like a slave.  The attitude emblematic of the Roman lover was not holding his beloved by the hand or around the waist or, as in the Middle Ages, putting his arm around her neck; the woman was a servant, and the lover sprawled on top of her as though she were a sofa.  The Roman way was the way of the seraglio.  A small amount of sadism was permissible: a slave, for example, could be beaten in her bed, on the pretext of making her obey.  The woman served her lord's pleasure and, if necessary, did all the work herself.  If she straddled her passive lover, it was to serve him.

Machismo was a factor.  Young men challenged one another in a macho fashion.  To be active was to be a male, regardless of the sex of the passive partner.  Hence there were two supreme forms of infamy: to use one's mouth to give a woman pleasure was considered servile and weak, and to allow oneself to be buggered was, for a free man, the height of passivity (impudicitia) and lack of self-respect.  Pederasty was a minor sin so long as it involved relations between a free man and a slave or person of no account.  Jokes about it were common among the people and in the theater, and people boasted of it in good society.  Nearly anyone can enjoy sensual pleasure with a member of the same sex, and pederasty was not at all uncommon in tolerant antiquity.  Many men of basically heterosexual bent used boys for sexual purposes.  It was proverbially held that sex with boys procures a tranquil pleasure unruffling to the soul, whereas passion for a woman plunges a free man into unendurable slavery.

Thus, Roman love was defined by macho domination and refusal to become a slave of passion.  The amorous excesses attributed to various tyrants were excesses of domination, described with misleading Sadian boldness.  Nero, a tyrant who was weak more than cruel, kept a harem to serve his passive needs.  Tiberius arranged for young slave boys to indulge his whims, and Messalina staged a pantomime of her own servility, usurping the male privilege of equating strength with frequency of intercourse.  These acts were not so much violations as distortions of the taboos.  They reflect a dreadful weakness, a need for planned pleasure.  Like alcohol, lust is dangerous to virility and must not be abused.  But gastronomy scarcely encourages moderation at table. 

Amorous passion, the Romans believed, was particularly to be feared because it could make a free man the slave of a woman.  He will call her “mistress” and, like a servant, hold her mirror or her parasol.  Love was not the playground of individualists, the would-be refuge from society that it is today.  Rome rejected the Greek tradition of “courtly love” of ephebes, which Romans saw as an exaltation of pure passion (in both senses of “pure,” for the Greeks pretended to believe that a man's love for a freeborn ephebe was Platonic).  When a Roman fell madly in love, his friends and he himself believed either that he had lost his head from overindulgence in sensuality or that he had fallen into a state of moral slavery.  The lover, like a good slave, docilely offered to die if his mistress wished it.  Such excesses bore the dark magnificence of shame, and even erotic poets did not dare to glorify them openly.  They chose the roundabout means of describing such behavior as an amusing reversal of the normal state of affairs, a humorous paradox.

Petrarch's praise of passion would have scandalized the ancients or made them smile.  The Romans were strangers to the medieval exaltation of the beloved, an object so sublime that it remained inaccessible.  They were strangers, too, to modern subjectivism, to our thirst for experience.  Standing apart from the world, we choose to experience something in order to see what effect it has, not because it is intrinsically valuable or required by duty.  Finally, the Romans were strangers to the real paganism, the at times graceful and beautiful paganism of the Renaissance.  Tender indulgence in pleasures of the senses that became, also, delights of the soul was not the way of the ancients.  The most Bacchic scenes of the Romans have nothing of the audacity of some modern writers.  The Romans knew but one variety of individualism, which confirmed the rule by seeming to contradict it: energetic indolence.  With secret delight they discussed senators such as Scipio, Sulla, Caesar, Petronius, and even Catiline, men scandalously indolent in private yet extraordinarily energetic in public.  It was an open secret among insiders that these men were privately lazy, and such knowledge gave the senatorial elite an air of royalty and of being above the common law while confirming its authentic spirit.  Although the charge of energetic indolence was a reproach, it was also somehow a compliment.  Romans found this compliment reassuring.  Their brand of individualism sought not real experience, self-indulgence, or private devotion, but tranquilization.

¹ Paul Veyne, Chapter 1: “The Roman Empire,” Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, edited by Paul Veyne, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, A History of Private Life, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987; pp. 202-205.

UPDATE:  2009-09-08 17:50 UT:  “Sex in Antiquity II – Moral hypochondria” and a preliminary piece “Jerangdu theories of male potency” were posted on 2005-11-05.

UPDATE:  2009-09-08 17:50 UT:  “Sex in Antiquity III – the Wages of Adultery” was posted on 2009-09-06.

Labels: ancient Rome, antiquity, Paul Veyne, sex