Very Frequently Attested Cultural Issues

Pederasty: Attitudes towards sex between adult males and boys between the ages of 12 and 18 vary among cultures and over time, from highly positive even for citizens (many Greek urban cultures, including Egyptians within this milieu), to generally positive though not for citizen boys (Roman urban cultures), to regretfully negative (various asceticisms), to strongly negative (Philo, rabbinic Judaism, monasticism). Noteworthy is the virtual disappearance of pederastic love literature in the late 200s ce, with Nemesianus a lone voice - though Philostratus’ pederastic assembly line suggests a world of sophists churning it out in bulk. Pederasty remains a major cultural preoccupation to the end of our period and beyond, even if attested solely by diatribes.

Sex between adult males: All cultures of the empire express negative attitudes towards sex between adult males, with adulthood being considered to start around age 20. Writers who identify as outsiders to the metropoleis sometimes merge pederasty together with sex between adult males in their critiques, and critics often speak of sex between women and between men as comparable evils.

Sex for men with women and women with men outside marriage: Mediterranean cultures generally expect all citizens to marry, and girls might marry soon after puberty. All cultures define adultery as involving a married woman and a person not her husband. Sex outside marriage for husbands is often not considered intrinsically problematic, and indeed underpins many erotic texts. Sex for women outside marriage is considered bad, even for women for whom this constitutes their identity (prostitutes) or a major part of it (slaves), and women are obsessively claimed to be promiscuous. Having sex with women outside marriage is the third great cultural concern for male writers; for the few extant women writers sex outside marriage also looms large. Respectable women’s self-definition seems to have depended on sexual self-differentiation from slave women. (On Roman women and adultery see Richlin 1981a, 1992b; on Jewish women and the ceremony of Sotah, see Peskowitz 1997: 131-53; Satlow 1996. On slave women, see Richlin 1997a; P. Clark 1998. On the sexuality expressed by the elegist Sulpicia, see Keith 1997.)