Mapping the Sexuality of the Roman Empire

If we could map all the Kinsey II responses, we would expect to see marked differences between rural and urban attitudes. For certain practices we might also be able to draw isobars: circumcision would be located in Egypt-Ethiopia-Arabia - Palestine-Phoenicia-Syria; iconography featuring male genitalia is mostly Italian; eunuchs seem to have begun in Asia Minor. Gender-marked clothing varies from place to place, though Greek dress is already popular in Italy by the late republican period. Women were supposedly more secluded in the East, but see Philo (section 3(1) above, under 84 ce) on women who brawl in the marketplace in Alexandria.

The Romans were the only culture in the empire to deck the walls with rows of phalli (W. Parker 1988 and Richlin 1992a on the ithyphallic god Priapus; on representations in art, Clarke 1998; Johns 1982: 61-75). Festooned with phallic amulets, even trimming their horses’ tack with phalli, they must have seemed odd sexually to many of their neighbors; we do hear something about this from the Rabbis (Cf. Satlow 1997: 435, ‘‘There can be little doubt that the rabbis would have seen the statues of Hermes and Priapus as ridiculous’’). To be penetrated, for a Roman, was degrading both in a physical sense of invasion, rupture, and contamination, and in a class sense: the penetrated person’s body was likened to the body of a slave. This experience of the individual is understood also on the state level, as war is associated with rape, both literally in the rape of the women and boys of the defeated enemy (Richlin 1992a: 98; cf. 1993: 553) - the alleged cause of Boudicca’s rebellion - and figuratively, for example in the images of the emperor battering female embodiments of conquered peoples in the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias (Ferris 2000: 55-60); compare the Hebrew image of the rape of the daughter of Zion (Gordon and Washington 1995). Slavery would have introduced conquered peoples to the Roman sex/gender system at the lowest level. For those not enslaved, Roman occupation would have disrupted major centers of cultural production: for example, the destruction of the Temple meant that the ceremony of Sotah could no longer be carried out, nor did this stem from a Roman desire to liberate Jewish women (see Hill 1997 on conquest and the body; Ando, this volume on landscape).

Though Greek and Roman ethnographies cannot be taken as true, and though all ancient ethnographies assign sexual and gender weirdness to places they consider marginal, it seems possible that the Celtic and Germanic tribes were more gender-egalitarian than the Mediterranean cultures, which consistently emphasize the visibility of women in the northern cultures. But an epistemological paradox besets efforts to know about the hinterlands of the empire: we know them mainly postconquest.

When this companion to the Roman Empire is redone in fifty years, it is my hope that my successor will be surprised that I could have omitted the Persians and Armenians, the tribes of Africa, Asia Minor, and the Balkans, and the Iron Age peoples of western Europe; that the necessary evidence will be available; and that archaeologists will have figured out how to do an archaeology of sexuality. Then maybe there will really be an overview of sexuality in the Roman Empire; meanwhile, these fragments.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This chapter is written in fond memory of Jack Winkler, whose imagination, taste for the noncanonical, and penchant for thought experiments continue to inspire the study of sexuality in antiquity. to Clifford Ando, Mark Masterson, Sara Phang, Michael Satlow, Martha Vinson, Greg Woolf, and many friends in Jewish and Christian studies for their unfailingly generous help.

Translations throughout are my own unless otherwise stated. Some dates here are debated, for which see the cited bibliography.