title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Other forms of sexual gratification available to soldiers were the use of male slaves, war rape, and same-sex relations. Homosexual behavior among soldiers was subject to harsh penalties, including death, as a violation of military discipline. Polybius (2nd century BC) reports that same-sex activity in the military was punishable by the "fustuarium", clubbing to death. Sex among fellow soldiers violated the Roman decorum against intercourse with another freeborn male. A soldier maintained his masculinity by not allowing his body to be used for sexual purposes. This physical integrity stood in contrast to the limits placed on his actions as a free man within the military hierarchy; most strikingly, Roman soldiers were the only citizens regularly subjected to corporal punishment, reserved in the civilian world mainly for slaves. Sexual integrity helped distinguish the status of the soldier, who otherwise sacrificed a great deal of his civilian autonomy, from that of the slave. In warfare, rape signified defeat, another motive for the soldier not to compromise his body sexually.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: An incident related by Plutarch in his biography of Marius illustrates the soldier's right to maintain his sexual integrity. A good-looking young recruit named Trebonius had been sexually harassed over a period of time by his superior officer, who happened to be Marius's nephew, Gaius Luscius. One night, having fended off unwanted advances on numerous occasions, Trebonius was summoned to Luscius's tent. Unable to disobey the command of his superior, he found himself the object of a sexual assault and drew his sword, killing Luscius. A conviction for killing an officer typically resulted in execution. When brought to trial, he was able to produce witnesses to show that he had repeatedly had to fend off Luscius, and "had never prostituted his body to anyone, despite offers of expensive gifts". Marius not only acquitted Trebonius in the killing of his kinsman, but gave him a crown for bravery. Roman historians record other cautionary tales of officers who abuse their authority to coerce sex from their soldiers, and then suffer dire consequences. The youngest officers, who still might retain some of the adolescent attraction that Romans favored in male–male relations, were advised to beef up their masculine qualities, such as not wearing perfume, nor trimming nostril and underarm hair.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: During wartime, the violent use of war captives for sex was not considered criminal rape. Mass rape was one of the acts of punitive violence during the sack of a city, but if the siege had ended through diplomatic negotiations rather than storming the walls, by custom the inhabitants were neither enslaved nor subjected to personal violence. Mass rape occurred in some circumstances, and is likely to be underreported in the surviving sources, but was not a deliberate or pervasive strategy for controlling a population. An ethical ideal of sexual self-control among enlisted men was vital to preserving peace once hostilities ceased. In territories and provinces brought under treaty with Rome, soldiers who committed rape against the local people might be subjected to harsher punishments than civilians. Sertorius, the long-time governor of Roman Spain whose policies emphasized respect and cooperation with provincials, executed an entire cohort when a single soldier had attempted to rape a local woman. Mass rape seems to have been more common as a punitive measure during Roman civil wars than abroad.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Because of the Roman emphasis on family, female sexuality was regarded as one of the bases for social order and prosperity. Female citizens were expected to exercise their sexuality within marriage, and were honored for their sexual integrity "(pudicitia)" and fecundity: Augustus granted special honors and privileges to women who had given birth to three children (see ""Ius trium liberorum""). Control of female sexuality was regarded as necessary for the stability of the state, as embodied most conspicuously in the absolute virginity of the Vestals. A Vestal who violated her vow was entombed alive in a ritual that mimicked some aspects of a Roman funeral; her lover was executed. Female sexuality, either disorderly or exemplary, often impacts state religion in times of crisis for the Republic. The moral legislation of Augustus focused on harnessing the sexuality of women.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: As was the case for men, free women who displayed themselves sexually, such as prostitutes and performers, or who made themselves available indiscriminately were excluded from legal protections and social respectability.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Many Roman literary sources approve of respectable women exercising sexual passion within marriage. While ancient literature overwhelmingly takes a male-centered view of sexuality, the Augustan poet Ovid expresses an explicit and virtually unique interest in how women experience intercourse.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Roman attitudes toward female nudity differed from but were influenced by those of the Greeks, who idealized the male body in the nude while portraying respectable women clothed. Partial nudity of goddesses in Roman Imperial art, however, can highlight the breasts as dignified but pleasurable images of nurturing, abundance, and peacefulness. Erotic art indicates that women with small breasts and wide hips had the ideal body type. By the 1st century AD, Roman art shows a broad interest in the female nude engaged in varied activities, including sex. Pornographic art that depicts women presumed to be prostitutes performing sex acts may show the breasts covered by a "strophium" even when the rest of the body is naked.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: In the real world as described in literature, prostitutes sometimes displayed themselves naked at the entrance to their brothel cubicles, or wore see-through silk garments; slaves for sale were often displayed naked to allow buyers to inspect them for defects, and to symbolize that they lacked the right to control their own body. As Seneca the Elder described a woman for sale:


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Naked she stood on the shore, at the pleasure of the purchaser; every part of her body was examined and felt. Would you hear the result of the sale? The pirate sold; the pimp bought, that he might employ her as a prostitute.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The display of the female body made it vulnerable. Varro said sight was the greatest of the senses, because while the others were limited by proximity, sight could penetrate even to the stars; he thought the Latin word for "sight, gaze", "visus", was etymologically related to "vis", "force, power". But the connection between "visus" and "vis", he said, also implied the potential for violation, just as Actaeon gazing on the naked Diana violated the goddess.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The completely nude female body as portrayed in sculpture was thought to embody a universal concept of Venus, whose counterpart Aphrodite is the goddess most often depicted as a nude in Greek art.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The "basic obscenity" for the female genitalia is "cunnus", "cunt", though perhaps not as strongly offensive as the English. Martial uses the word more than thirty times, Catullus once, and Horace thrice only in his early work; it also appears in the "Priapea" and graffiti. One of the slang words women used for their genitals was "porcus", "pig", particularly when mature women spoke of girls. Varro connects this usage of the word to the sacrifice of a pig to the goddess Ceres in preliminary wedding rites. Metaphors of fields, gardens, and meadows are common, as is the image of the masculine "plough" in the feminine "furrow". Other metaphors include cave, ditch, pit, bag, vessel, door, hearth, oven, and altar.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Although women's genitals appear often in invective and satiric verse as objects of disgust, they are rarely referred to in Latin love elegy. Ovid, the most heterosexual of the classic love poets, is the only one to refer to giving a woman pleasure through genital stimulation. Martial writes of female genitalia only insultingly, describing one woman's vagina as "loose ... as the foul gullet of a pelican". The vagina is often compared to a boy's anus as a receptacle for the phallus.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The function of the clitoris "(landica)" was "well understood". In classical Latin, "landica" was a highly indecorous obscenity found in graffiti and the "Priapea"; the clitoris was usually referred to with a metaphor, such as Juvenal's "crista" ("crest"). Cicero records that a hapless speaker of consular rank broke up the senate just by saying something that sounded like "landica": "hanc culpam maiorem an il-"lam dicam"?" ("Shall I call this fault greater or that one?" heard as "this greater fault or a clitoris?"). "Could he have been more obscene?" Cicero exclaims, observing at the same time that "cum nos", "when we", sounds like "cunnus". A lead sling-bullet uncovered through archaeology was inscribed "I aim for Fulvia's clit" "(Fulviae landicam peto)", Fulvia being the wife of Mark Antony who commanded troops during the civil wars of the 40s and 30s.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Latin lacked a standard word for labia; two terms found in medical writers are "orae", "edges" or "shores", and "pinnacula", "little wings". The first recorded instance of the word "vulva" occurs in Varro's work on agriculture (1st century BC), where it refers to the membrane that surrounds a fetus. In the early Empire, "vulva" came into usage for "womb", the usual word for which had been "uterus" in the Republic, or sometimes more vaguely "venter" or "alvus", both words for "belly". "Vulva" seems originally to have referred to the womb of animals, but is "extremely common" in Pliny's "Natural History" for a human uterus. In the Imperial era, "vulva" can mean "female reproductive organs" collectively or vaguely, or sometimes refers to the vagina alone. Early Latin Bible translators used "vulva" as the correct and proper word for the womb. At some point during the Imperial era, "matrix" became the common word for "uterus", particularly in the gynecological writers of late antiquity, who also employ a specialized vocabulary for parts of the reproductive organs.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Both women and men often removed their pubic hair, but grooming may have varied over time and by individual preference. A fragment from the early satirist Lucilius refers to penetrating a "hairy bag", and a graffito from Pompeii declares that "a hairy cunt is fucked much better than one which is smooth; it's steamy and wants cock".


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: At the entrance to a "caldarium" in the bath complex of the House of Menander at Pompeii, an unusual graphic device appears on a mosaic: a phallic oil can is surrounded by strigils in the shape of female genitalia, juxtaposed with an "Ethiopian" water-bearer who has an "unusually large and comically detailed" penis.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Latin words for "breasts" include "mammae" (cf. English "mammary"), "papillae" (more specifically for "nipples"), and "ubera", breasts in their capacity to provide nourishment, including the teats or udder of an animal. "Papillae" is the preferred word when Catullus and the Augustan poets take note of breasts in an erotic context.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The breasts of a beautiful woman were supposed to be "unobtrusive." Idealized breasts in the tradition of Hellenistic poetry were compared to apples; Martial makes fun of large breasts. Old women who were stereotypically ugly and undesirable in every way had "pendulous" breasts. On the Roman stage, exaggerated breasts were part of the costuming for comically unattractive female characters, since in classic Roman comedy women's roles were played by male actors in drag.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: While Greek epigrams describe ideal breasts, Latin poets take limited interest in them, at least as compared to the modern focus on admiring and fondling a woman's breasts. They are observed mainly as aspects of a woman's beauty or perfection of form, though Ovid finds them inviting to touch. In one poem celebrating a wedding, Catullus remarks on the bride's "tender nipples" "(teneris ... papillis)", which would keep a good husband sleeping with her; erotic appeal supports fidelity within marriage and leads to children and a long life together.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Because all infants were breastfed in antiquity, the breast was viewed primarily as an emblem of nurturing and of motherhood. "Mastoi", breast-shaped drinking cups, and representations of breasts are among the votive offerings "(vota)" found at sanctuaries of deities such as Diana and Hercules, sometimes having been dedicated by wet nurses. The breast-shaped cup may have a religious significance; the drinking of breast milk by an adult who is elderly or about to die symbolized potential rebirth in the afterlife. In the Etruscan tradition, the goddess Juno "(Uni)" offers her breast to Hercules as a sign that he may enter the ranks of the immortals. The religious meaning may underlie the story of how Pero offered breast milk to her elderly father when he was imprisoned and sentenced to death by starvation (see Roman Charity). The scene is among the moral paintings in a Pompeiian bedroom that belonged to a child, along with the legend "in sadness is the meeting of modesty and piety". Pliny records medicinal uses of breast milk, and ranks it as one of the most useful remedies, especially for ailments of the eyes and ears. Wrapping one's head in a bra was said to cure a headache.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Baring the breasts is one of the gestures made by women, particularly mothers or nurses, to express mourning or as an appeal for mercy. The baring and beating of breasts ritually in grief was interpreted by Servius as producing milk to feed the dead. In Greek and Latin literature, mythological mothers sometimes expose their breasts in moments of extreme emotional duress to demand that their nurturing role be respected. Breasts exposed with such intensity held apotropaic power. Julius Caesar indicates that the gesture had a similar significance in Celtic culture: during the siege of Avaricum, the female heads of household "(matres familiae)" expose their breasts and extend their hands to ask that the women and children be spared. Tacitus notes Germanic women who exhorted their reluctant men to valorous battle by aggressively baring their breasts. Although in general "the gesture is meant to arouse pity rather than sexual desire", the beauty of the breasts so exposed is sometimes in evidence and remarked upon.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Because women were normally portrayed clothed in art, bared breasts can signify vulnerability or erotic availability by choice, accident, or force. Baring a single breast was a visual motif of Classical Greek sculpture, where among other situations, including seductions, it often represented impending physical violence or rape. Some scholars have attempted to find a "code" in which exposing the right breast had an erotic significance, while the left breast signified nurturing. Although art produced by the Romans may imitate or directly draw on Greek conventions, during the Classical period of Greek art images of women nursing were treated as animalistic or barbaric; by contrast, the coexisting Italic tradition emphasized the breast as a focus of the mother–child relationship and as a source of female power.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The erogenous power of the breast was not utterly neglected: in comparing sex with a woman to sex with a boy, a Greek novel of the Roman Imperial era notes that "her breast when it is caressed provides its own particular pleasure". Propertius connects breast development with girls reaching an age to "play". Tibullus observes that a woman just might wear loose clothing so that her breasts "flash" when she reclines at dinner. An astrological tradition held that mammary intercourse was enjoyed by men born under the conjunction of Venus, Mercury, and Saturn. Even in the most sexually explicit Roman paintings, however, the breasts are sometimes kept covered by the "strophium" (breast band). The women so depicted may be prostitutes, but it can be difficult to discern why an artist decides in a given scenario to portray the breasts covered or exposed.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Greek words for a woman who prefers sex with another woman include "hetairistria" (compare "hetaira", "courtesan" or "companion"), "tribas" (plural "tribades"), and "Lesbia"; Latin words include the loanword "tribas", "fricatrix" ("she who rubs"), and "virago". References to sex between women are infrequent in the Roman literature of the Republic and early Principate. Ovid, who advocates generally for a heterosexual lifestyle, finds it "a desire known to no one, freakish, novel ... among all animals no female is seized by desire for female".


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: During the Roman Imperial era, which many Roman writers perceived as more decadent than the Republican period, sources for same-sex relations among women are more abundant, in the form of love spells, medical writing, texts on astrology and the interpretation of dreams, and other sources. A graffito from Pompeii expresses the desire of one woman for another:


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: I wish I could hold to my neck and embrace the little arms, and bear kisses on the tender lips. Go on, doll, and trust your joys to the winds; believe me, light is the nature of men.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: An early reference to same-sex relations among women as "lesbianism" is found in Lucian (2nd century AD): "They say there are women like that in Lesbos, masculine-looking, but they don't want to give it up for men. Instead, they consort with women, just like men."


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Since Romans thought a sex act required an active or dominant partner who was "phallic" (see "Phallic sexuality" above), male writers imagined that in lesbian sex one of the women would use a dildo or have an exceptionally large clitoris for penetration, and that she would be the one experiencing pleasure. Martial describes lesbians as having outsized sexual appetites and performing penetrative sex on both women and boys. Imperial portrayals of women who sodomize boys, drink and eat like men, and engage in vigorous physical regimens, may reflect cultural anxieties about the growing independence of Roman women.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The rape of women is a pervasive theme in the myths and legends of early Rome. The legendary founders Romulus and Remus were born from the rape of the Vestal Rhea Silvia by the god Mars. Romulus and his "band of freebooters" can transform their all-male settlement into a city only by the "rape" of the Sabine women, that is, by forcibly abducting the daughters of their Sabine neighbors to take as wives. The overthrow of the Roman monarchy and the establishment of the Republic was precipitated by the rape of the much-admired Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, the king's son. The legend crystallizes the Roman view of unchecked "libido" as a form of tyranny.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The Augustan historian Livy seems "embarrassed" by the rape motif of early Roman history, and emphasizes the redeeming political dimension of these events. Lucretius condemns rape as a primitive behavior outside the bounds of an advanced civilization, describing it as "a man's use of violent force and imposition of sexual impulse".


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Roman law recognized rape as a crime: the rape victim was not guilty of anything. Intercourse by force or compulsion "(vis)", even if it took place under circumstances that were otherwise unlawful for a woman (see "Moral and legal concepts" above), left the woman legally without blame. The official position under Diocletian (reigned 284–305 AD) held that:


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The laws punish the foul wickedness of those who prostitute their modesty to the lusts of others, but they do not attach blame to those who are compelled to "stuprum" by force, since it has, moreover, been quite properly decided that their reputations are unharmed and that they are not prohibited from marriage to others.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Although literary sources from the Republican era make it clear that rape was wrong and severely penalized, the statutes under which it might be charged as a crime are unknown until passage of the "Lex Iulia de vi publica", dating probably to the dictatorship of Julius Caesar in the 40s BC. Rome had no state prosecutors; cases could be prosecuted by any citizen with the legal expertise and speaking ability to do so. Since emancipated women were allowed to bring criminal prosecutions in the Republic, it is conceivable that a rape victim could have brought charges against her rapist herself. Otherwise, the case could be prosecuted by her father or husband, or by anyone who saw fit to do so. There was no statute of limitations for rape; by contrast adultery, which was criminalized under Augustus, had to be prosecuted within five years. Rape was a capital crime.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: As a matter of law, rape could be committed only against a citizen in good standing. A woman who worked as a prostitute or entertainer lost her social standing and became "infamis"; by making her body publicly available, she had in effect surrendered her right to be protected from sexual abuse or physical violence. Cicero defended a client whose misdeeds included the gang rape of an actress on the grounds that young men took customary license with entertainers. The rape of a slave could be prosecuted only as damage to her owner's property, under the "Lex Aquilia". Consent would have been an issue in rape cases only rarely; if the accused argued that the woman had consented, he could still be charged with committing the more general sex crime of "stuprum" against a citizen, since male sexual freedom was limited to prostitutes or slaves. If rape against a married woman could not be proven, the Augustan legislation criminalizing adultery would make the man liable to a charge of "adulterium", criminal adultery, though a charge of either adultery or "stuprum" without force would implicate the woman as well. An acquittal for rape, as with any other crime, would open the prosecutor to a retaliatory charge of "calumnia", malicious prosecution. The prosecution of rape might also be hindered by psychological and social pressures, such as embarrassment or a reluctance to expose one's private life.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Attitudes toward rape changed when the Empire became Christianized. St. Augustine interpreted Lucretia's suicide as a possible admission that she had secretly encouraged the rapist, and Christian apologists regarded her as having committed the sin of involuntary sexual pleasure. The first Christian emperor Constantine redefined rape as a public offense rather than as a private wrong. Earlier Roman law had blurred the line between abduction and elopement, since in either case it was the right of the "paterfamilias" to give or withhold his consent to his daughter's marriage that had been violated. The word "raptus" thus could refer to a successful seduction as well as abduction or rape. If the girl consented, Constantine ordered that she be punished along with the male "abductor" by being burnt alive. If she had not consented, she was still considered an accomplice, "on the grounds that she could have saved herself by screaming for help". As a participant to the rape, she was punished under law by being disinherited, regardless of the wishes of her family. Even if she and her family consented to a marriage as the result of an elopement, the marriage was legally void. In the Republic and the pre-Christian Empire, the consequences of an abduction or an elopement had been up to the couple and their families.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Both male and female freeborn children wore the "toga praetexta", a purple-bordered garment that marked its wearer as having "inviolable" status. An oath could be sworn upon the "sacred "praetexta"", a marker of how "we make sacred and venerable the weakness of childhood". It was religiously impermissible "(nefas)" to use obscene language in front of those wearing the "praetexta", and Cato claimed that in front of his son he tried to speak as though Vestal Virgins were present.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Freeborn Roman boys also wore an apotropaic amulet called the "bulla" which incorporated a phallic talisman "(fascinum)" inside a locket of gold, silver, or bronze, or in a leather pouch. In addition to its magical function, the "bulla" would have been a visible warning that the boy was sexually off-limits. The equivalent for the girl was the "lunula", a crescent moon amulet.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: There were laws protecting freeborn children from sexual predators, and the rape of a freeborn boy was a capital crime; this severity was directed at protecting the integrity of the young citizen. Fictional license was not a defense; Valerius Maximus reports that a poetic boast of seducing a "puer praetextatus" ("praetextate boy") and a freeborn virgin "(ingenua virgo)" was used in court to impugn a prosecutor's moral authority. In denouncing the debaucheries of Quintus Apronius, Cicero builds to the worst offence: Apronius danced naked at a banquet in front of a boy still of an age to wear the "praetexta". Although children were taken to dinner parties "(convivia)" to accustom them to proper adult social behavior, Quintilian scolds parents of his day for being poor role models: they parade their mistresses and male concubines and behave indiscreetly even when their children are present, and think it's cute when their children say things that are age-inappropriate. Quintilian regards this misbehavior as a sign of general moral decline. At weddings, however, boys were by ancient custom given license to speak obscenely, peppering the new couple with dirty jokes, as humor and laughter were thought to promote fertility.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Protections applied only to freeborn children, not those born to slaves, sold into slavery, or taken captive in war. The social acceptance of pederasty among the Romans was focused on the exploitation of young male slaves or prostitutes by men of the upper classes.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Adolescents in ritual preparation to transition to adult status wore the "tunica recta", the "upright tunic", so called because it was woven ritually on the type of upright loom that was the earliest used by Romans. The tunic, worn by both youths and maidens, may have had the purple band of inviolability, though this is unclear from the evidence. Girls wove their own "tunica recta".


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The puberty ritual for the young male involved shaving his first beard and taking off his "bulla", which he dedicated to the household gods, the Lares. He assumed the "toga virilis" ("toga of manhood"), was enrolled as a citizen on the census, and soon began his military service. Traditionally, the ceremony was held on the Liberalia, the festival in honor of the god Liber, who embodied both political and sexual liberty. Following his rite of passage, the young male citizen was permitted the avenues of sexual activity that were generally acceptable for Roman men of his social rank. Often a young man would be introduced to heterosexual intercourse by an experienced female prostitute.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Roman women were expected to remain virgins until marriage; the higher a girl's social rank, the earlier she was likely to become betrothed and married. The usual age of betrothal for upper classes girls was 14, but for patricians as early as 12. Weddings were often postponed until the girl was considered mature enough. The wedding ceremony was in part a rite of passage for the bride, as Rome lacked the elaborate female puberty rituals of ancient Greece. On the night before the wedding, the bride bound up her hair with a yellow hairnet she had woven. The confining of her hair signified the harnessing of her sexuality within marriage. Her weaving of the "tunica recta" and the hairnet demonstrated her skill and her capacity for acting in the traditional matron's role as "custos domi", "guardian of the house". On her wedding day, she belted her tunic with the "cingulum", made of ewe wool to symbolize fertility, and tied with the "knot of Hercules", which was supposed to be difficult to untie. The knot symbolized wifely chastity, in that it was to be untied only by her husband, but the "cingulum" also symbolized that the groom was bound to his wife. The bride's hair was ritually styled in "six tresses" "(seni crines)", and she was veiled until uncovered by her husband at the end of the ceremony, a ritual of surrendering her virginity to him.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Because men could enjoy sexual relations outside marriage with relative impunity, it has sometimes been assumed that satisfying sex was not an expectation of Roman marriage. The jurist Ulpian noted that "it is not sexual intercourse that makes a marriage but rather marital affection", but the warnings by moralists and philosophers against a preoccupation with sex within marriage recognize the potential for marital passion.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Sexual intimacy between a married couple was a private matter, and not usually the subject of literature. An exception was the epithalamium, a genre of poetry that celebrated a wedding. A wedding hymn by Catullus, for instance, praises the love goddess Venus because "nothing is possible without you". Ovid, whose love poetry early in his career was directed at fictional mistresses, wrote elegies during his exile in which he longed for his wife. Among the collected letters of Pliny "Minor" is one he writes about his feelings for his wife:


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: I am seized by an unbelievable longing for you. The reason is above all my love, but secondarily the fact that we are not used to being apart. This is why I spend the greater part of the night haunted by your image; this is why from time to time my feet lead me (the right expression!) of their own accord to your room at the times I was accustomed to frequent you; this is why, in short, I retreat, morbid and disconsolate, like an excluded lover from an unwelcoming doorway.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Pliny adopts the rhetoric of love poetry, conventionally directed at an illicit or hard-to-attain lover, as appropriate for expressing his wedded desire.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Although it was a point of pride for a woman to be "univira", married only once, there was no stigma attached to divorce. Speedy remarriage after divorce or the death of a spouse was common and even expected among the Roman elite, since marriage was considered right and natural for adults. Although widows were usually expected to wait ten months before remarrying, even a pregnant woman was not barred from taking a new husband, as long as the paternity of her child was not in doubt for legal purposes. If a first marriage ended, women seem to have had more say in arranging subsequent marriages. While having children was a primary goal of marriage, other social and familial bonds were enhanced, not excluding personal companionship and sexual pleasure between husband and wife, as indicated by marriages involving women past their childbearing years.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The Trojan royal couple Hector and Andromache became a mythological trope of wedded sex. Latin love elegy focuses on their sex life rather than the tragic end of their marriage with Hector's death at the hands of Achilles. They were known for the "woman on top" position, with a verb suggesting that the woman "rides" the man like a horse. In general, Hector was portrayed as markedly heterosexual and an exemplary husband.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: An epithalamium by Catullus paints the wedding night as a time of ripe eroticism, spiced with humorous and bawdy songs from the guests. "Look inside," the poet advises the bride, who burns with an "intimate flame", "where your man lies on the richly arrayed bed, completely available to you". The husband is reminded that "good Venus" has blessed him, since he can now desire openly what he desires, and need not conceal a "good love". The couple is encouraged to enjoy themselves as they please "(ludite ut lubet)"; the goal is to produce children soon.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: A pair of paintings in a bedroom of the Casa della Farnesina has been interpreted as "a narrative of the modest bride becoming the immodest lover—perhaps fulfilling a ribald male fantasy".


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Some literary passages suggest that a newlywed might break off his outside sexual relations for a time and focus on bonding with his wife in the hope of starting a family. Some Stoics maintained that marital fidelity was as much a virtue for men as for women (see "Stoic sexual morality" above). Legally, however, a Roman husband did not commit adultery when he had sex outside marriage as long as his partner was considered sexually available; sexual misconduct "(stuprum)" was adultery depending on the status of a female partner. A character in a play by Plautus expresses a man's sexual freedom in comic terms:


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: No one prohibits anyone from going down the public way "(publica via)"; as long as you do not make a path through posted land, as long as you hold off from brides, single women, maidens, the youth and free boys, love whatever you want.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: A married or marriageable woman and young male citizens are off-limits, just as if they were the property of someone else, and in fact adultery as a crime was committed contrary to the rights of the "paterfamilias" to control his household. For a man, adultery was a sexual offense committed with a woman who was neither his wife nor a permissible partner such as a prostitute or slave, in effect when his female partner was another man's wife or his unmarried daughter. The later jurists emphasize that "adulterium" in the strict sense was committed with a married woman.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: For a married woman, no infidelity was acceptable, and first-time brides were expected to be virgins. According to Cato (2nd century BC), a husband had an ancient right "(ius)" to kill his wife if he caught her in the act of adultery, but if this "right" existed, it was a matter of custom and not statute law. In the Republic, adultery was normally considered a private matter for families to deal with, not a serious criminal offense requiring the attention of the courts. No source records the justified killing of a woman for adultery by either a father or husband during the Republican era, though adultery was grounds for divorce.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Following the collapse of the Republic, moral legislation became part of the new political order under Rome's first emperor, Augustus. Laws pertaining to adultery passed in 18 BC were part of his program to restore the "mos maiorum", traditional social norms, while consolidating his political authority and codifying a more rigid social hierarchy in the wake of the recent civil wars. The appeal to old-fashioned values cloaked the radical overthrow of the Republic's participatory political institutions by top-down, one-man rule. The "Lex Iulia de adulteriis" ("Julian Law concerning acts of adultery") was directed at punishing married women who engaged in extra-marital affairs. Scholars have often assumed that the "Lex Iulia" was meant to address a virulent outbreak of adultery in the Late Republic. An androcentric perspective in the early 20th century held that the "Lex Iulia" had been "a very necessary check upon the growing independence and recklessness of women". A more sympathetic view in the late 20th to early 21st century saw love affairs as a way for the intelligent, independent women of the elite to form emotionally meaningful relationships outside marriages arranged for political purposes. It is possible, however, that no such epidemic of adultery even existed; the law should perhaps be understood not as addressing a real problem that threatened society, but as one of the instruments of social control exercised by Augustus that cast the state, and by extension himself, in the role of "paterfamilias" to all Rome.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Personal anxieties about infidelity, within marriage or not, are reflected in magic spells intended to "fix" "(defixiones)" or bind the other person's erotic attachment. Spells were also available for interrogating the beloved about fidelity. One magical papyrus from Roman Egypt recommends placing the heart of a hoopoe on a sleeping woman's genitals to induce truthful answers; another says that the tongue of a hen placed on her lips or breast will cause her to reveal the name of the man she loves.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Literature of the Late Republic and Principate, particularly the satires of Horace and Juvenal, offer various depictions, or perhaps fantasies, of how a wronged husband might subject his wife's lover to humiliation and punishment. In these literary treatments, the adulterer is castrated, beaten, raped by the husband himself or his slaves, or penetrated anally with a mullet, a type of prized fish cultivated by elite Romans as a leisure activity "(otium)". References to such acts do not appear in the letters of Cicero nor the histories of Tacitus, and may be fictional exaggerations. Ovid makes fun of the jealous husband as lacking in sophistication: "The man who's excessively wounded by his wife's adulterous affairs is a hick." Ovid's predecessor Catullus wrote poetry celebrating his adulterous affair with "Lesbia", his social superior, traditionally identified as Clodia. The cultivation of a laissez-faire attitude as a sign of urbanity may have prompted the provision of Augustus's adultery law that required a husband to divorce his wife and bring formal legal charges against her, or face charges himself for pimping "(lenocinium)".


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Sexuality was a "core feature" of ancient Roman slavery. Because slaves were regarded as property under Roman law, an owner could use them for sex or hire them out to service other people. Some scholars propose that content in Cicero's letters indicate he had a long-term homosexual relationship with his slave Tiro. As Eva Cantarella stated bluntly, "the Roman "paterfamilias" was an absolute master, ... he exercised a power outside any control of society and the state. In this situation why on earth should he refrain from sodomising his houseboys?" But this form of sexual release thus held little erotic cachet: to use one's own slaves was "one step up from masturbation". In describing the ideal partner in pederasty, Martial prefers a slave boy who "acts more like a free man than his master", that is, one who can frame the affair as a stimulating game of courtship. When figures identifiable as slaves appear in erotic art, they are performing routine tasks in the background, not taking part in sex acts. In his work on the interpretation of dreams ("c." 170 AD), Artemidorus takes a symbolic view of the sexual value of slaves: to dream of having sex with one's own female slave was a good thing, "for slaves are the dreamer's possession; therefore taking pleasure in them signifies the dreamer's being pleased with his own possessions".


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: A Roman could exploit his own slaves for sex, but was not entitled to compel any enslaved person he chose to have sex, since the owner had the right to control his own property. In the pursuit of sex with a slave who belonged to someone else, persuasion or threats might be employed. A charge of rape could not be brought against a free man who forced a slave to have sex, since a slave lacked the legal standing that protected a citizen's body, but the owner could prosecute the rapist under the "Lex Aquilia", a law pertaining to property damage.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: A slave's sexuality was closely controlled. Slaves had no right to legal marriage "(conubium)", though they could live together as husband and wife "(contubernales)". An owner usually restricted the heterosexual activities of his male slaves to females he also owned; any children born from these unions added to his wealth. Cato, at a time when Rome's large-scale slave economy was still in early development, thought it good practice to monitor his slaves' sex lives, and required male slaves to pay a fee for access to their female fellow slaves.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: If an owner found that his male slave was having a sexual relationship with a free woman, the law required that he warn the couple three times to break it off. If the affair continued, he had the right to take ownership of the woman. References to women from respectable families having sex with a male slave are infrequent, indicating that male writers were not preoccupied with the risk of it. Cicero offers no examples in either the gossipy parts of his letters or in court cases where he attacks the reputation of a woman: he accuses Clodia of incest and of running her house like a brothel, but not of sleeping with slaves. Not even Messalina or Sallust's Sempronia is accused in the hostile sources of having sex with a slave. Sex with a slave was among the trumped-up charges against Claudia Octavia, the wife of Nero, when Poppaea Sabina campaigned to take her place, but mostly it was a matter for innuendo or insult against a husband who failed to prevent it.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Despite the external controls and restrictions placed on a slave's sexuality, Roman art and literature perversely often portray slaves as lascivious, voyeuristic, and even sexually knowing. One of the themes of Roman comedy that distinguishes it from its Greek models is the depiction of master-slave relations.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Freeborn Romans who fell into slavery were supposed to be protected from sexual exploitation, as indicated by two different stories recorded by ancient historians. Before the abolition of debt bondage in the 4th century BC, free Romans were sometimes driven to sell themselves or their children into slavery when they were overwhelmed by debt. According to Livy, debt slavery ("nexum") was abolished as a direct result of the attempted sexual abuse of a freeborn youth who served as surety for his father's debt with the usurer Lucius Papirius. The boy, Gaius Publilius, was notably beautiful, and Papirius insisted that as a bond slave he was required to provide sexual services. When Publilius refused, Papirius had him stripped and whipped. The youth then took to the streets to display his injuries, and an outcry among the people led the consuls to convene the senate. The political process eventually led to the "Lex Poetelia Papiria", which prohibited holding debtors in bondage for their debt and required instead that the debtor's property be used as collateral. The law thus established that the integrity of a Roman citizen's body was fundamental to the concept of "libertas", political liberty, in contrast to the uses to which a slave's body was subject. In this and a similar incident reported by Valerius Maximus, corporal punishment and sexual abuse are seen as similar violations of the citizen's freedom from physical compulsion, in contrast to the slave's physical vulnerability.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Some sexual protections could be extended to slaves. The conduct of slaves reflected generally on the respectability of the household, and the "materfamilias" in particular was judged by her female slaves' sexual behavior, which was expected to be moral or at least discreet. This decorum may have limited the exploitation of female slaves that were part of the "familia". Seneca expressed Stoic indignation that a male slave should be groomed effeminately and used sexually, because a slave's human dignity should not be debased. The burgeoning trade in eunuch slaves during the early Empire prompted legislation under the emperor Hadrian that prohibited the castration of a slave against his will "for lust or gain". Legal agreements on the sale of a slave might include a "ne serva prostituatur" covenant that prohibited the employment of the slave as a prostitute. Although concern for the slave's welfare may have been a factor in individual cases, this legal restriction seems also to have been intended to shield the male citizen owner from the shame or "infamia" associated with pimping and prostitution. The "ne serva" covenant remained in force for subsequent sales, even if the buyer was initially unaware of it, and if it was violated, the illegally prostituted slave was granted freedom.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Prostitution was legal throughout the Roman Empire in all periods. Most prostitutes were slaves or freedwomen. Prostitutes in Rome had to register with the aediles. Despite what might seem to be a clear distinction as a matter of law, the jurist Ulpian opined that an openly promiscuous woman brought the status of prostitute upon herself, even if she accepted no money. The Augustan moral legislation that criminalized adultery exempted prostitutes, who could legally have sex with a married man. Encouraged to think of adultery as a matter of law rather than morality, a few socially prominent women even chose to avoid prosecution for adultery by registering themselves as prostitutes.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Confused status frequently results in plot complications in the comedies of Plautus and Terence. Obstacles to love arise when a young man falls in love with, and wishes to marry, a non-citizen prostitute, and are overcome when the young woman's true status as a freeborn virgin is revealed. The well-brought-up freeborn virgin is marriageable, and the non-citizen prostitute is not. The relation of these comic situations to real life is problematic: Plautus and Terence drew on Greek models which are often little known, and so the extent to which they incorporated Roman social behaviors and attitudes is hard to determine. Elaine Fantham has observed that prolonged military campaigning in Greece and Asia Minor had introduced Roman men to a more sophisticated standard of luxury and pleasure, perhaps reflected by comedy: the young man acts out his infatuation with an expensive courtesan instead of a family slave or common prostitute.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Prostitutes appear in erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum, including wall paintings from buildings identified as brothels, in which they are often nude except for a strapless bra "(strophium)". The paintings illustrate various sexual positions that contradict some scholarly claims about the preferences of Roman men in heterosexual acts. Literary sources record that prostitutes wore distinctive clothing, often gaudy dresses of see-through silk. They were the only Roman women who wore the toga, the distinctive dress of a free Roman male. This crossing of gender boundaries has been interpreted variously.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Prostitutes were among those persons in Rome categorized as "infames", enjoying few legal protections even if they were technically not slaves. "Infamia" as a legal status once entered into could not be escaped: a prostitute was "not only a woman who practices prostitution, but also one who has formerly done so, even though she has ceased to act in this manner; for the disgrace is not removed even if the practice is subsequently discontinued".


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: In the Roman moral tradition, pleasure "(voluptas)" was a dubious pursuit. The Stoic moralist Seneca contrasts pleasure with virtue "(virtus)":


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: 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.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Roman ambivalence toward physical pleasure is expressed by the "infamia" of those whose bodies provided it publicly. In a technical sense, "infamia" was an official loss of legal standing for a freeborn person as a result of misconduct, including sexual misconduct, but the word could be used for ill repute in general. "Infamia" was an "inescapable consequence" of certain professions, including not only prostitutes and pimps but performers such as actors, dancers, and gladiators: "These figures were the objects of other people's desires. They served the pleasure of others. They were tarnished by exposure to the public gaze."


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Those labeled "infames" (singular "infamis") were liable to corporal punishment, usually reserved for slaves. Under the Republic and early Empire, one of the ways in which the citizen's liberty was defined was through the freedom of his body from physical coercion or punishment such as flogging by authorities. Citizens who chose to become public performers, however, and to use their bodies to offer public pleasure, were excluded from these physical protections, and could be beaten or otherwise subjected to violence. Any free man who became a gladiator took an oath to suffer branding, bondage, and beating, as well as potential death by the sword. Both glamorized and despised, the gladiator was supposed to exert a compelling sexual allure over women.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Actors were sexually ambiguous, in part because they could imitate women, and were attractive to both men and women. The "dictator" Sulla had a long-term affair with an actor; Maecenas, the arts patron and advisor to Augustus, was in love with an actor named Bathyllus; and women of the Imperial family are alleged to have had affairs with actors. Actresses were assumed to be prostitutes.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: A man who enjoyed receiving anal sex or providing oral sex, often characterized as a "cinaedus", might also be stigmatized as "infamis", though if he was a citizen he could retain his legal standing.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Archaeological evidence, primarily from Pompeii and Herculaneum, and literary sources seem to indicate the existence of private "sex clubs" in some Roman homes "(domūs)". Most Romans lived in apartments "(insulae)"; the "domus" was a large, independent dwelling owned by a family of considerable means, and in Rome was central to the family's social identity. A few of these residences have rooms decorated with pornographic art not differing from that found in identified brothels; in some cases, an erotically decorated room has its own exterior door to admit visitors who would normally enter the home through the main doors leading to the atrium, where the family displayed ancestral images and other trophies of respectability.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: It has been suggested that these rooms were meant to evoke the ambience of a brothel for the hosting of exclusive sex parties, such as the one described by the historian Valerius Maximus as occurring in 52 BC with a consul and the tribunes of the "plebs" in attendance:


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Just as notorious was that party arranged for Metellus Scipio when he was consul and for the people's tribunes—by Gemellus, their tribunicial errand boy. He was a free man by birth, but twisted by his business to play the servant's role. Society gave a collective blush: he established a whorehouse in his own house, and pimped out Mucia and Flavia, each of them notable for her father and husband, along with the aristocratic boy Saturninus. Bodies in shameless submission, ready to come for a game of drunken sex! A banquet not for honoring consul and tribunes, but indicting them!


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The existence of sex clubs may provide background for Late Republican political smears about public figures whose party guests included prostitutes, and for the notorious Imperial whorehouse Caligula established on the Palatine, where he prostituted married women and freeborn youths.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Around 90 positions for intercourse are recorded in the ancient world. Both Roman erotic art and Latin literature, most famously a passage from Ovid's "Art of Love", depict various forms of copulation "(concubitus varii)" and sexual positions "(figurae veneris)". The Latin terms are Ovid's, from his description of how the most aristocratic households displayed erotic paintings among their art collections. According to Suetonius, Tiberius had a vast collection of sex manuals and erotic art, including a painting of the mythological huntress Atalanta performing oral sex on Meleager, a work that the emperor regarded as worth more than a million sesterces. Sexual variety fascinated Romans. Astrology was thought to influence one's preferences and pursuits: people born when the sun, moon, and planets were in certain astrological signs were supposed to be inclined toward secret vice or "unnatural" forms of intercourse, or to becoming "pathici".


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Lucretius observes that sex acts may have different purposes. Prostitutes employ certain movements aimed at giving their customers pleasure and at avoiding pregnancy. Wives wishing to conceive are advised against moving vigorously during intercourse, since such movements "knock the ploughshare from the furrow and misdirect the sowing of the seed". Lucretius recommends "doggy style" ("a tergo") for couples trying to conceive, because it mimics the natural procreative sex of animals.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The basic obscene verb for a man having sex with a woman is "futuo", "I fuck." Although not found in polite literature, "futuo" was not necessarily insulting or aggressive; it was used transactionally for sex between a prostitute and her client, and in a passionate or loving setting may have been spoken as an arousing intimacy. A fragment from a play by Plautus suggests that acquiring an erotic vocabulary was part of a woman's introduction to sexuality within marriage: a virgin explains that she has not yet learned the words suitable for the wedding night "(nupta verba)". The easy use of the word by a woman in other settings indicates her independence of social norms, and corresponding lack of status. "Either fuck me or let's fight it out," the formidable Fulvia is quoted as challenging the future Augustus. In graffiti at Pompeii written by both men and women, forms of "futuo" are used to announce prowess, satisfaction, or availability.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Thomas Habinek has claimed that "Ovid invents the category of the heterosexual male", since, he says, it was considered normal for a Roman man to have same-sex relations. Ovid radically rejects the Roman tradition of pederasty, and says he takes more pleasure "(voluptas)" in making love with a woman as his equal. Sexual pleasure between man and woman, he emphasizes, should be mutual; Ovid instructs his male pupils to make love to a woman slowly, as he advises men not to conclude the sex act without enabling their female partners to achieve orgasm. In one passage, he seems to be recommending simultaneous orgasm:


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: But don't you fail your lady, hoisting bigger sails, and don't let her get ahead of you on the track either; race to the finish together: that's when pleasure is full, when man and woman lie there, equally vanquished.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Riding" is a common metaphor for the sex act, particularly used of the woman-on-top position. The "mulier equitans" ("woman riding") does not appear in Greek vase painting but is popular in Roman art. Ovid recommends it for the petite woman, as a tall woman may not wish to seem too towering in relation to the man. Supposedly favored by the mythological couple Hector and Andromache, even though she was of legendary height, it was jokingly called "the Hector horse". One relief from Roman Gaul showing the "mulier equitans" plays on the metaphor by picturing a galloping horse within a frame in the background (see first image in gallery below).


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: In art, the "mulier equitans" convention has the woman posed frontally to expose her body in full to the viewer, often emphasizing her depilated pubic area. The significance of this position in Roman culture has been interpreted variously. Kenneth Dover thought it might represent the relative sexual emancipation of Roman women. From a woman's perspective, the position would grant an independence of movement for her own pleasure. Paul Veyne, however, thought it emphasized that the woman had to do the work of servicing the man, who lies there and receives pleasure without effort. The position may have been favored for art because it pleased both male and female viewers: for men, it offered an unobstructed view of the woman's body, as recommended by Ovid, and of the penis entering the vagina; women saw the visually dominant female figure playing the active role.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The position is also called "Venus pendula conversa", "perpendicular Venus with the woman facing toward (the man)"; for its reverse ("Venus pendula aversa", "perpendicular Venus with the woman facing away"), the man lies down with the woman on top, but she turns her back and faces his feet. This version is rarely mentioned or depicted, but is found in Roman art set in Nilotic Egypt.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: An equestrian metaphor is also found for the "cinaedus" "riding" on top in anal sex, and at least once of lesbians who "take turns riding and move with the Moon as witness".


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The Latin verb for "to penetrate anally, bugger" is "pedicare". The object was usually but not always male. "Pedicare" was a blunt and non-euphemistic word, and can be used in a threatening manner, as notoriously by Catullus in "Carmen" 16, or in general to mean "fuck you". The etymology of "pedicare" is unclear, but some have thought it derived from Greek "paidika", having to do with pederasty. The basic word for "anus" was "culus". Common metaphors are "ficus", "fig", and "anus", "ring," which was considered a decorous term and was standard in medical texts.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Men were said to "take it like a woman" ("muliebria pati", "to undergo womanly things") when they were anally penetrated, but when a man performed anal sex on a woman, she was thought of as playing the boy's role. Martial, for instance, is emphatic that anal sex is better with boys than with women; when his wife objects that she provides him with anal sex in an effort to preserve his fidelity, he taunts her with the inferiority of her anus compared with a boy's.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The "figura veneris" in which the woman crouches to lift her buttocks, called "the lioness", may be intended for anal penetration, since boys in Greek art can be portrayed in the same position; with a female partner, it may be difficult to distinguish in art from "a tergo" (rear entry). "Culibonia" ("good anal") was a humorous term for a prostitute with this speciality. Avoiding pregnancy may have been one motive for female prostitutes to offer anal intercourse.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Os impurum", "filthy mouth" or "impure mouth", was a term of abuse especially for those who provided oral sex. "Oral turpitude" was a favorite form of invective for Catullus, Horace, and Martial. An accusation of having an "os impurum" is an "extreme obscenity", so vile that Cicero reserved it for men of lower standing than himself, only implying that their debasement tainted their more powerful patrons who were his real targets.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: It was a convention of obscenely comic verse that oral sex caused bad breath that was nearly toxic. "Whores of the alleyways" are contaminated from giving oral sex; Catullus refers to "the foul saliva of a pissed-over whore". The urinary function of the penis makes oral sex particularly repulsive to Catullus, who elsewhere reviles a Celtiberian for brushing his teeth in urine. Martial jokes that a fine perfume turned to "garum", fish sauce, when it was sniffed by a man whose breath was putrid from oral sex. In another of Martial's epigrams, a "fellator" breathes on a hot cake to cool it down and turns it to excrement. The bad breath and rotten teeth that are attributed to performing oral sex represent moral decay and a general corruption of the mouth's positive functions as the organ of a citizen's persuasive speech.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Because of the stigma attached to providing physical pleasure, a man who performed oral sex on a woman was subject to mockery. Cunnilingus typically appears in Roman art only as part of a reciprocal act, with the woman fellating her male partner in some variation of the "69" position. A wall painting from Pompeii, however, represents a virtually unique role reversal in the giving of oral sex. The woman who receives cunnilingus is tall and shapely, well-groomed, and brazenly nude except for jewelry. The male figure is relatively small, crouching subserviently, and fully clothed; he has an anxious or furtive look. The situation is so extreme that it was probably meant to be humorous as well as titillating; other paintings in this group show a series of sex acts, at least some of which could be seen as transgressive or parodic.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: There is some evidence that women could hire male prostitutes to provide cunnilingus. Graffiti at Pompeii advertise the prices male prostitutes charged for cunnilingus, in the same price range as females performing fellatio; however, the graffiti could be intended as insults to the men named, and not as actual advertisements. One graffito is perhaps intended as political invective: "Vote Isidore for aedile; he's the best at licking cunt!"


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The Latin verb "fellare" is usually used for a woman performing oral sex on a man. Accusing a man of fellating another man was possibly the worst insult in all Roman invective. It was an act that might be requested from women who were "infames", and not something a husband in a respectable household would have expected from his wife. Fellatio was seen as a "somewhat laughable" preference for older men who have trouble maintaining an erection, but graffiti show that the skills of a good "fellatrix" were enthusiastically utilized. Fellatio was a fairly uncommon subject in Roman art.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Irrumatio" is a forced form of fellatio, almost always against another man. Forcing someone to be a receptacle for oral sex was proof of virility, something to boast about, as indicated by the "Priapeia" and the poems of Catullus and Martial. It was also threatened as a punishment, particularly for adulterers. Martial urges a wronged husband who has already cut off the adulterous man's ears and nose to complete the humiliation by befouling his mouth with oral rape.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Group sex appears in literary sources, graffiti, and art. Suetonius says that the emperor Tiberius enjoyed watching group sex, and described "chains" arranged of girls and boys:


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: In his retreat at Capri, he put together a bedroom that was the theater of his secret debauches. There he assembled from all over companies of male and female prostitutes, and inventors of monstrous couplings (which he called "spintriae"), so that, intertwining themselves and forming a triple chain "(triplici serie connexi)", they mutually prostituted themselves in front of him to fire up his flagging desires.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Most threesomes depict two men penetrating a woman. A medallion from Roman Gaul shows two men reclining on a bed, one on the right and one on the left, with their legs extended under a woman between them. Another shows a woman "riding" a man who reclines, while a man standing behind her parts her legs to enter. A far less common variation has one man entering a woman from the rear while he in turn receives anal sex from a man standing behind him, a scenario found in Catullus, "Carmen" 56 as well as art. Catullus makes it clear that this concatenation was considered humorous, possibly because the man in the center could be a "cinaedus", a male who liked to receive anal sex but who was also considered seductive to women.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Foursomes also appear in Roman art, typically with two women and two men, sometimes in same-sex pairings. One example of a foursome from the Suburban Baths at Pompeii demonstrates what Romans saw as the superior role. A woman on the far right kneels beside a bed to perform cunnilingus on a woman lying on it; this woman in turn fellates a man who kneels above her. The man is himself receiving anal sex from a fourth figure, who is represented as the "victor": he acts only to fulfill his own sexual gratification without providing it to others, and looks directly at the viewer with a triumphant wave of the hand.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: A Latin epigram by the Gallo-Roman poet Ausonius (4th century AD) is a riddle that depends on familiarity with the configurations of group sex:


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Three men in bed together: two are committing debauchery "(stuprum)", two are being debauched.""Doesn't that make four men?""You're mistaken: the man on either end each counts as a single offense, but the one in the middle both acts and is acted on."


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Masturbation is little noted in the sources for Roman sexuality. The Romans evidently preferred the left hand for masturbation. Martial has a few mentions in his poems, but considers it an inferior form of sexual release resorted to by slaves, though he admits to masturbating when a beautiful slave-boy is too expensive to obtain: "my hand relieved me as a substitute for Ganymede". It was a longstanding if infrequent theme in Latin satire; one of the few surviving fragments of Lucilius, Rome's earliest satirist, jokes about a personified penis "(Mutto)" whose girlfriend Laeva ("Lefty") wipes away his "tears". A graffito from Pompeii reads "when my worries oppress my body, with my left hand I release my pent-up fluids".


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The etymology of the Latin verb "masturbari" is unclear. It has been argued that it is a compound of "turbare" 'agitate' and "mas" 'male', in an otherwise unattested usage for 'penis'. One traditional view sees "man(u)-" 'hand' with an altered form of "stuprare" 'to defile, commit a sexual wrong against'. Calvert Watkins proposed that it derives from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning 'marrow, brain', since ancient medical writers believed that semen descended from the brain through the bones; if this is correct, the word "turbare" may still have influenced the formation in Latin.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: The mythological tradition is full of sexual encounters between humans and animals, especially mortal women and gods in the guise of animals. Bestiality is a particular characteristic of intercourse with Jupiter (Greek Zeus), who visits Leda as a swan and Europa as a bull. The Minotaur is born when Pasiphaë feels such sexual attraction for a bull that she has herself disguised as a cow to mate with him. Satyrs, known for their sexual voracity, are often pictured with bestial features.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Mock bestiality is recorded as a form of sexual roleplay in Imperial Rome. Nero is supposed to have enjoyed a form of bondage with either male or female partners in which he dressed in animal skins to attack their genitals, just as condemned prisoners were bound and attacked by wild animals in the arena (see "Damnatio ad bestias"). The historian Dio tells of how a prostitute pretended to be a leopard for the gratification of a senator. The actor Bathyllus was known for an erotic dance in which he dressed as Leda having sex with the swan; the women watching were variously aroused. Bestiality is also a theme of Apuleius' novel "Metamorphoses" (or "The Golden Ass"), in which the protagonist, transformed into a donkey, is desired by a wealthy noble matron, just as Pasiphaë desired the bull.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: There is some indication that violent sexual encounters, like other mythological scenarios, were acted out as punitive entertainments in the arena. The poet Martial praises a scenario for its fidelity to the Pasiphaë myth. The logistics of staging a sex act between a woman and a bull is a matter of speculation; if "Pasiphaë" were a condemned criminal to be tortured and killed, the animal may have been induced by the application of "vaginal secretion from a cow in season". In Apuleius's novel, a female poisoner condemned "ad bestias" is scheduled to appear in the arena for intercourse with the protagonist in his bestial form.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: In his chapter on anthropology and human physiology in the encyclopedic "Natural History", Pliny notes that "there are even those who are born of both sexes, whom we call hermaphrodites, at one time "androgyni"" ("andr-", "man", and "gyn-", "woman", from the Greek). The Sicilian historian Diodorus (1st century BC) wrote that "there are some who declare that the coming into being of creatures of a kind such as these are marvels "(terata)", and being born rarely, they announce the future, sometimes for evil and sometimes for good". Isidore of Seville ("c." 560–636) described a hermaphrodite fancifully as those who "have the right breast of a man and the left of a woman, and after coitus in turn can both sire and bear children".


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: In contemporary English, "hermaphrodite" is used in biology but has acquired pejorative connotations in referring to people born with physical characteristics of both sexes (see intersex); in antiquity, however, the figure of the so-called hermaphrodite was a primary focus of questions pertaining to gender identity. The hermaphrodite represented a "violation of social boundaries, especially those as fundamental to daily life as male and female". In traditional Roman religion, a hermaphroditic birth was a kind of "prodigium", an occurrence that signalled a disturbance of the "pax deorum", Rome's treaty with the gods, as Diodorus indicated. Livy records an incident during the Second Punic War when the discovery of a four-year-old hermaphrodite prompted an elaborate series of expiations: on the advice of the "haruspices", the child was enclosed in a chest, carried out to sea, and allowed to drown. Other rituals followed. A hermaphrodite found in 133 BC was drowned in the local river; executing the hermaphroditic person by drowning seems to have been the prescribed way to repair the perceived violation of the natural order.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Pliny observed that while hermaphrodites were once considered portents "(prodigia)", in his day they had become objects of delight "(deliciae)"; they were among the human curiosities of the sort that the wealthy might acquire at the "monsters' market" at Rome described by Plutarch. Under Roman law, a hermaphrodite had to be classed as either male or female; no third gender existed as a legal category.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: In the mythological tradition, Hermaphroditus was a beautiful youth who was the son of Hermes (Roman Mercury) and Aphrodite (Venus). Like many other divinities and heroes, he had been nursed by nymphs, but the evidence that he himself received cult devotion among the Greeks is sparse. Ovid wrote the most influential narrative of how Hermaphroditus became androgynous, emphasizing that although the handsome youth was on the cusp of sexual adulthood, he rejected love as Narcissus had, and likewise at the site of a reflective pool, the water nymph Salmacis saw and desired him. He spurned her, and she pretended to withdraw until, thinking himself alone, he undressed to bathe in her waters. She then flung herself upon him, and prayed that they might never be parted. The gods granted this request, and thereafter the body of Hermaphroditus contained both male and female. As a result, men who drank from the waters of the spring Salmacis supposedly "grew soft with the vice of "impudicitia"", according to the lexicographer Festus. The myth of Hylas, the young companion of Hercules who was abducted by water nymphs, shares with Hermaphroditus and Narcissus the theme of the dangers that face the beautiful adolescent male as he transitions to adult masculinity, with varying outcomes for each.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Depictions of Hermaphroditus were very popular among the Romans. The dramatic situation in paintings often elicits a "double take" on the part of the viewer, or expresses the theme of sexual frustration. Hermaphroditus is often in the company of a satyr, a figure of bestial sexuality known for subjecting an unsuspecting or often sleeping victim to non-consensual sex; the satyr in scenes with Hermaphroditus is usually shown to be surprised or repulsed, to humorous effect. In a few works, Hermaphroditus is strong enough to ward off his would-be attacker, but in others he shows his willingness to engage in sex, even if the satyr seems no longer inclined:


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Artistic representations of Hermaphroditus bring to the fore the ambiguities in sexual differences between women and men as well as the ambiguities in all sexual acts. ... Hermaphroditus gives an eternally ambiguous answer to a man's curiosity about a woman's sexual experience—and vice versa. ... (A)rtists always treat Hermaphroditus in terms of the viewer finding out his/her actual sexual identity. ... Hermaphroditus stands for both the physical and, more important, the psychological impossibility of ever understanding the feelings of the beloved. Hermaphroditus is a highly sophisticated representation, invading the boundaries between the sexes that seem so clear in classical thought and representation.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Macrobius describes a masculine form of "Venus" (Aphrodite) who received cult on Cyprus; she had a beard and male genitals, but wore women's clothing. The deity's worshippers cross-dressed, men wearing women's clothes, and women men's. The Latin poet Laevius wrote of worshipping "nurturing Venus" whether female or male "(sive femina sive mas)". The figure was sometimes called "Aphroditos". In several surviving examples of Greek and Roman sculpture, she is found in the attitude "anasyrmene", from the Greek verb "anasyromai", "to pull up one's clothes". The love goddess lifts her garments to reveal her masculine attribute, male genitalia, a gesture that traditionally held apotropaic or magical power.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: In 55 BC, Pompeius Magnus ("Pompey the Great") opened his theater complex dedicated to Venus Victrix, "Venus the Conqueror," which continued into late antiquity as a venue for performing arts, literature, landscape design, visual art, and architecture. The Theater of Pompey was in many ways the permanent monument of his military triumph six years earlier. Among the displays were portrait galleries of female writers and of courtesans; a series of images illustrated freakish births that had served as war omens. In general, intellectuality and culture are represented as feminine and Hellenized, while war and politics are Roman and masculine. Statues personified fourteen conquered "nationes" ("nations, peoples") as women in ethnic or "barbarian" dress. Other monuments throughout the Empire, including the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias and the altar of the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls at Lugdunum (modern Lyon, France), as well as various coins, embody conquered territories and peoples as women: Roman military power defeats a "feminized" nation. Although the figures from Pompey's theater have not survived, relief panels from Aphrodisias include scenes such as a heroically nude Claudius forcing the submission of Britannia, whose right breast is bare, and Nero dragging away a dead Armenia, a composition that recalls the defeat of the Amazon Penthesilea by Achilles. A particularly well-documented series of coins depicts "Iudaea Capta", a female personification of the Jewish nation as captive, issued after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD.


title: Sexuality in ancient Rome

text: Sexual conquest is a metaphor widely used by the Romans for imperialism, but not always straightforwardly for Roman domination. Horace famously described the Romans as taken captive by captive Greece: the image of Roman culture colonized from within by a civilization they had defeated but perceived as intellectually and aesthetically superior might be expressed by myths in which a man raped, abducted, or enslaved a woman but fell in love with her, as embodied for instance by Achilles and Briseis.


title: Sophocles

text: Sophocles (; , , Sophoklễs; 497/6 – winter 406/5 BC) is one of three ancient Greek tragedians, at least one of whose plays has survived in full. His first plays were written later than, or contemporary with, those of Aeschylus; and earlier than, or contemporary with, those of Euripides. Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, but only seven have survived in a complete form: "Ajax", "Antigone", "Women of Trachis", "Oedipus Rex", "Electra", "Philoctetes" and "Oedipus at Colonus". For almost fifty years, Sophocles was the most celebrated playwright in the dramatic competitions of the city-state of Athens which took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia. He competed in thirty competitions, won twenty-four, and was never judged lower than second place. Aeschylus won thirteen competitions, and was sometimes defeated by Sophocles; Euripides won four.


title: Sophocles

text: The most famous tragedies of Sophocles feature Oedipus and Antigone: they are generally known as the Theban plays, though each was part of a different tetralogy (the other members of which are now lost). Sophocles influenced the development of drama, most importantly by adding a third actor (attributed to Sophocles by Aristotle; to Aeschylus by Themistius), thereby reducing the importance of the chorus in the presentation of the plot. He also developed his characters to a greater extent than earlier playwrights.


title: Sophocles

text: Sophocles, the son of Sophillus, was a wealthy member of the rural "deme" (small community) of Hippeios Colonus in Attica, which was to become a setting for one of his plays; and he was probably born there, a few years before the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC: the exact year is unclear, but 497/6 is most likely. He was born into a wealthy family (his father was an armour manufacturer), and was highly educated. His first artistic triumph was in 468 BC, when he took first prize in the Dionysia, beating the reigning master of Athenian drama, Aeschylus. According to Plutarch, the victory came under unusual circumstances: instead of following the usual custom of choosing judges by lot, the archon asked Cimon, and the other "strategoi" present, to decide the victor of the contest. Plutarch further contends that, following this loss, Aeschylus soon left for Sicily. Though Plutarch says that this was Sophocles' first production, it is now thought that his first production was probably in 470 BC. "Triptolemus" was probably one of the plays that Sophocles presented at this festival.


title: Sophocles

text: In 480 BC Sophocles was chosen to lead the paean (a choral chant to a god), celebrating the Greek victory over the Persians at the Battle of Salamis. Early in his career, the politician Cimon might have been one of his patrons; but, if he was, there was no ill will borne by Pericles, Cimon's rival, when Cimon was ostracized in 461 BC. In 443/2, Sophocles served as one of the "Hellenotamiai", or treasurers of Athena, helping to manage the finances of the city during the political ascendancy of Pericles. In 441 BC, according to the "Vita Sophoclis", he was elected one of the ten generals, executive officials at Athens, as a junior colleague of Pericles; and he served in the Athenian campaign against Samos. He was supposed to have been elected to this position as the result of his production of "Antigone", but this is "most improbable".


title: Sophocles

text: In 420 BC, he was chosen to receive the image of Asclepius in his own house, when the cult was being introduced to Athens, and lacked a proper place (τέμενος). For this, he was given the posthumous epithet "Dexion" (receiver) by the Athenians. But "some doubt attaches to this story". He was also elected, in 411 BC, one of the commissioners ("probouloi") who responded to the catastrophic destruction of the Athenian expeditionary force in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War.


title: Sophocles

text: Sophocles died at the age of 90 or 91 in the winter of 406/5 BC, having seen, within his lifetime, both the Greek triumph in the Persian Wars, and the bloodletting of the Peloponnesian War. As with many famous men in classical antiquity, his death inspired a number of apocryphal stories. The most famous is the suggestion that he died from the strain of trying to recite a long sentence from his "Antigone" without pausing to take a breath. Another account suggests he choked while eating grapes at the Anthesteria festival in Athens. A third holds that he died of happiness after winning his final victory at the City Dionysia. A few months later, a comic poet, in a play titled "The Muses", wrote this eulogy: "Blessed is Sophocles, who had a long life, was a man both happy and talented, and the writer of many good tragedies; and he ended his life well without suffering any misfortune." According to some accounts, however, his own sons tried to have him declared incompetent near the end of his life; and that he refuted their charge in court by reading from his new "Oedipus at Colonus". One of his sons, Iophon, and a grandson, called Sophocles, also became playwrights.


title: Sophocles

text: An ancient source, Athenaeus’s work "Sophists at Dinner", contains references to Sophocles' sexuality. In that work, a character named Myrtilus claims that Sophocles "was partial to boys, in the same way that Euripides was partial to women" ("φιλομεῖραξ δὲ ἦν ὁ Σοφοκλῆς, ὡς Εὐριπίδης φιλογύνης"), and relates an anecdote, attributed to Ion of Chios, of Sophocles flirting with a serving-boy at a symposium: He also says that Hieronymus of Rhodes, in his "Historical Notes", claims that Sophocles once led a boy outside the city walls for sex; and that the boy snatched Sophocles' cloak (χλανίς, "khlanis"), leaving his own child-sized robe ("παιδικὸν ἱμάτιον") for Sophocles. Moreover, when Euripides heard about this (it was much discussed), he mocked the disdainful treatment, saying that he had himself had sex with the boy, "but had not given him anything more than his usual fee" ("ἀλλὰ μηδὲν προσθεῖναι"), or, "but that nothing had been taken off" ("ἀλλὰ μηδὲν προεθῆναι"). In response, Sophocles composed this elegy:


title: Sophocles

text: Sophocles is known for innovations in dramatic structure; deeper development of characters than earlier playwrights; and, if it was not Aeschylus, the addition of a third actor, which further reduced the role of the chorus, and increased opportunities for development and conflict. Aeschylus, who dominated Athenian playwriting during Sophocles' early career, adopted the third actor into his own work. Besides the third actor, Aristotle credits Sophocles with the introduction of "skenographia", or scenery-painting; but this too is attributed elsewhere to someone else (by Vitruvius, to Agatharchus of Samos). After Aeschylus died, in 456 BC, Sophocles became the pre-eminent playwright in Athens, winning competitions at eighteen Dionysia, and six Lenaia festivals. His reputation was such that foreign rulers invited him to attend their courts; but, unlike Aeschylus, who died in Sicily, or Euripides, who spent time in Macedon, Sophocles never accepted any of these invitations. Aristotle, in his "Poetics" (c. 335 BC), used Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" as an example of the highest achievement in tragedy.


title: Sophocles

text: Only two of the seven surviving plays can be dated securely: "Philoctetes" to 409 BC, and "Oedipus at Colonus" to 401 BC (staged after his death, by his grandson). Of the others, "Electra" shows stylistic similarities to these two, suggesting that it was probably written in the later part of his career; "Ajax", "Antigone", and "The Trachiniae", are generally thought early, again based on stylistic elements; and "Oedipus Rex" is put in a middle period. Most of Sophocles' plays show an undercurrent of early fatalism, and the beginnings of Socratic logic as a mainstay for the long tradition of Greek tragedy.


title: Sophocles

text: The Theban plays comprise three plays: "Oedipus Rex" (also called "Oedipus Tyrannus" or "Oedipus the King"), "Oedipus at Colonus", and "Antigone". All three concern the fate of Thebes during and after the reign of King Oedipus. They have often been published under a single cover; but Sophocles wrote them for separate festival competitions, many years apart. The Theban plays are not a proper trilogy (i.e. three plays presented as a continuous narrative), nor an intentional series; they contain inconsistencies. Sophocles also wrote other plays pertaining to Thebes, such as the "Epigoni", but only fragments have survived.


title: Sophocles

text: The three plays involve the tale of Oedipus, who kills his father and marries his mother, not knowing they are his parents. His family is cursed for three generations.


title: Sophocles

text: In "Oedipus Rex", Oedipus is the protagonist. His infanticide is planned by his parents, Laius and Jocasta, to prevent him fulfilling a prophecy; but the servant entrusted with the infanticide passes the infant on, through a series of intermediaries, to a childless couple, who adopt him, not knowing his history. Oedipus eventually learns of the Delphic Oracle's prophecy of him, that he would kill his father, and marry his mother; he attempts to flee his fate without harming those he knows as his parents (at this point, he does not know that he is adopted). Oedipus meets a man at a crossroads accompanied by servants; Oedipus and the man fight, and Oedipus kills the man (who was his father, Laius, although neither knew at the time). He becomes the ruler of Thebes after solving the riddle of the Sphinx and in the process, marries the widowed queen, his mother Jocasta. Thus the stage is set for horror. When the truth comes out, following from another true but confusing prophecy from Delphi, Jocasta commits suicide, Oedipus blinds himself and leaves Thebes. At the end of the play, order is restored. This restoration is seen when Creon, brother of Jocasta, becomes king, and also when Oedipus, before going off to exile, asks Creon to take care of his children. Oedipus's children will always bear the weight of shame and humiliation because of their father's actions.


title: Sophocles

text: In "Oedipus at Colonus", the banished Oedipus and his daughter Antigone arrive at the town of Colonus where they encounter Theseus, King of Athens. Oedipus dies and strife begins between his sons Polyneices and Eteocles. They fight, and simultaneously run each other through.


title: Sophocles

text: In "Antigone", the protagonist is Oedipus' daughter, Antigone. She is faced with the choice of allowing her brother Polyneices' body to remain unburied, outside the city walls, exposed to the ravages of wild animals, or to bury him and face death. The king of the land, Creon, has forbidden the burial of Polyneices for he was a traitor to the city. Antigone decides to bury his body and face the consequences of her actions. Creon sentences her to death. Eventually, Creon is persuaded to free Antigone from her punishment, but his decision comes too late and Antigone commits suicide. Her suicide triggers the suicide of two others close to King Creon: his son, Haemon, who was to wed Antigone, and his wife, Eurydice, who commits suicide after losing her only surviving son.


title: Sophocles

text: The plays were written across thirty-six years of Sophocles' career and were not composed in chronological order, but instead were written in the order "Antigone", "Oedipus Rex", and "Oedipus at Colonus". Nor were they composed as a "trilogy" – a group of plays to be performed together, but are the remaining parts of three different groups of plays. As a result, there are some inconsistencies: notably, Creon is the undisputed king at the end of "Oedipus Rex" and, in consultation with Apollo, single-handedly makes the decision to expel Oedipus from Thebes. Creon is also instructed to look after Oedipus' daughters Antigone and Ismene at the end of "Oedipus Rex". By contrast, in the other plays there is some struggle with Oedipus' sons Eteocles and Polynices in regard to the succession. In "Oedipus at Colonus", Sophocles attempts to work these inconsistencies into a coherent whole: Ismene explains that, in light of their tainted family lineage, her brothers were at first willing to cede the throne to Creon. Nevertheless, they eventually decided to take charge of the monarchy, with each brother disputing the other's right to succeed. In addition to being in a clearly more powerful position in "Oedipus at Colonus", Eteocles and Polynices are also culpable: they consent (l. 429, Theodoridis, tr.) to their father's going to exile, which is one of his bitterest charges against them.


title: Sophocles

text: In addition to the three Theban plays, there are four surviving plays by Sophocles: "Ajax", "Women of Trachis", "Electra", and "Philoctetes", the last of which won first prize in 409 BC.


title: Sophocles

text: "Ajax" focuses on the proud hero of the Trojan War, Telamonian Ajax, who is driven to treachery and eventually suicide. Ajax becomes gravely upset when Achilles’ armor is presented to Odysseus instead of himself. Despite their enmity toward him, Odysseus persuades the kings Menelaus and Agamemnon to grant Ajax a proper burial.


title: Sophocles

text: "The Women of Trachis" (named for the Trachinian women who make up the chorus) dramatizes Deianeira's accidentally killing Heracles after he had completed his famous twelve labors. Tricked into thinking it is a love charm, Deianeira applies poison to an article of Heracles' clothing; this poisoned robe causes Heracles to die an excruciating death. Upon learning the truth, Deianeira commits suicide.


title: Sophocles

text: "Electra" corresponds roughly to the plot of Aeschylus' "Libation Bearers". It details how Electra and Orestes avenge their father Agamemnon's murder by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.


title: Sophocles

text: "Philoctetes" retells the story of Philoctetes, an archer who had been abandoned on Lemnos by the rest of the Greek fleet while on the way to Troy. After learning that they cannot win the Trojan War without Philoctetes' bow, the Greeks send Odysseus and Neoptolemus to retrieve him; due to the Greeks' earlier treachery, however, Philoctetes refuses to rejoin the army. It is only Heracles' deus ex machina appearance that persuades Philoctetes to go to Troy.


title: Sophocles

text: Although over 120 titles of plays associated with Sophocles are known and presented below, little is known of the precise dating of most of them. "Philoctetes" is known to have been written in 409 BC, and "Oedipus at Colonus" is known to have only been performed in 401 BC, posthumously, at the initiation of Sophocles' grandson. The convention on writing plays for the Greek festivals was to submit them in tetralogies of three tragedies along with one satyr play. Along with the unknown dating of the vast majority of over 120 plays, it is also largely unknown how the plays were grouped. It is, however, known that the three plays referred to in the modern era as the "Theban plays" were never performed together in Sophocles' own lifetime, and are therefore not a trilogy (which they are sometimes erroneously seen as).


title: Sophocles

text: Fragments of "Ichneutae" ("Tracking Satyrs") were discovered in Egypt in 1907. These amount to about half of the play, making it the best preserved satyr play after Euripides' "Cyclops", which survives in its entirety. Fragments of the "Epigoni" were discovered in April 2005 by classicists at Oxford University with the help of infrared technology previously used for satellite imaging. The tragedy tells the story of the second siege of Thebes. A number of other Sophoclean works have survived only in fragments, including:


title: Sophocles

text: There is a passage of Plutarch's tract "De Profectibus in Virtute 7 " in which Sophocles discusses his own growth as a writer. A likely source of this material for Plutarch was the "Epidemiae" of Ion of Chios, a book that recorded many conversations of Sophocles; but a Hellenistic dialogue about tragedy, in which Sophocles appeared as a character, is also plausible. The former is a likely candidate to have contained Sophocles' discourse on his own development because Ion was a friend of Sophocles, and the book is known to have been used by Plutarch. Though some interpretations of Plutarch's words suggest that Sophocles says that he imitated Aeschylus, the translation does not fit grammatically, nor does the interpretation that Sophocles said that he was making fun of Aeschylus' works. C. M. Bowra argues for the following translation of the line:


title: Sophocles

text: "After practising to the full the bigness of Aeschylus, then the painful ingenuity of my own invention, now in the third stage I am changing to the kind of diction which is most expressive of character and best."


title: Sophocles

text: Here Sophocles says that he has completed a stage of Aeschylus' work, meaning that he went through a phase of imitating Aeschylus' style but is finished with that. Sophocles' opinion of Aeschylus was mixed. He certainly respected him enough to imitate his work early on in his career, but he had reservations about Aeschylus' style, and thus did not keep his imitation up. Sophocles' first stage, in which he imitated Aeschylus, is marked by "Aeschylean pomp in the language". Sophocles' second stage was entirely his own. He introduced new ways of evoking feeling out of an audience, as in his "Ajax", when Ajax is mocked by Athene, then the stage is emptied so that he may commit suicide alone. Sophocles mentions a third stage, distinct from the other two, in his discussion of his development. The third stage pays more heed to diction. His characters spoke in a way that was more natural to them and more expressive of their individual character feelings.


title: Bibi (singer)

text: Kim Hyung-seo (, born September 27, 1998), known professionally as Bibi (; stylised in all caps), is a South Korean singer-songwriter. In 2017, she signed with Feel Ghood Music after Yoon Mi-rae discovered her self-produced songs on SoundCloud.


title: Bibi (singer)

text: She appeared as a contestant in SBS competition show "The Fan", where she eventually finished in second place. She made her official debut with the single "Binu" on May 15, 2019.


title: Bibi (singer)

text: Bibi was also known as "Nakedbibi" on SoundCloud. The name's meaning came from "baby" sounding like "bibi" when pronounced quickly, and that newborn babies don't wear any clothes and have a natural appearance that isn't affected by anything. Her current stage name is said to be one that defines her want to show her honest self.


title: Bibi (singer)

text: Bibi pursues freewheeling and out-of-the-box music. Her music features various genres, including R&B, soul, hip hop, and ballad. Rather than focusing on dealing with beautiful things beautifully, it is a style of music that focuses on beautifully sublimating beautiful sorrows and pains that are alienated and hidden from the world.


title: Bibi (singer)

text: Bibi is known for her two red dots under her eyes that was variously described as moles or dots. The dots are her makeup style that were inspired from her grandpa's roseola that was caused by his fevers, which he died from, and a tribute to her grandpa who was a role model to her.


title: Bibi (singer)

text: Bibi has a younger sister, Kim Na-kyoung, who debuted in the girl group TripleS through one of its sub-units Acid Angel from Asia on October 28, 2022.


title: Sarah Parish

text: Sarah Parish (born 7 June 1968) is an English actress. She is known for her work on television series including: "The Pillars of the Earth", "Peak Practice", "Hearts and Bones", "Cutting It", "Doctor Who", "Mistresses", "Merlin", "Atlantis", "Monroe", HBO's "Industry", "Stay Close", "Trollied," "W1A" and as the titular character in "Bancroft."


title: Sarah Parish

text: Parish was born in Yeovil, Somerset, to Bill and Thelma Parish; she has a sister, Julie, and a brother, musician John Parish. She was educated at the local Preston School and Yeovil College. She began acting at an early age and believes her first stage appearance was aged two in a pantomime in the village of Tintinhull playing the pearl in an oyster. She later attended Yeovil Youth Theatre.