title: History of Ireland

text: By the end of the 15th century, central English authority in Ireland had all but disappeared. England's attentions were diverted by the Wars of the Roses. The Lordship of Ireland lay in the hands of the powerful Fitzgerald Earl of Kildare, who dominated the country by means of military force and alliances with Irish lords and clans. Around the country, local Gaelic and Gaelicised lords expanded their powers at the expense of the English government in Dublin but the power of the Dublin government was seriously curtailed by the introduction of Poynings' Law in 1494. According to this act, the Irish Parliament was essentially put under the control of the Westminster Parliament.


title: History of Ireland

text: From 1536, Henry VIII of England decided to reconquer Ireland and bring it under crown control. The Fitzgerald dynasty of Kildare, who had become the effective rulers of Ireland in the 15th century, had become unreliable allies of the Tudor monarchs. They had invited Burgundian troops into Dublin to crown the Yorkist pretender, Lambert Simnel as King of England in 1487. Again in 1536, Silken Thomas, Fitzgerald went into open rebellion against the crown. Having put down this rebellion, Henry resolved to bring Ireland under English government control so the island would not become a base for future rebellions or foreign invasions of England. In 1541, he upgraded Ireland from a lordship to a full Kingdom. Henry was proclaimed King of Ireland at a meeting of the Irish Parliament that year. This was the first meeting of the Irish Parliament to be attended by the Gaelic Irish chieftains as well as the Hiberno-Norman aristocracy. With the institutions of government in place, the next step was to extend the control of the English Kingdom of Ireland over all of its claimed territory. This took nearly a century, with various English administrations either negotiating or fighting with the independent Irish and Old English lords. The Spanish Armada in Ireland suffered heavy losses during an extraordinary season of storms in the autumn of 1588. Among the survivors was Captain Francisco de Cuellar, who gave a remarkable account of his experiences on the run in Ireland.


title: History of Ireland

text: The re-conquest was completed during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, after several brutal conflicts. (See the Desmond Rebellions, 1569–73 and 1579–83, and the Nine Years War, 1594–1603, for details.) After this point, the English authorities in Dublin established real control over Ireland for the first time, bringing a centralised government to the entire island, and successfully disarmed the native lordships. In 1614 the Catholic majority in the Irish Parliament was overthrown through the creation of numerous new boroughs which were dominated by the new settlers. However, the English were not successful in converting the Catholic Irish to the Protestant religion and the brutal methods used by crown authority (including resorting to martial law) to bring the country under English control, heightened resentment of English rule.


title: History of Ireland

text: From the mid-16th to the early 17th century, crown governments had carried out a policy of land confiscation and colonisation known as Plantations. Scottish and English Protestant colonists were sent to the provinces of Munster, Ulster and the counties of Laois and Offaly. These Protestant settlers replaced the Irish Catholic landowners who were removed from their lands. These settlers formed the ruling class of future British appointed administrations in Ireland. Several Penal Laws, aimed at Catholics, Baptists and Presbyterians, were introduced to encourage conversion to the established (Anglican) Church of Ireland.


title: History of Ireland

text: The 17th century was perhaps the bloodiest in Ireland's history. Two periods of war (1641–53 and 1689–91) caused a huge loss of life. The ultimate dispossession of most of the Irish Catholic landowning class was engineered, and recusants were subordinated under the Penal Laws.


title: History of Ireland

text: During the 17th century, Ireland was convulsed by eleven years of warfare, beginning with the Rebellion of 1641, when Irish Catholics rebelled against the domination of English and Protestant settlers. The Catholic gentry briefly ruled the country as Confederate Ireland (1642–1649) against the background of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms until Oliver Cromwell reconquered Ireland in 1649–1653 on behalf of the English Commonwealth. Cromwell's conquest was the most brutal phase of the war. By its close, around half of Ireland's pre-war population was killed or exiled as slaves, where many died due to harsh conditions. As retribution for the rebellion of 1641, the better-quality remaining lands owned by Irish Catholics were confiscated and given to British settlers. Several hundred remaining native landowners were transplanted to Connacht.


title: History of Ireland

text: Ireland became the main battleground after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Catholic James II left London and the English Parliament replaced him with William of Orange. The wealthier Irish Catholics backed James to try to reverse the Penal Laws and land confiscations, whereas Protestants supported William and Mary in this "Glorious Revolution" to preserve their property in the country. James and William fought for the Kingdom of Ireland in the Williamite War, most famously at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, where James's outnumbered forces were defeated.


title: History of Ireland

text: From the 15th to the 18th century, Irish, English, Scots and Welsh prisoners were transported for forced labour in the Caribbean to work off their term of punishment. Even larger numbers came voluntarily as indentured servants. In the 18th century they were sent to the American colonies, and in the early 19th century to Australia. The Irish were dehumanised by the English, described as "savages," so making their displacement appear all the more justified. In 1654 the British parliament gave Oliver Cromwell a free hand to banish Irish "undesirables". Cromwell rounded up Catholics throughout the Irish countryside and placed them on ships bound for the Caribbean, mainly the island of Barbados. By 1655, 12,000 political prisoners had been forcibly shipped to Barbados and into indentured servitude.


title: History of Ireland

text: The majority of the people of Ireland were Catholic peasants; they were very poor and largely inert politically during the eighteenth century, as many of their leaders converted to Protestantism to avoid severe economic and political penalties. Nevertheless, there was a growing Catholic cultural awakening underway. There were two Protestant groups. The Presbyterians in Ulster in the North lived in much better economic conditions but had virtually no political power. Power was held by a small group of Anglo-Irish families, who were loyal to the Anglican Church of Ireland. They owned the great bulk of the farmland, where the work was done by the Catholic peasants. Many of these families lived in England and were absentee landlords, whose loyalty was basically to England. The Anglo-Irish who lived in Ireland became increasingly identified as Irish nationalists, and were resentful of the English control of their island. Their spokesmen, such as Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, sought more local control.


title: History of Ireland

text: Jacobite resistance in Ireland was finally ended after the Battle of Aughrim in July 1691. The Penal Laws that had been relaxed somewhat after the Restoration were reinforced more thoroughly after this war, as the infant Anglo-Irish Ascendency wanted to ensure that the Irish Roman Catholics would not be in a position to repeat their rebellions. Power was held by the 5% who were Protestants belonging to the Church of Ireland. They controlled all major sectors of the Irish economy, the bulk of the farmland, the legal system, local government and held strong majorities in both houses of the Irish Parliament. They strongly distrusted the Presbyterians in Ulster and were convinced that the Catholics should have minimal rights. They did not have full political control because the government in London had superior authority and treated Ireland as a backward colony. When the American colonies revolted in the 1770s, the Ascendency wrested multiple concessions to strengthen its power. They did not seek independence because they knew they were heavily outnumbered and ultimately depended upon the British Army to guarantee their security.


title: History of Ireland

text: Subsequent Irish antagonism toward England was aggravated by the economic situation of Ireland in the 18th century. Some absentee landlords managed their estates inefficiently, and food tended to be produced for export rather than for domestic consumption. Two very cold winters near the end of the Little Ice Age led directly to a famine between 1740 and 1741, which killed about 400,000 people and caused over 150,000 Irish to leave the island. In addition, Irish exports were reduced by the Navigation Acts from the 1660s, which placed tariffs on Irish products entering England, but exempted English goods from tariffs on entering Ireland. Despite this most of the 18th century was relatively peaceful in comparison with the preceding two centuries, and the population doubled to over four million.


title: History of Ireland

text: By the 18th century, the Anglo-Irish ruling class had come to see Ireland, not England, as their native country. A Parliamentary faction led by Henry Grattan agitated for a more favourable trading relationship with Great Britain and for greater legislative independence for the Irish Parliament. However, reform in Ireland stalled over the more radical proposals toward enfranchising Irish Catholics. This was partially enabled in 1793, but Catholics could not yet become members of the Irish Parliament, or become government officials. Some were attracted to the more militant example of the French Revolution of 1789.


title: History of Ireland

text: Presbyterians and Dissenters too faced persecution on a lesser scale, and in 1791 a group of dissident Protestant individuals, all of whom but two were Presbyterians, held the first meeting of what would become the Society of the United Irishmen. Originally they sought to reform the Irish Parliament which was controlled by those belonging to the state church; seek Catholic Emancipation; and help remove religion from politics. When their ideals seemed unattainable they became more determined to use force to overthrow British rule and found a non-sectarian republic. Their activity culminated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, which was bloodily suppressed.


title: History of Ireland

text: Ireland was a separate kingdom ruled by King George III of Britain; he set policy for Ireland through his appointment of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland or viceroy. In practice, the viceroys lived in England and the affairs in the island were largely controlled by an elite group of Irish Protestants known as "undertakers." The system changed in 1767, with the appointment of an English politician who became a very strong Viceroy. George Townshend served 1767-72 and was in residence in The Castle in Dublin. Townsend had the strong support of both the King and the British cabinet in London, and all major decisions were basically made in London. The Ascendancy complained, and obtained a series of new laws in the 1780s that made the Irish Parliament effective and independent of the British Parliament, although still under the supervision of the king and his Privy Council.


title: History of Ireland

text: Largely in response to the 1798 rebellion, Irish self-government was ended altogether by the provisions of the Acts of Union 1800 (which abolished the Irish Parliament of that era).


title: History of Ireland

text: In 1800, following the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the Irish and the British parliaments enacted the Acts of Union. The merger created a new political entity called United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland with effect from 1 January 1801. Part of the agreement forming the basis of union was that the Test Act would be repealed to remove any remaining discrimination against Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Baptists and other dissenter religions in the newly United Kingdom. However, King George III, invoking the provisions of the Act of Settlement 1701 controversially and adamantly blocked attempts by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. Pitt resigned in protest, but his successor Henry Addington and his new cabinet failed to legislate to repeal or change the Test Act. This was followed by the first Irish Reform Act 1832, which allowed Catholic members of parliament but raised the property qualification to £10 effectively removing the poorer Irish freeholders from the franchise.


title: History of Ireland

text: In 1823 an enterprising Catholic lawyer, Daniel O'Connell, known in Ireland as 'The Liberator' began an ultimately successful Irish campaign to achieve emancipation and to be seated in the Parliament. This culminated in O'Connell's successful election in the Clare by-election, which revived the parliamentary efforts at reform.


title: History of Ireland

text: The Catholic Relief Act 1829 was eventually approved by the UK parliament under the leadership of the Dublin-born Prime Minister, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. This indefatigable Anglo-Irish statesman, a former Chief Secretary for Ireland, and hero of the Napoleonic Wars, successfully guided the legislation through both houses of Parliament. By threatening to resign, he persuaded King George IV to sign the bill into law in 1829. The continuing obligation of Roman Catholics to fund the established Church of Ireland, however, led to the sporadic skirmishes of the Tithe War of 1831–38. The Church was disestablished by the Gladstone government in 1867. The continuing enactment of parliamentary reform during the ensuing administrations further extended the initially limited franchise. Daniel O'Connell M.P. later led the Repeal Association in an unsuccessful campaign to undo the Act of Union 1800.


title: History of Ireland

text: The Great Irish Famine ("An Gorta Mór") was the second of Ireland's "Great Famines". It struck the country during 1845–49, with potato blight, exacerbated by the political factors of the time leading to mass starvation and emigration. The impact of emigration in Ireland was severe; the population dropped from over 8 million before the Famine to 4.4 million in 1911. Gaelic or Irish, once the island's spoken language, declined in use sharply in the nineteenth century as a result of the Famine and the creation of the National School education system, as well as hostility to the language from leading Irish politicians of the time; it was largely replaced by English.


title: History of Ireland

text: Outside mainstream nationalism, a series of violent rebellions by Irish republicans took place in 1803, under Robert Emmet; in 1848 a rebellion by the Young Irelanders, most prominent among them, Thomas Francis Meagher; and in 1867, another insurrection by the Irish Republican Brotherhood. All failed, but "physical force nationalism" remained an undercurrent in the nineteenth century.


title: History of Ireland

text: A central issue throughout the 19th and early 20th century was land ownership. A small group of about 10,000 English families owned practically all the farmland; Most were permanent residents of England, and seldom presented the land. They rented it out to Irish tenant farmers. Falling behind in rent payments meant eviction, and very bad feelings – often violence. The late 19th century witnessed major land reform, spearheaded by the Land League under Michael Davitt demanding what became known as the "3 Fs; Fair rent, free sale, fixity of tenure". Parliament passed laws in 1870, 1881, 1903 and 1909 that enabled most tenant farmers to purchase their lands, and lowered the rents of the others. From 1870 and as a result of the Land War agitations and subsequent Plan of Campaign of the 1880s, various British governments introduced a series of Irish Land Acts. William O'Brien played a leading role in the 1902 Land Conference to pave the way for the most advanced social legislation in Ireland since the Union, the Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903. This Act set the conditions for the break-up of large estates and gradually devolved to rural landholders, and tenants' ownership of the lands. It effectively ended the era of the absentee landlord, finally resolving the Irish Land Question.


title: History of Ireland

text: In the 1870s the issue of Irish self-government again became a major focus of debate under Charles Stewart Parnell, founder of the Irish Parliamentary Party. Prime Minister Gladstone made two unsuccessful attempts to pass Home Rule in 1886 and 1893. Parnell's leadership ended when he was implicated in a divorce scandal that gained international publicity in 1890. He had been secretly living for years with Katherine O'Shea, the long-separated wife of a fellow Irish MP. Disaster came quickly: Gladstone and the Liberal Party refused to cooperate with him; his party split; the Irish Catholic bishops led the successful effort to crush his minority faction at by-elections. Parnell fought for control to the end, but his body was collapsing and he died in 1891 at age 45.


title: History of Ireland

text: After the introduction of the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 which broke the power of the landlord-dominated "Grand Juries", passing for the first time democratic control of local affairs into the hands of the people through elected Local County Councils, the debate over full Home Rule led to tensions between Irish nationalists and Irish unionists (those who favoured the maintenance of the Union). Most of the island was predominantly nationalist, Catholic and agrarian. The northeast, however, was predominantly unionist, Protestant and industrialised. Unionists feared a loss of political power and economic wealth in a predominantly rural, nationalist, Catholic home-rule state. Nationalists believed they would remain economically and politically second-class citizens without self-government. Out of this division, two opposing sectarian movements evolved, the Protestant "Orange Order" and the Catholic Ancient Order of Hibernians.


title: History of Ireland

text: Home Rule became certain when in 1910 the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) under John Redmond held the balance of power in Commons and the third Home Rule Bill was introduced in 1912. Unionist resistance was immediate with the formation of the Ulster Volunteers. In turn the Irish Volunteers were established to oppose them and enforce the introduction of self-government.


title: History of Ireland

text: In September 1914, just as the First World War broke out, the UK Parliament passed the Government of Ireland Act 1914 to establish self-government for Ireland, but it was suspended for the duration of the war. To ensure implementation of Home Rule after the war, nationalist leaders and the IPP under Redmond supported Ireland's participation in the British and Allied war effort under the Triple Entente against the expansion of Central Powers. The core of the Irish Volunteers was against this decision, but the majority left to form the National Volunteers who enlisted in Irish regiments of the New British Army, the 10th and 16th (Irish) Divisions, their Northern counterparts in the 36th (Ulster) Division. Before the war ended, Britain made two concerted efforts to implement Home Rule, one in May 1916 and again with the Irish Convention during 1917–1918, but the Irish sides (Nationalist, Unionist) were unable to agree to terms for the temporary or permanent exclusion of Ulster from its provisions.


title: History of Ireland

text: The period 1916–1921 was marked by political violence and upheaval, ending in the partition of Ireland and independence for 26 of its 32 counties. A failed militant attempt was made to gain separate independence for Ireland with the 1916 Easter Rising, an insurrection in Dublin. Though support for the insurgents was small, the violence used in its suppression led to a swing in support of the rebels. In addition, the unprecedented threat of Irishmen being conscripted to the British Army in 1918 (for service on the Western Front as a result of the German spring offensive) accelerated this change. In the December 1918 elections Sinn Féin, the party of the rebels, won three-quarters of all seats in Ireland, twenty-seven MPs of which assembled in Dublin on 21 January 1919 to form a 32-county Irish Republic Parliament, the first Dáil Éireann unilaterally declaring sovereignty over the entire island.


title: History of Ireland

text: Unwilling to negotiate any understanding with Britain short of complete independence, the Irish Republican Army, the army of the newly declared Irish Republic, waged a guerilla war (the Irish War of Independence) from 1919 to 1921. In the course of the fighting and amid much acrimony, the Fourth Government of Ireland Act 1920 implemented Home Rule while separating the island into what the British government's Act termed "Northern Ireland" and "Southern Ireland". In July 1921 the Irish and British governments agreed to a truce that halted the war. In December 1921 representatives of both governments signed an Anglo-Irish Treaty. The Irish delegation was led by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. This abolished the Irish Republic and created the Irish Free State, a self-governing Dominion of the Commonwealth of Nations in the manner of Canada and Australia. Under the Treaty, Northern Ireland could opt out of the Free State and stay within the United Kingdom: it promptly did so. In 1922 both parliaments ratified the Treaty, formalising independence for the 26-county Irish Free State (which renamed itself "Ireland" in 1937, and declared itself a republic in 1949); while the 6-county Northern Ireland, gaining Home Rule for itself, remained part of the United Kingdom. For most of the next 75 years, each territory was strongly aligned to either Catholic or Protestant ideologies, although this was more marked in the six counties of Northern Ireland.


title: History of Ireland

text: The treaty to sever the Union divided the republican movement into "anti-Treaty" (who wanted to fight on until an Irish Republic was achieved) and "pro-Treaty" supporters (who accepted the Free State as the first step towards full independence and unity). Between 1922 and 1923 both sides fought the bloody Irish Civil War. The new Irish Free State government defeated the anti-Treaty remnant of the Irish Republican Army, imposing multiple executions. This division among nationalists still colours Irish politics today, specifically between the two leading Irish political parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.


title: History of Ireland

text: The new Irish Free State (1922–37) existed against the backdrop of the growth of dictatorships in mainland Europe and a major world economic downturn in 1929. In contrast with many contemporary European states, it remained a democracy. Testament to this came when the losing faction in the Irish civil war, Éamon de Valera's Fianna Fáil, was able to take power peacefully by winning the 1932 general election. Nevertheless, until the mid-1930s, considerable parts of Irish society saw the Free State through the prism of the civil war, as a repressive, British-imposed state. It was only the peaceful change of government in 1932 that signalled the final acceptance of the Free State on their part. In contrast to many other states in the period, the Free State remained financially solvent as a result of low government expenditure, despite the Economic War with Britain. However, unemployment and emigration were high. The population declined to a low of 2.7 million recorded in the 1961 census.


title: History of Ireland

text: The Roman Catholic Church had a powerful influence over the Irish state for much of its history. The clergy's influence meant that the Irish state had very conservative social policies, forbidding, for example, divorce, contraception, abortion, pornography as well as encouraging the censoring and banning of many books and films. In addition, the Church largely controlled the State's hospitals, and schools and remained the largest provider of many other social services.


title: History of Ireland

text: With the partition of Ireland in 1922, 92.6% of the Free State's population were Catholic while 7.4% were Protestant. By the 1960s the Protestant population had fallen by half. Although emigration was high among all the population, due to a lack of economic opportunity, the rate of Protestant emigration was disproportionate in this period. Many Protestants left the country in the early 1920s, either because they felt unwelcome in a predominantly Catholic and nationalist state, because they were afraid due to the burning of Protestant homes (particularly of the old landed class) by republicans during the civil war, because they regarded themselves as British and did not wish to live in an independent Irish state, or because of the economic disruption caused by the recent violence. The Catholic Church had also issued a decree, known as Ne Temere, whereby the children of marriages between Catholics and Protestants had to be brought up as Catholics. From 1945, the emigration rate of Protestants fell and they became less likely to emigrate than Catholics.


title: History of Ireland

text: In 1937 a new Constitution re-established the state as "Ireland" (or "Éire" in Irish). The state remained neutral throughout World War II (see "Irish neutrality"), which saved it from much of the horrors of the war, although tens of thousands volunteered to serve in the British forces. Ireland was also impacted by food rationing, and coal shortages; peat production became a priority during this time. Though nominally neutral, recent studies have suggested a far greater level of involvement by the South with the Allies than was realised, with D Day's date set on the basis of secret weather information on Atlantic storms supplied by Ireland. ("For more detail on 1939–45, see main article The Emergency".)


title: History of Ireland

text: In the 1960s, Ireland underwent a major economic change under reforming Taoiseach (prime minister) Seán Lemass and Secretary of the Department of Finance T.K. Whitaker, who produced a series of economic plans. Free second-level education was introduced by Donogh O'Malley as Minister for Education in 1968. From the early 1960s, Ireland sought admission to the European Economic Community but, because 90% of exports were to the United Kingdom market, it did not do so until the UK did, in 1973.


title: History of Ireland

text: Global economic problems in the 1970s, augmented by a set of misjudged economic policies followed by governments, including that of Taoiseach Jack Lynch, caused the Irish economy to stagnate. The Troubles in Northern Ireland discouraged foreign investment. Devaluation was enabled when the Irish Pound, or Punt, was established as a separate currency in 1979, breaking the link with the UK's sterling. However, economic reforms in the late 1980s, helped by investment from the European Community, led to the emergence of one of the world's highest economic growth rates, with mass immigration (particularly of people from Asia and Eastern Europe) as a feature of the late 1990s. This period came to be known as the Celtic Tiger and was focused on as a model for economic development in the former Eastern Bloc states, which entered the European Union in the early 2000s (decade). Property values had risen by a factor of between four and ten between 1993 and 2006, in part fuelling the boom.


title: History of Ireland

text: Irish society adopted relatively liberal social policies during this period. Divorce was legalised, homosexuality decriminalised, and abortion in limited cases was allowed by the Irish Supreme Court in the X Case legal judgement. Major scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, both sexual and financial, coincided with a widespread decline in religious practice, with weekly attendance at Roman Catholic Mass dropping by half in twenty years. A series of tribunals set up from the 1990s have investigated alleged malpractices by politicians, the Catholic clergy, judges, hospitals, and the Gardaí (police).


title: History of Ireland

text: Ireland's newfound prosperity was challenged abruptly in 2008 when the banking system collapsed due to the Irish property bubble bursting. Some 25-26% of GDP was needed to bail out failing Irish banks and force banking sector consolidation. This was the largest banking bailout for any country in history, in comparison, only 7–8% of GDP was needed to bail out failing Finnish banks in its banking crisis in the 1990s. This resulted in a major financial and political crisis as Ireland entered a recession. Emigration rose to 1989 levels as the unemployment rate rose from 4.2% in 2007 to reach 14.6% as of February 2012.


title: History of Ireland

text: The 1920 Government of Ireland Bill created the state of Northern Ireland, which consisted of the six northeastern counties of Derry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Antrim, Down and Armagh. From 1921 to 1972, Northern Ireland was governed by a Unionist government, based at Stormont in east Belfast. Unionist leader and first Prime Minister, James Craig, declared that it would be "a Protestant State for a Protestant People". Craig's goal was to form and preserve Protestant authority in the new state which was above all an effort to secure a unionist majority. In 1926 the majority of the population in the province were Presbyterian and Anglican, therefore, solidifying Craig's Protestant political power. The Ulster Unionist Party thereafter formed every government until 1972.


title: History of Ireland

text: Discrimination against the minority Catholic community in jobs and housing, and their total exclusion from political power due to the majoritarian electoral system, led to the emergence of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in the late 1960s, inspired by Martin Luther King's civil rights movement in the United States of America. The military forces of the Northern Protestants and Northern Catholics (IRA) turned to brutal acts of violence to establish power. As time went on it became clear that these two rival states would bring about a civil war. After the Second World War, keeping the cohesion within Stormont seemed impossible; increased economic pressures, solidified Catholic unity, and British involvement ultimately led to Stormont's collapse. As the civil rights movement of the United States gained worldwide acknowledgment, Catholics rallied together to achieve a similar socio-political recognition. This resulted in the formation of various organisations such as the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in 1967 and the Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ) in 1964.


title: History of Ireland

text: Non-violent protest became an increasingly important factor in mobilising Catholic sympathies and opinion and thus more effective in generating support than actively violent groups such as the IRA. However, these non-violent protests posed a problem to Northern Ireland's prime minister Terrance O'Neil (1963) because it hampered his efforts to persuade Catholics in Northern Ireland that they too, like their Protestant counterparts, belong within the United Kingdom. Despite O'Neil's reforming efforts there was growing discontent amongst both Catholics and Unionists. In October 1968 a peaceful civil rights march in Derry turned violent as police brutally beat protesters. The outbreak was televised by international media, and as a result the march was highly publicised which further confirmed the socio-political turmoil in Ireland. A violent counter-reaction from conservative unionists led to civil disorder, notably the Battle of the Bogside and the Northern Ireland riots of August 1969. To restore order, British troops were deployed to the streets of Northern Ireland at that time.


title: History of Ireland

text: The violent outbreaks in the late 1960s encouraged and helped strengthen military groups such as the IRA, who served as the protectors of the working class Catholics who were vulnerable to police and civilian brutality. During the late sixties and early seventies recruitment into the IRA organisation dramatically increased as street and civilian violence worsened. The interjection from the British troops proved to be insufficient to quell the violence and thus solidified the IRA's growing military importance. On 30 January 1972 the worst tensions came to a head with the events of Bloody Sunday. Paratroops opened fire on civil rights protesters in Derry, killing 13 unarmed civilians. Bloody Friday, Bloody Sunday, and other violent acts in the early 1970s came to be known as the Troubles.


title: History of Ireland

text: The Stormont parliament was prorogued in 1972 and abolished in 1973. Paramilitary private armies such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army, resulted from a split within the IRA, the Official IRA and Irish National Liberation Army fought against the Ulster Defence Regiment and the Ulster Volunteer Force. Moreover, the British army and the (largely Protestant) Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) also took part in the chaos that resulted in the deaths of over 3,000 men, women and children, civilians and military. Most of the violence took place in Northern Ireland, but some also spread to England and across the Irish border.


title: History of Ireland

text: For the next 27½ years, with the exception of five months in 1974, Northern Ireland was under "direct rule" with a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the British Cabinet responsible for the departments of the Northern Ireland government. Direct Rule was designed to be a temporary solution until Northern Ireland was capable of governing itself again. Principal acts were passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in the same way as for much of the rest of the UK, but many smaller measures were dealt with by Order in Council with minimal parliamentary scrutiny. Attempts were made to establish a power-sharing executive, representing both the nationalist and unionist communities, by the Northern Ireland Constitution Act of 1973 and the Sunningdale Agreement in December 1973.


title: History of Ireland

text: Both acts however did little to create cohesion between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The Constitution Act of 1973 formalised the UK government's affirmation of reunification of Ireland by consent only; therefore ultimately delegating the authoritative power of the border question from Stormont to the people of Northern Ireland (and the Republic of Ireland). Conversely, the Sunningdale Agreement included a "provision of a Council of Ireland which held the right to execute executive and harmonizing functions". Most significantly, the Sunningdale Agreement brought together political leaders from Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the UK to deliberate for the first time since 1925. The Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention and Jim Prior's 1982 assembly were also temporarily implemented; however all failed to either reach consensus or operate in the longer term.


title: History of Ireland

text: During the 1970s British policy concentrated on defeating the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) by military means including the policy of Ulsterisation (requiring the RUC and British Army reserve Ulster Defence Regiment to be at the forefront of combating the IRA). Although IRA violence decreased it was obvious that no military victory was on hand in either the short or medium terms. Even Catholics who generally rejected the IRA were unwilling to offer support to a state that seemed to remain mired in sectarian discrimination, and the Unionists were not interested in Catholic participation in running the state in any case. In the 1980s the IRA attempted to secure a decisive military victory based on massive arms shipments from Libya. When this failed, senior republican figures began to look to broaden the struggle from purely military means. In time this began a move towards military cessation.


title: History of Ireland

text: In 1985 the Irish and British governments signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement signalling a formal partnership in seeking a political solution. The Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) recognised the Irish government's right to be consulted and heard as well as guaranteed equality of treatment and recognition of the Irish and British identities of the two communities. The agreement also stated that the two governments must implement a cross-border co-operation. Socially and economically Northern Ireland suffered the worst levels of unemployment in the UK and although high levels of public spending ensured a slow modernisation of public services and moves towards equality, progress was slow in the 1970s and 1980s. Only in the 1990s, when progress toward peace became tangible, did the economic situation brighten. By then the demographics of Northern Ireland had undergone significant change, and more than 40% of the population was Catholic.


title: History of Ireland

text: More recently, the Belfast Agreement ("Good Friday Agreement") of 10 April 1998 brought – on 2 December 1999 – a degree of power-sharing to Northern Ireland, giving both unionists and nationalists control of limited areas of government. However, both the power-sharing Executive and the elected Assembly were suspended between January and May 2000, and from October 2002 until April 2007, following breakdowns in trust between the political parties involving outstanding issues, including "decommissioning" of paramilitary weapons, policing reform and the removal of British army bases. In new elections in 2003, the moderate Ulster Unionist and (nationalist) Social Democrat and Labour parties lost their dominant positions to the more hard-line Democratic Unionist and (nationalist) Sinn Féin parties. On 28 July 2005, the Provisional IRA announced the end of its armed campaign and on 25 September 2005 international weapons inspectors supervised the disarmament of the majority of weapons of the PIRA. Eventually, devolution was restored in April 2007.


title: History of Ireland

text: Ireland's economy became more diverse and sophisticated than ever before; integrating itself into the global economy by joining the European Economic Community (EEC), a precursor to the European Community (EC) and the European Union (EU), at the same time as the United Kingdom. By the beginning of the 1990s, Ireland had transformed itself into a modern industrial economy and generated substantial national income that benefited the entire nation. Although dependence on agriculture still remained high, Ireland's industrial economy produced sophisticated goods that rivalled international competition. Ireland's international economic boom of the 1990s became known as the Celtic Tiger.


title: History of Ireland

text: The Catholic Church, which once exercised great power, found its influence on socio-political issues in Ireland much reduced. Irish bishops were no longer able to advise and influence the public on how to exercise their political rights. Modern Ireland's detachment of the Church from ordinary life can be explained by the increasing disinterest in Church doctrine by younger generations and the questionable morality of the Church's representatives. A highly publicised case was that of Eamonn Casey, the Bishop of Galway, who resigned abruptly in 1992 after it was revealed that he had had an affair with an American woman and had fathered a child. Further controversies and scandals arose concerning paedophile and child-abusing priests. As a result, many in the Irish public began to question the credibility and effectiveness of the Catholic Church. In 2011 Ireland closed its embassy at the Vatican, an apparent result of this growing trend.


title: History of Ireland

text: The national flag of Ireland is a tricolour of green, white and orange. This flag, which bears the colours green for Irish Catholics, orange for Irish Protestants, and white for the desired peace between them, dates to the mid-19th century. The tricolour was first unfurled in public by Young Irelander Thomas Francis Meagher who, using the symbolism of the flag, explained his vision as follows: ""The white in the centre signifies a lasting truce between the "Orange" and the "Green," and I trust that beneath its folds the hands of the Irish Protestant and the Irish Catholic may be clasped in generous and heroic brotherhood"". Fellow nationalist John Mitchel said of it: "I hope to see that flag one day waving as our national banner."


title: History of Ireland

text: After its use in the 1916 Rising it became widely accepted by nationalists as the national flag and was used officially by the Irish Republic (1919–21) and the Irish Free State (1922–37).


title: History of Ireland

text: In 1937 when the Constitution of Ireland was introduced, the tricolour was formally confirmed as the national flag: "The national flag is the tricolour of green, white and orange." While the tricolour today is the official flag of Ireland, it is not an official flag in Northern Ireland although it is sometimes used unofficially.


title: History of Ireland

text: The only official flag representing Northern Ireland is the Union Flag of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland however its use is controversial. The Ulster Banner is sometimes used unofficially as a de facto regional flag for Northern Ireland.


title: History of Ireland

text: Since Partition, there has been no universally accepted flag to represent the entire island. As a provisional solution for certain sports fixtures, the Flag of the Four Provinces enjoys a certain amount of general acceptance and popularity.


title: History of Ireland

text: St Patrick's Saltire was formerly used to represent the island of Ireland by the all-island Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU), before the adoption of the four-provinces flag. The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) uses the tricolour to represent the whole island.


title: History of Ireland

text: Ireland has a very large historiography, contributed by scholars in Ireland, North America, and Britain. There has been both a standard interpretation and, since the late 1930s, a good deal of revisionism. One of the most important themes has always been Irish nationalism—what Alfred Markey, calls:


title: History of Ireland

text: A great deal of attention has focused on the Irish revolutionary period, 1912–23. Starting in 2012 a series of conferences on "Reflecting on a decade of War and Revolution in Ireland 1912-1923: Historians and Public History" brought together hundreds of academics, teachers, and the general public.


title: History of Ireland

text: Ireland in some ways was the first acquisition of the British Empire. Marshall says historians continue to debate whether Ireland should be considered part of the British Empire. Recent work by historians pays special attention to continuing Imperial aspects of Irish history, Atlantic Ocean history, and the role of migration in forming the Irish diaspora across the Empire and North America.


title: History of Ireland

text: As historiography evolves, new approaches have been applied to the Irish situation. Studies of women, and gender relationships more generally, had been rare before 1990; they now are commonplace with over 3,000 books and articles. Postcolonialism is an approach in several academic disciplines that seeks to analyze, explain, and respond to the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism. The emphasis is usually on the human consequences of controlling a country and establishing settlers for the economic exploitation of the native people and their land.


title: History of Ireland

text: According to L.A. Clarkson in 1980, the 18th and 19th centuries are the best covered time frames. Recent research on 18th-century overseas trade and 19th-century agrarian conditions has broken the nationalist approach that traditionally structured Irish economic historiography. Understudied areas include economic growth and fluctuations, the labour market, capital formation, business, and history. Except for emigration, little has been written on Ireland's external economic relations in the 19th century.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Homosexuality in ancient Rome often differs markedly from the contemporary West. Latin lacks words that would precisely translate "homosexual" and "heterosexual". The primary dichotomy of ancient Roman sexuality was active/dominant/masculine and passive/submissive/feminine. Roman society was patriarchal, and the freeborn male citizen possessed political liberty ("libertas") and the right to rule both himself and his household ("familia"). "Virtue" ("virtus") was seen as an active quality through which a man ("vir") defined himself. The conquest mentality and "cult of virility" shaped same-sex relations. Roman men were free to enjoy sex with other males without a perceived loss of masculinity or social status, as long as they took the dominant or penetrative role. Acceptable male partners were slaves and former slaves, prostitutes, and entertainers, whose lifestyle placed them in the nebulous social realm of "infamia", excluded from the normal protections accorded to a citizen even if they were technically free. Although Roman men in general seem to have preferred youths between the ages of 12 and 20 as sexual partners, freeborn male minors were off limits at certain periods in Rome, though professional prostitutes and entertainers might remain sexually available well into adulthood.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Same-sex relations among women are far less documented and, if Roman writers are to be trusted, female homoeroticism may have been very rare, to the point that Ovid, in the Augustine era describes it as "unheard-of". However, there is scattered evidence — for example, a couple of spells in the Greek Magical Papyri — which attests to the existence of individual women in Roman-ruled provinces in the later Imperial period who fell in love with members of the same sex.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: During the Republic, a Roman citizen's political liberty ("libertas") was defined in part by the right to preserve his body from physical compulsion, including both corporal punishment and sexual abuse. Roman society was patriarchal (see "paterfamilias"), and masculinity was premised on a capacity for governing oneself and others of lower status. "Virtus", "valor" as that which made a man most fully a man, was among the active virtues. Sexual conquest was a common metaphor for imperialism in Roman discourse, and the "conquest mentality" was part of a "cult of virility" that particularly shaped Roman homosexual practices. Roman ideals of masculinity were thus premised on taking an active role that was also, as Craig A. Williams has noted, "the prime directive of masculine sexual behavior for Romans". In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, scholars have tended to view expressions of Roman male sexuality in terms of a "penetrator-penetrated" binary model; that is, the proper way for a Roman male to seek sexual gratification was to insert his penis into his partner. Allowing himself to be penetrated threatened his liberty as a free citizen as well as his sexual integrity.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: It was expected and socially acceptable for a freeborn Roman man to want sex with both female and male partners, as long as he took the penetrative role. The morality of the behavior depended on the social standing of the partner, not gender "per se". Both women and young men were considered normal objects of desire, but outside marriage a man was supposed to act on his desires with only slaves, prostitutes (who were often slaves), and the "infames". Gender did not determine whether a sexual partner was acceptable, as long as a man's enjoyment did not encroach on another man's integrity. It was immoral to have sex with another freeborn man's wife, his marriageable daughter, his underage son, or with the man himself; sexual use of another man's slave was subject to the owner's permission. Lack of self-control, including in managing one's sex life, indicated that a man was incapable of governing others; too much indulgence in "low sensual pleasure" threatened to erode the elite male's identity as a cultured person.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Homoerotic themes are introduced to Latin literature during a period of increasing Greek influence on Roman culture in the 2nd century BC.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Greek cultural attitudes differed from those of the Romans primarily in idealizing "eros" between freeborn male citizens of equal status, though usually with a difference of age (see "Pederasty in ancient Greece"). An attachment to a male outside the family, seen as a positive influence among the Greeks, within Roman society threatened the authority of the "paterfamilias". Since Roman women were active in educating their sons and mingled with men socially, and women of the governing classes often continued to advise and influence their sons and husbands in political life, homosociality was not as pervasive in Rome as it had been in Classical Athens, where it is thought to have contributed to the particulars of pederastic culture.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: In the Imperial era, a perceived increase in passive homosexual behavior among free males was associated with anxieties about the subordination of political liberty to the emperor, and led to an increase in executions and corporal punishment. The sexual license and decadence under the empire was seen as a contributing factor and symptom of the loss of the ideals of physical integrity ("libertas") under the Republic.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Love or desire between males is a very frequent theme in Roman literature. In the estimation of a modern scholar, Amy Richlin, out of the poems preserved to this day, those addressed by men to boys are as common as those addressed to women.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Among the works of Roman literature that can be read today, those of Plautus are the earliest to survive in full to modernity, and also the first to mention homosexuality. Their use to draw conclusions about Roman customs or morals, however, is controversial because these works are all based on Greek originals. However, Craig A. Williams defends such use of the works of Plautus. He notes that the homo- and heterosexual exploitation of slaves, to which there are so many references in Plautus' works, is rarely mentioned in Greek New Comedy, and that many of the puns that make such a reference (and Plautus' oeuvre, being comic, is full of them) are only possible in Latin, and can not therefore have been mere translations from the Greek.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The consul Quintus Lutatius Catulus was among a circle of poets who made short, light Hellenistic poems fashionable. One of his few surviving fragments is a poem of desire addressed to a male with a Greek name. In the view of Ramsay MacMullen, who is of the opinion that, before the flood of Greek influence, the Romans were against the practice of homosexuality, the elevation of Greek literature and art as models of expression promoted the celebration of homoeroticism as the mark of an urbane and sophisticated person. The opposite view is sustained by Craig Williams, who is critical of Macmullen's discussion on Roman attitudes toward homosexuality: he draws attention to the fact that Roman writers of love poetry gave their beloveds Greek pseudonyms no matter the sex of the beloved. Thus, the use of Greek names in homoerotic Roman poems does not mean that the Romans attributed a Greek origin to their homosexual practices or that homosexual love only appeared as a subject of poetic celebration among the Romans under the influence of the Greeks.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: References to homosexual desire or practice, in fact, also appear in Roman authors who wrote in literary styles seen as originally Roman, that is, where the influence of Greek fashions or styles is less likely. In an Atellan farce authored by Quintus Novius (a literary style seen as originally Roman), it is said by one of the characters that "everyone knows that a boy is superior to a woman"; the character goes on to list physical attributes, most of which denoting the onset of puberty, that mark boys when they are at their most attractive in the character's view. Also remarked elsewhere in Novius' fragments is that the sexual use of boys ceases after "their butts become hairy". A preference for smooth male bodies over hairy ones is also avowed elsewhere in Roman literature (e.g., in "Ode" 4.10 by Horace and in some epigrams by Martial or in the "Priapeia"), and was likely shared by most Roman men of the time.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: In a work of satires, another literary genre that Romans saw as their own, Gaius Lucilius, a second-century BC poet, draws comparisons between anal sex with boys and vaginal sex with females; it is speculated that he may have written a whole chapter in one of his books with comparisons between lovers of both sexes, though nothing can be stated with certainty as what remains of his oeuvre are just fragments.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: In other satire, as well as in Martial's erotic and invective epigrams, at times boys' superiority over women is remarked (for example, in Juvenal 6). Other works in the genre (e.g., Juvenal 2 and 9, and one of Martial's satires) also give the impression that passive homosexuality was becoming a fad increasingly popular among Roman men of the first century AD, something which is the target of invective from the authors of the satires. The practice itself, however, was perhaps not new, as over a hundred years before these authors, the dramatist Lucius Pomponius wrote a play, "Prostibulum" ("The Prostitute"), which today only exists in fragments, where the main character, a male prostitute, proclaims that he has sex with male clients also in the active position.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: "New poetry" introduced at the end of the 2nd century included that of Gaius Valerius Catullus, whose work include expressing desire for a freeborn youth explicitly named "Youth" ("Iuventius"). The Latin name and freeborn status of the beloved subvert Roman tradition. Catullus's contemporary Lucretius also recognizes the attraction of "boys" ("pueri", which can designate an acceptable submissive partner and not specifically age). Homoerotic themes occur throughout the works of poets writing during the reign of Augustus, including elegies by Tibullus and Propertius, several "Eclogues" of Vergil, especially the second, and some poems by Horace. In the "Aeneid," Vergil – who, according to a biography written by Suetonius, had a marked sexual preference for boys – draws on the Greek tradition of pederasty in a military setting by portraying the love between Nisus and Euryalus, whose military valor marks them as solidly Roman men ("viri"). Vergil describes their love as "pius", linking it to the supreme virtue of "pietas" as possessed by the hero Aeneas himself, and endorsing it as "honorable, dignified and connected to central Roman values".


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: By the end of the Augustan period Ovid, Rome's leading literary figure, was alone among Roman figures in proposing a radically new agenda focused on love between men and women: making love with a woman is more enjoyable, he says, because unlike the forms of same-sex behavior permissible within Roman culture, the pleasure is mutual. Even Ovid himself, however, did not claim exclusive heterosexuality and he does include mythological treatments of homoeroticism in the "Metamorphoses", but Thomas Habinek has pointed out that the significance of Ovid's rupture of human erotics into categorical preferences has been obscured in the history of sexuality by a later heterosexual bias in Western culture.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Several other Roman writers, however, expressed a bias in favor of males when sex or companionship with males and females were compared, including Juvenal, Lucian, Strato, and the poet Martial, who often derided women as sexual partners and celebrated the charms of "pueri". In literature of the Imperial period, the "Satyricon" of Petronius is so permeated with the culture of male–male sex that in 18th-century European literary circles, his name became "a byword for homosexuality".


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Homosexuality appears with much less frequency in the visual art of Rome than in its literature. Out of several hundred objects depicting images of sexual contact — from wall paintings and oil lamps to vessels of various types of material — only a small minority exhibits acts between males, and even fewer among females.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Male homosexuality occasionally appears on vessels of numerous kinds, from cups and bottles made of expensive material such as silver and cameo glass to mass-produced and low-cost bowls made of Arretine pottery. This may be evidence that sexual relations between males had the acceptance not only of the elite, but was also openly celebrated or indulged in by the less illustrious, as suggested also by ancient graffiti.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: When whole objects rather than mere fragments are unearthed, homoerotic scenes are usually found to share space with pictures of opposite-sex couples, which can be interpreted to mean that heterosexuality and homosexuality (or male homosexuality, in any case) are of equal value. The Warren Cup (discussed below) is an exception among homoerotic objects: it shows only male couples and may have been produced in order to celebrate a world of exclusive homosexuality.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The treatment given to the subject in such vessels is idealized and romantic, similar to that dispensed to heterosexuality. The artist's emphasis, regardless of the sex of the couple being depicted, lies in the mutual affection between the partners and the beauty of their bodies.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Such a trend distinguishes Roman homoerotic art from that of the Greeks. With some exceptions, Greek vase painting attributes desire and pleasure only to the active partner of homosexual encounters, the "erastes", while the passive, or "eromenos", seems physically unaroused and, at times, emotionally distant. It is now believed that this may be an artistic convention provoked by reluctance on the part of the Greeks to openly acknowledge that Greek males could enjoy taking on a "female" role in an erotic relationship; reputation for such pleasure could have consequences to the future image of the former "eromenos" when he turned into an adult, and hinder his ability to participate in the socio-political life of the "polis" as a respectable citizen. Because, among the Romans, normative homosexuality took place, not between freeborn males or social equals as among the Greeks, but between master and slave, client and prostitute or, in any case, between social superior and social inferior, Roman artists may paradoxically have felt more at ease than their Greek colleagues to portray mutual affection and desire between male couples. This may also explain why anal penetration is seen more often in Roman homoerotic art than in its Greek counterpart, where non-penetrative intercourse predominates.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: A wealth of wall paintings of a sexual nature have been spotted in ruins of some Roman cities, notably Pompeii, where there were found the only examples known so far of Roman art depicting sexual congress between women. A frieze at a brothel annexed to the Suburban Baths, in Pompeii, shows a series of sixteen sex scenes, three of which display homoerotic acts: a bisexual threesome with two men and a woman, intercourse by a female couple using a strap-on, and a foursome with two men and two women participating in homosexual anal sex, heterosexual fellatio, and homosexual cunnilingus.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Contrary to the art of the vessels discussed above, all sixteen images on the mural portray sexual acts considered unusual or debased according to Roman customs: e.g., female sexual domination of men, heterosexual oral sex, passive homosexuality by an adult man, lesbianism, and group sex. Therefore, their portrayal may have been intended to provide a source of ribald humor rather than sexual titillation to visitors of the building.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Threesomes in Roman art typically show two men penetrating a woman, but one of the Suburban scenes has one man entering a woman from the rear while he in turn receives anal sex from a man standing behind him. This scenario is described also by Catullus, "Carmen" 56, who considers it humorous. The man in the center may be a "cinaedus", a male who liked to receive anal sex but who was also considered seductive to women. Foursomes also appear in Roman art, typically with two men and two women, sometimes in same-sex pairings.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Roman attitudes toward male nudity differ from those of the ancient Greeks, who regarded idealized portrayals of the nude male. The wearing of the toga marked a Roman man as a free citizen. Negative connotations of nudity include defeat in war, since captives were stripped, and slavery, since slaves for sale were often displayed naked.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: At the same time, the phallus was displayed ubiquitously in the form of the "fascinum", a magic charm thought to ward off malevolent forces; it became a customary decoration, found widely in the ruins of Pompeii, especially in the form of wind chimes ("tintinnabula"). The outsized phallus of the god Priapus may originally have served an apotropaic purpose, but in art it is frequently laughter-provoking or grotesque. Hellenization, however, influenced the depiction of male nudity in Roman art, leading to more complex signification of the male body shown nude, partially nude, or costumed in a muscle cuirass.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The Warren Cup is a piece of convivial silver, usually dated to the time of the Julio-Claudian dynasty (1st century AD), that depicts two scenes of male–male sex. It has been argued that the two sides of this cup represent the duality of pederastic tradition at Rome, the Greek in contrast to the Roman. On the "Greek" side, a bearded, mature man is penetrating a young but muscularly developed male in a rear-entry position. The young man, probably meant to be 17 or 18, holds on to a sexual apparatus for maintaining an otherwise awkward or uncomfortable sexual position. A child-slave watches the scene furtively through a door ajar. The "Roman" side of the cup shows a "puer delicatus" [fig., "delicious boy"], age 12 to 13, held for intercourse in the arms of an older male, clean-shaven and fit. The bearded pederast may be Greek, with a partner who participates more freely and with a look of pleasure. His counterpart, who has a more severe haircut, appears to be Roman, and thus uses a slave boy; the myrtle wreath he wears symbolizes his role as an "erotic conqueror". The cup may have been designed as a conversation piece to provoke the kind of dialogue on ideals of love and sex that took place at a Greek symposium.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: More recently, academic Maria Teresa Marabini Moevs has questioned the authenticity of the cup, while others have published defenses of its authenticity. Marabini Moevs has argued, for example, that the Cup was probably manufactured by the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and that it supposedly represents perceptions of Greco-Roman homosexuality from that time, whereas defenders of the legitimacy of the cup have highlighted certain signs of ancient corrosion and the fact that a vessel manufactured in the 19th century, would have been made of pure silver, whereas the Warren Cup has a level of purity equal to that of other Roman vessels. To address this issue, the British Museum, which holds the utensil, performed a chemical analysis in 2015 to determine the date of its production. The analysis concluded that the silverware was indeed made in classical antiquity.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: A man or boy who took the "receptive" role in sex was variously called "cinaedus", "pathicus", "exoletus", "concubinus" (male concubine), "spint(h)ria" ("analist"), "puer" ("boy"), "pullus" ("chick"), "pusio", "delicatus" (especially in the phrase "puer delicatus", "exquisite" or "dainty boy"), "mollis" ("soft", used more generally as an aesthetic quality counter to aggressive masculinity), "tener" ("delicate"), "debilis" ("weak" or "disabled"), "effeminatus", "discinctus" ("loose-belted"), "pisciculi," and "morbosus" ("sick"). As Amy Richlin has noted, "'gay' is not exact, 'penetrated' is not self-defined, 'passive' misleadingly connotes inaction" in translating this group of words into English.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Some terms, such as "exoletus", specifically refer to an adult; Romans who were socially marked as "masculine" did not confine their same-sex penetration of male prostitutes or slaves to those who were "boys" under the age of 20. Some older men may have at times preferred the passive role. Martial describes, for example, the case of an older man who played the passive role and let a younger slave occupy the active role. An adult male's desire to be penetrated was considered a sickness ("morbus"); the desire to penetrate a handsome youth was thought normal.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Cinaedus" is a derogatory word denoting a male who was gender-deviant; his choice of sex acts, or preference in sexual partner, was secondary to his perceived deficiencies as a "man" ("vir"). Catullus directs the slur "cinaedus" at his friend Furius in his notoriously obscene "Carmen" 16. Although in some contexts "cinaedus" may denote an anally passive man and is the most frequent word for a male who allowed himself to be penetrated anally, a man called "cinaedus" might also have sex with and be considered highly attractive to women. "Cinaedus" is not equivalent to the English vulgarism "faggot", except that both words can be used to deride a male considered deficient in manhood or with androgynous characteristics whom women may find sexually alluring.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The clothing, use of cosmetics, and mannerisms of a "cinaedus" marked him as effeminate, but the same effeminacy that Roman men might find alluring in a "puer" became unattractive in the physically mature male. The "cinaedus" thus represented the absence of what Romans considered true manhood, and the word is virtually untranslatable into English.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Originally, a "cinaedus" (Greek "kinaidos") was a professional dancer, characterized as non-Roman or "Eastern"; the word itself may come from a language of Asia Minor. His performance featured tambourine-playing and movements of the buttocks that suggested anal intercourse. The Cinaedocolpitae, an Arabian tribe recorded in Greco-Roman sources of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, may have a name derived from this meaning.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Some Roman men kept a male concubine ("concubinus", "one who lies with; a bed-mate") before they married a woman. Eva Cantarella has described this form of concubinage as "a stable sexual relationship, not exclusive but privileged". Within the hierarchy of household slaves, the "concubinus" seems to have been regarded as holding a special or elevated status that was threatened by the introduction of a wife. In a wedding hymn, Catullus portrays the groom's "concubinus" as anxious about his future and fearful of abandonment. His long hair will be cut, and he will have to resort to the female slaves for sexual gratification—indicating that he is expected to transition from being a receptive sex object to one who performs penetrative sex. The "concubinus" might father children with women of the household, not excluding the wife (at least in invective). The feelings and situation of the "concubinus" are treated as significant enough to occupy five stanzas of Catullus's wedding poem. He plays an active role in the ceremonies, distributing the traditional nuts that boys threw (rather like rice or birdseed in the modern Western tradition).


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The relationship with a "concubinus" might be discreet or more open: male concubines sometimes attended dinner parties with the man whose companion they were. Martial even suggests that a prized "concubinus" might pass from father to son as an especially coveted inheritance. A military officer on campaign might be accompanied by a "concubinus". Like the catamite or "puer delicatus", the role of the concubine was regularly compared to that of Ganymede, the Trojan prince abducted by Jove (Greek Zeus) to serve as his cupbearer.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The "concubina", a female concubine who might be free, held a protected legal status under Roman law, but the "concubinus" did not, since he was typically a slave.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Exoletus" (pl. "exoleti") is the past-participle form of the verb "exolescere", which means "to grow up" or "to grow old". The term denotes a male prostitute who services another sexually despite the fact that he himself is past his prime according to the ephebic tastes of Roman homoerotism. Though adult men were expected to take on the role of "penetrator" in their love affairs, such a restriction did not apply to "exoleti". In their texts, Pomponius and Juvenal both included characters who were adult male prostitutes and had as clients male citizens who sought their services so they could take a "female" role in bed (see above). In other texts, however, "exoleti" adopt a receptive position.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The relationship between the "exoletus" and his partner could begin when he was still a boy and the affair then extended into his adulthood. It is impossible to say how often this happened. For even if there was a tight bond between the couple, the general social expectation was that pederastic affairs would end once the younger partner grew facial hair. As such, when Martial celebrates in two of his epigrams (1.31 and 5.48) the relationship of his friend, the centurion Aulens Pudens, with his slave Encolpos, the poet more than once gives voice to the hope that the latter's beard come late, so that the romance between the pair may last long. Continuing the affair beyond that point could result in damage to the master's repute. Some men, however, insisted on ignoring this convention.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Exoleti" appear with certain frequency in Latin texts, both fictional and historical, unlike in Greek literature, suggesting perhaps that adult male-male sex was more common among the Romans than among the Greeks. Ancient sources impute the love of, or the preference for, "exoleti" (using this or equivalent terms) to various figures of Roman history, such as the tribune Clodius, the emperors Tiberius, Galba, Titus, and Elagabalus, besides other figures encountered in anecdotes, told by writers such as Tacitus, on more ordinary citizens.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Pathicus" was a "blunt" word for a male who was penetrated sexually. It derived from the unattested Greek adjective "pathikos", from the verb "paskhein", equivalent to the Latin deponent "patior, pati, passus", "undergo, submit to, endure, suffer". The English word "passive" derives from the Latin "passus".


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Pathicus" and "cinaedus" are often not distinguished in usage by Latin writers, but "cinaedus" may be a more general term for a male not in conformity with the role of "vir", a "real man", while "pathicus" specifically denotes an adult male who takes the sexually receptive role. A "pathicus" was not a "homosexual" as such. His sexuality was not defined by the gender of the person using him as a receptacle for sex, but rather his desire to be so used. Because in Roman culture a man who penetrates another adult male almost always expresses contempt or revenge, the "pathicus" might be seen as more akin to the sexual masochist in his experience of pleasure. He might be penetrated orally or anally by a man or by a woman with a dildo, but showed no desire for penetrating nor having his own penis stimulated. He might also be dominated by a woman who compels him to perform cunnilingus.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: In the discourse of sexuality, "puer" ("boy") was a role as well as an age group. Both "puer" and the feminine equivalent "puella", "girl", could refer to a man's sexual partner, regardless of age. As an age designation, the freeborn "puer" made the transition from childhood at around age 14, when he assumed the "toga of manhood", but he was 17 or 18 before he began to take part in public life. A slave would never be considered a "vir", a "real man"; he would be called "puer", "boy", throughout his life. "Pueri" might be "functionally interchangeable" with women as receptacles for sex, but freeborn male minors were strictly off-limits. To accuse a Roman man of being someone's "boy" was an insult that impugned his manhood, particularly in the political arena. The aging "cinaedus" or an anally passive man might wish to present himself as a "puer".


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The "puer delicatus" was an "exquisite" or "dainty" child-slave chosen by his master for his beauty as a "boy toy", also referred to as ("sweets" or "delights"). Unlike the freeborn Greek "eromenos" ("beloved"), who was protected by social custom, the Roman "delicatus" was in a physically and morally vulnerable position. The "coercive and exploitative" relationship between the Roman master and the "delicatus", who might be prepubescent, can be characterized as pedophilic, in contrast to Greek "paiderasteia".


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Funeral inscriptions found in the ruins of the imperial household under Augustus and Tiberius also indicate that "deliciae" were kept in the palace and that some slaves, male and female, worked as beauticians for these boys. One of Augustus' "pueri" is known by name: Sarmentus.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The boy was sometimes castrated in an effort to preserve his youthful qualities; the emperor Nero had a "puer delicatus" named Sporus, whom he castrated and married.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Pueri delicati" might be idealized in poetry and the relationship between him and his master may be painted in what his master viewed as strongly romantic colors. In the "Silvae", Statius composed two epitaphs (2.1 and 2.6) to commemorate the relationship of two of his friends with their respective "delicati" upon the death of the latter. These poems have been argued to demonstrate that such relationships could have an emotional dimension, and it is known from inscriptions in Roman ruins that men could be buried with their "delicati", which is evidence of the degree of control that masters would not relinquish, even in death, as well as of a sexual relationship in life.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Both Martial and Statius in a number of poems celebrate the freedman Earinus, a eunuch, and his devotion to the emperor Domitian. Statius goes as far as to describe this relationship as a marriage (3.4).


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: In the erotic elegies of Tibullus, the "delicatus" Marathus wears lavish and expensive clothing. The beauty of the "delicatus" was measured by Apollonian standards, especially in regard to his long hair, which was supposed to be wavy, fair, and scented with perfume. The mythological type of the "delicatus" was represented by Ganymede, the Trojan youth abducted by Jove (Greek Zeus) to be his divine companion and cupbearer. In the "Satyricon", the tastelessly wealthy freedman Trimalchio says that as a child-slave he had been a "puer delicatus" serving both the master and, secretly, the mistress of the household.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Pullus" was a term for a young animal, and particularly a chick. It was an affectionate word traditionally used for a boy ("puer") who was loved by someone "in an obscene sense".


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The lexicographer Festus provides a definition and illustrates with a comic anecdote. Quintus Fabius Maximus Eburnus, a consul in 116 BC and later a censor known for his moral severity, earned his "cognomen" meaning "Ivory" (the modern equivalent might be "Porcelain") because of his fair good looks ("candor"). Eburnus was said to have been struck by lightning on his buttocks, perhaps a reference to a birthmark. It was joked that he was marked as "Jove's chick" ("pullus Iovis"), since the characteristic instrument of the king of the gods was the lightning bolt (see also the relation of Jove's cupbearer Ganymede to "catamite"). Although the sexual inviolability of underage male citizens is usually emphasized, this anecdote is among the evidence that even the most well-born youths might go through a phase in which they could be viewed as "sex objects". Perhaps tellingly, this same member of the illustrious Fabius family ended his life in exile, as punishment for killing his own son for "impudicitia".


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The 4th-century Gallo-Roman poet Ausonius records the word "pullipremo", "chick-squeezer", which he says was used by the early satirist Lucilius.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Pusio" is etymologically related to "puer," and means "boy, lad". It often had a distinctly sexual or sexually demeaning connotation. Juvenal indicates the "pusio" was more desirable than women because he was less quarrelsome and would not demand gifts from his lover. "Pusio" was also used as a personal name ("cognomen").


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Scultimidonus" ("asshole-bestower") was rare and "florid" slang that appears in a fragment from the early Roman satirist Lucilius. It is glossed as "Those who bestow for free their "scultima", that is, their anal orifice, which is called the "scultima" as if from the inner parts of whores" ("scortorum intima").


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The abstract noun "impudicitia" (adjective "impudicus") was the negation of "pudicitia", "sexual morality, chastity". As a characteristic of males, it often implies the willingness to be penetrated. Dancing was an expression of male "impudicitia".


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Impudicitia" might be associated with behaviors in young men who retained a degree of boyish attractiveness but were old enough to be expected to behave according to masculine norms. Julius Caesar was accused of bringing the notoriety of "infamia" upon himself, both when he was about 19, for taking the passive role in an affair with King Nicomedes of Bithynia, and later for many adulterous affairs with women. Seneca the Elder noted that ""impudicitia" is a crime for the freeborn, a necessity in a slave, a duty for the freedman": male–male sex in Rome asserted the power of the citizen over slaves, confirming his masculinity.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Latin had such a wealth of words for men outside the masculine norm that some scholars argue for the existence of a homosexual subculture at Rome; that is, although the noun "homosexual" has no straightforward equivalent in Latin, literary sources reveal a pattern of behaviors among a minority of free men that indicate same-sex preference or orientation. Plautus mentions a street known for male prostitutes. Public baths are also referred to as a place to find sexual partners. Juvenal states that such men scratched their heads with a finger to identify themselves.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Apuleius indicates that "cinaedi" might form social alliances for mutual enjoyment, such as hosting dinner parties. In his novel "The Golden Ass", he describes one group who jointly purchased and shared a "concubinus". On one occasion, they invited a "well-endowed" young hick ("rusticanus iuvenis") to their party, and took turns performing oral sex on him.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Other scholars, primarily those who argue from the perspective of "cultural constructionism", maintain that there is not an identifiable social group of males who would have self-identified as "homosexual" as a community.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Although in general the Romans regarded marriage as a male–female union for the purpose of producing children, a few scholars believe that in the early Imperial period some male couples were celebrating traditional marriage rites in the presence of friends. Male–male weddings are reported by sources that mock them; the feelings of the participants are not recorded. Both Martial and Juvenal refer to marriage between males as something that occurs not infrequently, although they disapprove of it. Roman law did not recognize marriage between males, but one of the grounds for disapproval expressed in Juvenal's satire is that celebrating the rites would lead to expectations for such marriages to be registered officially. As the empire was becoming Christianized in the 4th century, legal prohibitions against marriage between males began to appear.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Various ancient sources state that the emperor Nero celebrated two public weddings with males, once taking the role of the bride (with a freedman Pythagoras), and once the groom (with Sporus); there may have been a third in which he was the bride. The ceremonies included traditional elements such as a dowry and the wearing of the Roman bridal veil. In the early 3rd century AD, the emperor Elagabalus is reported to have been the bride in a wedding to his male partner. Other mature men at his court had husbands, or said they had husbands in imitation of the emperor. Although the sources are in general hostile, Dio Cassius implies that Nero's stage performances were regarded as more scandalous than his marriages to men.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The earliest reference in Latin literature to a marriage between males occurs in the "Philippics" of Cicero, who insulted Mark Antony for being promiscuous in his youth until Curio "established you in a fixed and stable marriage ("matrimonium"), as if he had given you a "stola"", the traditional garment of a married woman. Although Cicero's sexual implications are clear, the point of the passage is to cast Antony in the submissive role in the relationship and to impugn his manhood in various ways; there is no reason to think that actual marriage rites were performed.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Roman law addressed the rape of a male citizen as early as the 2nd century BC, when it was ruled that even a man who was "disreputable and questionable" ("famosus," related to "infamis", and "suspiciosus)" had the same right as other free men not to have his body subjected to forced sex. The "Lex Julia de vi publica", recorded in the early 3rd century AD but probably dating from the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, defined rape as forced sex against "boy, woman, or anyone"; the rapist was subject to execution, a rare penalty in Roman law. Men who had been raped were exempt from the loss of legal or social standing suffered by those who submitted their bodies to use for the pleasure of others; a male prostitute or entertainer was "infamis" and excluded from the legal protections extended to citizens in good standing. As a matter of law, a slave could not be raped; he was considered property and not legally a person. The slave's owner, however, could prosecute the rapist for property damage.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Fears of mass rape following a military defeat extended equally to male and female potential victims. According to the jurist Pomponius, "whatever man has been raped by the force of robbers or the enemy in wartime" ought to bear no stigma.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The threat of one man to subject another to anal or oral rape ("irrumatio") is a theme of invective poetry, most notably in Catullus's notorious "Carmen" 16, and was a form of masculine braggadocio. Rape was one of the traditional punishments inflicted on a male adulterer by the wronged husband, though perhaps more in revenge fantasy than in practice.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: In a collection of twelve anecdotes dealing with assaults on chastity, the historian Valerius Maximus features male victims in equal number to female. In a "mock trial" case described by the elder Seneca, an "adulescens" (a man young enough not to have begun his formal career) was gang-raped by ten of his peers; although the case is hypothetical, Seneca assumes that the law permitted the successful prosecution of the rapists. Another hypothetical case imagines the extremity to which a rape victim might be driven: the freeborn male ("ingenuus") who was raped commits suicide. The Romans considered the rape of an "ingenuus" to be among the worst crimes that could be committed, along with parricide, the rape of a female virgin, and robbing a temple.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The Roman soldier, like any free and respectable Roman male of status, was expected to show self-discipline in matters of sex. Augustus (reigned 27 BC – 14 AD) even prohibited soldiers from marrying, a ban that remained in force for the Imperial army for nearly two centuries. Other forms of sexual gratification available to soldiers were prostitutes of any gender, male slaves, war rape, and same-sex relations. The "Bellum Hispaniense", about Caesar's civil war on the front in Roman Spain, mentions an officer who has a male concubine ("concubinus") on campaign. Sex among fellow soldiers, however, 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.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: In warfare, rape symbolized defeat, a motive for the soldier not to make his body sexually vulnerable in general. During the Republic, homosexual behavior among fellow soldiers was subject to harsh penalties, including death, as a violation of military discipline. Polybius (2nd century BC) reports that the punishment for a soldier who willingly submitted to penetration was the "fustuarium", clubbing to death.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Roman historians record 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 by not wearing perfume, nor trimming nostril and underarm hair. An incident related by Plutarch in his biography of Marius illustrates the soldier's right to maintain his sexual integrity despite pressure from his superiors. 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, after 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.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: In addition to repeatedly described anal intercourse, oral sex was common. A graffito from Pompeii is unambiguous: "Secundus is a fellator of rare ability" ("Secundus felator rarus"). In contrast to ancient Greece, a large penis was a major element in attractiveness. Petronius describes a man with a large penis in a public bathroom. Several emperors are reported in a negative light for surrounding themselves with men with large sexual organs.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: The Gallo-Roman poet Ausonius (4th century AD) makes a joke about a male threesome that depends on imagining the configurations of group sex:


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: "Three men in bed together: two are sinning, two are sinned against.""Doesn't that make four men?""You're mistaken: the man on either end is implicated once, but the one in the middle does double duty."


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: In other words, a 'train' is being alluded to: the first man penetrates the second, who in turn penetrates the third. The first two are "sinning", while the last two are being "sinned against".


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: References to sex between women are infrequent in the Roman literature of the Republic and early Principate. Ovid finds it "a desire known to no one, freakish, novel ... among all animals no female is seized by desire for female". During the Roman Imperial era, sources for same-sex relations among women, though still rare, are more abundant, in the form of love spells, medical writing, texts on astrology and the interpretation of dreams, and other sources. While graffiti written in Latin by men in Roman ruins commonly express desire for both males and females, graffiti imputed to women overwhelmingly express desire only for males, though one graffito from Pompeii may be an exception, and has been read by many scholars as depicting the desire of one woman for another:


title: Homosexuality 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: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Other readings, unrelated to female homosexual desire, are also possible. According to Roman studies scholar Craig Williams, the verses can also be read as, "a poetic soliloquy in which a woman ponders her own painful experiences with men and addresses herself in Catullan manner; the opening wish for an embrace and kisses express a backward-looking yearning for her man."


title: Homosexuality 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". An early reference to same-sex relations among women is found in the Roman-era Greek writer Lucian (2nd century CE): "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: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Since Romans thought a sex act required an active or dominant partner who was "phallic", male writers imagined that in female–female 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. Dildos are rarely mentioned in Roman sources, but were a popular comic item in Classical Greek literature and art. There is only one known depiction of a woman penetrating another woman in Roman art, whereas women using dildos is common in Greek vase painting.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Martial describes women acting sexually actively with other women 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: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Cross-dressing appears in Roman literature and art in various ways to mark the uncertainties and ambiguities of gender:


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: A section of the "Digest" by Ulpian categorizes Roman clothing on the basis of who may appropriately wear it: "vestimenta virilia", "men's clothing", is defined as the attire of the "paterfamilias", "head of household"; "puerilia" is clothing that serves no purpose other than to mark its wearer as a "child" or minor; "muliebria" are the garments that characterize a "materfamilias"; "communia", those that are "common", that is, worn by either sex; and "familiarica", clothing for the "familia", the subordinates in a household, including the staff and slaves. A man who wore women's clothes, Ulpian notes, would risk making himself the object of scorn. Female prostitutes were the only women in ancient Rome who wore the distinctively masculine toga. The wearing of the toga may signal that prostitutes were outside the normal social and legal category of "woman".


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: A fragment from the playwright Accius (170–86 BC) seems to refer to a father who secretly wore "virgin's finery". An instance of transvestism is noted in a legal case, in which "a certain senator accustomed to wear women's evening clothes" was disposing of the garments in his will. In the "mock trial" exercise presented by the elder Seneca, the young man ("adulescens") was gang-raped while wearing women's clothes in public, but his attire is explained as his acting on a dare by his friends, not as a choice based on gender identity or the pursuit of erotic pleasure.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Gender ambiguity was a characteristic of the priests of the goddess Cybele known as Galli, whose ritual attire included items of women's clothing. They are sometimes considered a transgender or transsexual priesthood, since they were required to be castrated in imitation of Attis. The complexities of gender identity in the religion of Cybele and the Attis myth are explored by Catullus in one of his longest poems, "Carmen" 63.


title: Homosexuality 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, the love goddess pulls up her garments to reveal her male genitalia, a gesture that traditionally held apotropaic or magical power.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: 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). Some commentators see hermaphroditism as a "violation of social boundaries, especially those as fundamental to daily life as male and female". The era also saw a historical account of a congenital eunuch.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: Attitudes toward same-sex behavior changed as Christianity became more prominent in the Empire. The modern perception of Roman sexual decadence can be traced to early Christian polemic. Apart from measures to protect the liberty of citizens, the prosecution of male–male sex as a general crime began in the 3rd century when male prostitution was banned by Philip the Arab. A series of laws regulating male–male sex were promulgated during the social crisis of the 3rd century, from the statutory rape of minors to marriage between males.


title: Homosexuality in ancient Rome

text: By the end of the 4th century, anally passive men under the Christian Empire were punished by burning. "Death by sword" was the punishment for a "man coupling like a woman" under the Theodosian Code. It is in the 6th century, under Justinian, that legal and moral discourse on male–male sex becomes distinctly Abrahamic: all male–male sex, passive or active, no matter who the partners, was declared contrary to nature and punishable by death. Male–male sex was pointed to as cause for God's wrath following a series of disasters around 542 and 559.


title: Edgar Winter

text: Edgar Holland Winter (born December 28, 1946) is an American musician. He is a multi-instrumentalist, playing keyboards, guitar, saxophone, and percussion, as well as singing. His success peaked in the 1970s with his band the Edgar Winter Group and their popular songs "Frankenstein" and "Free Ride". He is the brother of late blues singer and guitarist Johnny Winter.


title: Edgar Winter

text: Winter was born to John Winter II and Edwina Winter on December 28, 1946, in Beaumont, Texas. Both he and his older brother Johnny were born with albinism. By the time he left the family home, Winter had already mastered numerous instruments and reading and writing music.


title: Edgar Winter

text: Winter composed and performed songs of numerous genres, including rock, jazz, blues, and pop. His critically acclaimed 1970 debut release, "Entrance", was first to demonstrate his unique style of non-sequitir, genre-blending musicianship. His early recording of "Tobacco Road" propelled him into the national spotlight. Edgar followed "Entrance" with two hit albums backed by his group White Trash, a group originally composed of musicians from Texas and Louisiana. White Trash, with Winter and Jerry Lacroix both on lead vocals and sax, released the studio album "Edgar Winter's White Trash", in 1971. It reached #111 on the charts, and 1972's follow-up album (partially recorded at New York's Apollo Theater) "Roadwork" achieved gold status.