Sexual Life In Ancient Rome

Otto Kiefer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136182051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

First published in 2001. The psychological basis of the Roman Empire was a ruthless, frequently sadistic 'will to power'. This impulse is highly manifest in Ancient Roman attitudes towards sex. After describing women's position in Roman society, Keifer skilfully surveys the crypto-sexual satisfaction derived by Romans from a range of activities.

Chapter Five

Love in Roman Poetry

IF it is true that the magic of love makes every man a poet, then poetry must be the truest and clearest reflection of a nation's love-life. Men choose the language of poetry to record both the noblest and the basest of sexual experiences. The sublimest utterances of passion – the sonnets of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare, Plato's mystical revelations of Eros – spring from the inmost souls of their creators no less than the coarse and sensual poems of the Priapeia. Our love and our sexual experience have their roots in the remotest depths of the hidden unconscious life of the soul, in darkness unexplored by the rational mind; and from these depths spring the most precious and delicate flowers as well as the vilest poison-weeds. As we know, the ruling principle of life, Schopenhauer's mysterious Will to Life, is nowhere revealed more truly and powerfully than in that sphere of life which we name love. So it is that poetry, the clearest mirror of love, is also the brightest revelation of the heart of a people.

Today, under the levelling influence of European civilization, it is often difficult to distinguish whether any particular poem is the work of a German, a Swede, or a Norwegian. But the most important ancient poetry is usually so strongly national (in the best sense of the word) that even without being a scholar one can easily tell whether any poem is Greek or Latin. For example, the comedies of Terence are written in Latin, but their spirit and their affinities are so thoroughly Greek that we cannot study Roman life in them. Yet the coarser comedies of Plautus, though their material is also borrowed from Greek comedy, contain much more of the true Roman spirit. But the springs of Roman poetry are clearest when their source is the personal experience of the poet – that is, in the work of Catullus, Tibullus, Pro-pertius, Horace, and occasionally in Ovid. Even although the formal element of such poetry is derived from Greek models, the content of it is more truly Roman than that of Terence's comedies. We are therefore restricted to certain poems of certain authors for our evidence in this chapter. Further restrictions are imposed by the scope of the book. It would be impossible to give an exhaustive account of Roman erotic poetry without writing an extensive work on that subject alone. For the whole of Roman poetry is impregnated with eroticism, from its first faltering essays to its end in the work of Ausonius. It is almost enough to distort the proportions of this book if we discuss a few of the leading poets with reference to sexual life; we shall purposely omit the many poets whose works are preserved only in scanty fragments known to scholars alone. Our purpose is not to write an exact survey of all Roman poetry; it is to see how the most important Roman poets treat the problem of love, which we have already seen in other spheres of Roman life.

We must first lay down one basic principle. The Romans were farmers and soldiers; their nature was prosaic and practical; and they had no natural inclination to create poetry for themselves, as the Greeks had.

We have already mentioned a little book on Roman Sexual Life by the brilliant scholar, H. Paldamus. He says in it, with much justice: ‘Every nation must pay for despising common humanity and natural feeling; and the Romans paid more dearly than any other nation. After they had subjected all their morality, all their feelings, and all their habits to the supreme power of the state, after the earlier moral code had become compulsory and legalized – then, when the constraint was at last removed, their passions (under the influence of Greeks and Asiatics) broke out with redoubled violence; and soon they reached a height which has been unequalled since the Roman Empire passed away.’

Paldamus differs from us on one point especially. We do not believe in this ‘earlier moral code’. As we have often said, the Roman is by nature a coarse sensualist; in a sense he is brutish and savage; nevertheless he is a sober and steady citizen, anxious to find the way to a reasonable and efficient communal life. Such a nation cannot produce poetry spontaneously, far less love-poetry: it will have no geniuses of the love-lyric, like Sappho, Ibycus, Anacreon, and Mimnermus. The Romans lack the spiritual equipment for the finer types of love. As Tacitus says, ‘they marry without love and love without respect or refinement’. And their love-poetry has the qualities we should expect: it is either imitation and almost translation of Greek models, or it reaches its best in the frank expression of sensuality. Perhaps the most truly original Roman work dealing with love is the sensual novel of Petronius (which survives only in a mutilated form); and next to it come the poems in which the poets speak of their own experiences, as did Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Horace, and to some extent Ovid also. Paldamus points out that much important Roman erotic poetry – especially that written before the time of Catullus – has been irretrievably lost. That is true, but we must not forget that the soil of the old Republic was unfit to bear the tenderest flowers of love-poetry.

Many passages from Plautus’ comedies show us what love was in the Republic of the second century B.C. They always paint the same picture – wild sensuality. A few quotations may be sufficient. We read in the Pseudolus (64):–

The constant love we share and wear so near,
our fun and games and talking lip to lip,
the closely strained embrace of our amorous bodies,
the gentle little bites on tender mouths,
the wanton pressure of tiptilted breasts –
ah, all these pleasures which you shared with me
are broken, wasted, ruined now for ever.

Elsewhere in the same play (1255), a banquet is thus described:–

Why talk in riddles? This
makes glad to be alive,
this has all pleasures, this has all life's treasures,
this is heaven itself.
When a lover holds his sweetheart, when he presses lip to lip,
when they catch and clasp each other, tongue with tongue,
when breast and breast are closely pressed, when bodies
interlace,
then the white-handed girl pours cups of nectar for her love.
There are no frowns or hateful faces,
unwelcome guests or idle talk –
perfumes and unguents, ribbons and fine garlands,
gaily given and generously.

As we have said, Plautus was more or less indebted to Greek models for all his material. It was inevitable that he should confuse Greek and Roman elements in his representation of manners and customs. In the Cistellaria (22) we may find a suitable example of this. The bawd is bewailing the lot of prostitutes as compared with that of married women :–

Right it is and proper
that women in our walk of life
should be good friends and allies.
Look at the blue-blooded ladies, wives in lofty families,
see how close they keep their friendship, how they back each
other up.
If we copy them and do the same, we have a hard life still.
They detest us! and they wish we needed all their help:
never to stand on our own feet,
always to need their backing,
humble suppliants.
Go to them! you'll soon prefer to leave them, for they flatter us
openly at least; in private, if they get the chance,
they pour cold water on us,
say we catch their husbands,
rival themselves in love.
They keep us down – we're freedwomen!

We have seen that it was impossible for the daughter of a patrician family to become a harlot without being stigmatized as dishonourable (infamis). It was different for the daughters of freedmen. The Roman matrons particularly hated these girls, suspecting (not without justification) that they were temptations to married men. Accordingly, the bawd says (Cistellaria, 78):–

It may be profitable for a lady
to love one man and spend her life with him.
A prostitute is like a prosperous city –
she can't get on without a lot of men.

A man's adventures were limited by the convention which Plautus elsewhere describes (Curculio, 35):–

No Stop sign here, no Notice To Trespassers.
If you've the cash, buy anything on sale.
The highway's free to all – walk where you like,
but don't make tracks through any walled preserve.
Don't touch a wife, a widow, or a virgin,
a youth, or a freeborn child – take all the rest!

Perhaps even these few quotations from Plautus are not altogether appropriate; for our purpose is, after all, to show the nature of Roman love-life, and not merely the treatment of erotic subjects in the Latin language. We shall therefore follow the example of Paldamus, and discuss Plautus no further. Anything said of Plautus is equally true of Terence, whose work was more refined but still more Greek in spirit. And with that let us leave the early dramatists.

Among the poets whose work survives, the first to treat of love is Lucretius. His work is a didactic poem which attempts to expound the doctrines of his master Epicurus. He refers incidentally to love – not of course in personal reminiscence like Catullus, but theoretically, like Schopenhauer in his chapters on sexual life. But all Lucretius’ work is in the language of poetry, so that we may quote some of it in this chapter. His epic begins with a glorification of Venus, however inappropriate that may be in the mouth of an atheist. These are his words (i, 1):–

Mother of Rome, delight of gods and men,
kind lady Venus, thou who dost inhabit
the sailing oceans and the fruitful earth
and all that is beneath the gliding stars –
since through thy power each race of living creatures
begets itself and enters the light of the sun –
thy coming calms the wind; the clouds of heaven
vanish before thee; and the manifold earth
puts forth sweet flowers, the level ocean smiles,
and heaven shines with a broad peaceful light.
When the first springtide lightens in the day
and western winds unlock the gates of birth,
then first the birds of the air acknowledge thee
and thy dominion over their desires.
Then herds of wild things gallop the happy fields,
swim rushing rivers; captured and enchanted
by swe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Translators’ Preface
• Introduction: The Ideals of Rome
• I. Woman in Roman Life
• II. The Romans and Cruelty
• III. Roman Religion and Philosophy in Relation to Sexual Life
• IV. Physical Life
• V. Love in Roman Poetry
• VI. Men and Women of the Imperial Age
• VII. The Fall of Rome and its Causes