Love, Sex and Marriage in Ancient Rome

Tarquin and Lucretia (detail), by Titian.

Source: Wikimedia Commons/Titian/Public domain

Sex, said the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, ‘is the friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of some mucus.

In Rome, female infants were much more likely to be exposed (abandoned to die) because daughters required a dowry to wed and did not hand down the family name. Girls from leading families may have been taught to read and write, but most received no formal education and married soon after the onset of puberty. A woman’s highest duty, both to her husband and to Rome, was to bear a vigorous son who might one day follow in his father’s estate.

A woman could marry cum manu, becoming, in legal terms, a daughter of her husband; or she could marry sine manu and hold property in her own name. However, a woman who married sine manu had to have a guardian or tutor, commonly her father, to determine how she might use ‘her’ property. A tutor had considerable powers, and could force the woman out of one marriage and into another, more expedient, one. That said, not all families followed these practices, particularly if the pater familias, or head of the family, had died on campaign; and by the time of Augustus (d. 14 CE), freeborn women could become sui iuris, or legally independent, if they had three or more children.

Roman women, even if sui iuris, could not vote or assume office, and upper-class women in particular were largely confined to running the home. But unlike the women of Classical Athens, who were regarded as chattel and were, in some respects, worse off than slaves, Roman women played an important role in the raising of children, and, although forbidden from drinking wine (on the grounds that it might drive them to adultery), or performing on a stage, were otherwise free to attend dinner parties, baths, and circuses. There were, of course, a few formidable women who flouted these rules, and most women exercised significant influence over their husbands, sons, and brothers—even when, as with Agrippina the Younger (d. 59 CE), these all happened to be emperors. One day, Agrippina visited some astrologers to inquire into the future of her son, Nero. The astrologers predicted, rightly, that Nero would become emperor, but also kill his mother. According to Tacitus, a historian and near contemporary, Agrippina replied, “Let him kill me, so long as he becomes emperor.”

Pudicitia

Both women and men, but especially women, were supposed to uphold pudicitia, a complex virtue that can be translated roughly as ‘restraint’ or ‘chastity’. A woman with a high degree of pudicitia, that is, a univira [‘one-man woman’], sought at all times to uphold modesty and limit her social interactions with men to her male relatives. Divorce on the other hand did not attract any stigma, and upper-class divorcees or widows were encouraged, even expected, to remarry after some time.

Pudicitia stood for reason and control, whereas impudicitia—that is, shamelessness, sexual vice, and struprum [‘sex crime’]—stood for chaos and calamity. The Romans held pudicitia in the highest regard and idealized those who embodied it, with Augustus going so far as to enact a programme of legislation to promote its observance and exiling his own daughter Julia for adultery and treason.

Livy, a historian and contemporary of Augustus, upheld the legendary Lucretia as an epitome of pudicitia, and it is possible that her rape and subsequent suicide—a popular subject in Renaissance art (Figure 6)—are an allegorical tale evolved to uphold Roman values and the virtuous Republic which rose up from the old, corrupted monarchy.

The Vestal Virgins

The Romans, like much everyone else, sought to control female sexuality to protect the family and, by extension, social order and the state. They crystallized these notions in the cult of Venus, the mother of Æneas, founder of Rome; and in the Vestal Virgins, the priestesses of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. To violate a Vestal Virgin’s vow of chastity was to commit an act of religious impurity, or incestum, and thereby to undermine Rome’s compact with the gods, the pax deorum [‘peace of the gods’]. In turn, a Vestal Virgin ran the very real risk of being buried alive if ever convicted of fornication.

Roman religion both reflected and regulated sexual mores, with the male-female duality enshrined in the pairings of the twelve Dii Consentes, or major gods (the counterparts of the Greek Olympian gods): Jupiter—Juno, Neptune—Minerva, Mars—Venus, Apollo—Diana, Vulcan—Vesta, and Mercury—Ceres. Several religious festivals, such as the Liberalia, Floralia, and Lupercalia, to say nothing of the banned Bacchanalia, included an important element of ritualized sex.

The Vestal Virgins tended to the cult of the fascinus populi Romani, the image of the divine phallus and male counterpart of the hearth of Vesta. Like the eternal flame, also guarded by the Vestals, or the Palladium, Lares, and Penates of Troy, the fascinus populi Romani assured the continuity and ascendancy of the state. Similarly, during the Liberalia, devotees of the god Liber Pater carted a giant phallus through the countryside to fertilize the fields and safeguard crops—after which a virtuous matron would crown the phallus with a garland or wreath. Smaller talismans in the shape of a penis and testes, often winged, invoked the protection of the god Fascinus against the evil eye. These charms, or fascini, typically in the form of a ring or amulet, were most commonly worn by infants, boys, and soldiers.

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Double Standards

Of course, the Romans often lost sight of their high ideals—although later Christian writers no doubt exaggerated the extent of their depravities.

In particular, it was entirely accepted, and even expected, for freeborn men to have extramarital relations with both female and male partners, especially adolescents, provided that they:

• Exercised moderation,
• Adopted the active, or dominant, role, and
• Confined their activities to slaves and prostitutes, or, less commonly, a concubine or ‘kept woman’.

Married or marriageable women who ‘belonged’ to another freeborn man, and young freeborn males, were strictly off limits.

The Stoic teacher Musonius (d. c. 100 CE), a rare voice at the time, criticized the double standard that granted men much greater sexual freedom than women, arguing that, if men are to presume to exercise control over their women, they ought, surely, to exercise even greater control over themselves.

In sum, most extramarital and same-sex activity took place with slaves and prostitutes.

Slaves were regarded as property and lacked the legal standing that protected a citizen from bodily harm. A freeman who forced a slave into having sex could not be charged with rape, but only under laws relating to property damage—and that only at the instigation of the slave’s owner.

Prostitution was legal and common, and often operated out of brothels or the fornices (arcade dens) under the arches of a circus. (Still today, the anatomical recess around the head of the cervix is called the fornix.) Most prostitutes were slaves or freedwomen. A freeborn person who fell into prostitution suffered infamia, that is, loss of respect or reputation, and became an infamis, losing her or his social and legal standing. Other groups that incurred infamia—a concept that still retains some currency in the Roman Catholic Church—included actors, dancers, gladiators, and other entertainers, which is why Roman women were forbidden from the stage. Members of these groups, which had in common the pleasuring of others, could be subjected to violence and even killed with relative impunity.

Homosexuality

A freeborn man’s libertas, or political liberty, manifested itself, among others, in the mastery of his own body, and his adoption of a passive or submissive sexual position implied servility and a loss of virility.

Homosexual behaviour among soldiers not only violated the decorum against sexual intercourse among freeborn men, but also compromised the penetrated soldier’s sexual and therefore martial dominance, with rape and penetration the symbols, and sometimes also the harsh realities, of military defeat. According to the historian Polybius, the punishment meted out to a soldier who had allowed himself to be penetrated was fustuarium, that is, cudgelling to death, the same penalty as for desertion.

By some Roman twist of logic, a man who was penetrated was seen to take on the role of a woman, but a woman who suffered the same was seen to take on the role of a boy. In one of the censored poems of Martial (d. c. 103 CE), the poet’s wife catches him with a boy. When she offers him anal sex to encourage fidelity, he replies that anal sex with a tight boy is beyond compare to anal sex with a woman: ‘you, my wife, have got no more than two cunts.’

Latin does not have a strict equivalent for ‘homosexual’, which is relatively recent both in coinage and in concept; but a minority of men did, then as today, express a clear same-sex preference or orientation—most famously the emperor Hadrian (d. 138 CE), who founded a city in memory of his beloved Antinous and even had him deified.

In Closing

Since Roman men often indulged in extramarital sex, it might be assumed that Roman marriage was all duty and dour. However, the houses and bedrooms of the nobility were often decorated with erotic scenes ranging from elegant dalliance to explicit pornography. The poet Horace had a mirrored room for sex, and the emperor Tiberius stocked his bedchambers with the sex manuals of Elephantis. In Ancient Rome as in Victorian England, virtuous restraint went hand in hand with licentious abandon, the one put on display in the public arena and the other hidden away in closed rooms and shady nooks.

And so, according to the Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE):

Virtue you will find in the temple, in the forum, in the senate house, standing before the city walls, dusty and sunburnt, her hands rough; pleasure you will most often find lurking around the baths and sweating rooms, and places that fear the police, in search of darkness, soft, effete, reeking of wine and perfume, pallid or else painted and made up with cosmetics like a corpse.

Read more in Stoic Stories: Stoicism by Its Best Stories​​​​​​​.