(a) The institution of slavery underlies all responses. Despite ethical pangs, Christians and Jews kept slaves, and indeed for the Rabbis slavery carried an extra stigma (Hezser 2002). Widespread poverty and the concomitant practice of the abandonment or sale of infants meant that for many people sex was not a choice but an obligation, forced sex being a primary element in the degradation of slavery (Joshel 1992: 30-1). Many of those enslaved would have come from peripheral cultures, whose (now unknown) sex/gender systems may well have differed from their captors’. And colonized cultures themselves also took slaves (cf. Hezser 2002 on the Jews’ circumcision of male captives).
(b) Sexual practices generally elicit evaluative reactions, both enthusiastically for and violently against. These often coexist, though there are definitely local differences in the mix. The same wording sometimes repeats over centuries, e. g. in condemnations of pederasty, but conflicts also persist.
(c) Urban Greeks and Romans during this period commonly constructed the sexual body as a set of plugs and sockets, receptacles for the phallus or tongue (so Hallett 1977; H. Parker 1997; Richlin 1981b, 1992a; Skinner 1979; Halperin 1990; a model rejected for classical Athens by Davidson 2001 and Hubbard 2003). Classes of individuals are then defined by their ‘‘activity,’’ their plugness or their socketness: they penetrate or are penetrated. But socketness is often felt to be intrinsically female, and vice versa, as in the younger Seneca’s description of women as pati natae, ‘‘born to undergo’’ (Ep. 95.21; On patior, see Richlin 1993: 531; Walters 1997b: 30-1). This view is in keeping with the understanding of the female body in this period (P. Clark 1998; Fredrick 1997; M. M. Levine 1995; Richlin 1984, 1995, 1997a, 1997d; Wyke 1994). ‘‘Socketness’’ in males is thus acceptable in adolescence, which is perceived as an epicene state, but not in adulthood. For some writers from other cultures this model seems to be alien and somewhat upsetting. It was perhaps the case that sexual subcultures flourished mainly in the metropoleis.
World History
