When 18th-century excavators dug up the city of Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, vivid pictures of sexual positions emerged one after another from the walls of small buildings facing the street. These were the brothels called lupanar, where a client pointed at the menu on the wall to choose his partner and position. In ancient Roman society, sex was not a private matter to be concealed but a public and economic activity woven into the flow lines of civic life.

Sexuality in ancient Rome (Japanese: 古代ローマの性文化; sexuality in ancient Rome) is the totality of the practices, institutions, and norms surrounding sex of Roman society as it unfolded across the Mediterranean world over the more than a thousand years from the legendary founding of Rome in 753 BCE to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. This article treats the public-prostitution system, slavery and sex, the culture of male love, marriage law, and the laws controlling adultery.

The public-prostitution system and the lupanar

The Roman public-prostitution system was already in place by the middle Republic (around the 3rd century BCE). Prostitutes had their names entered on the register of the aediles and, as registered prostitutes (meretrices), were objects of taxation. Once registered, a person was in practice never released from the status for life and was subject to restrictions on citizenship.

A brothel was called a lupanar (“she-wolf’s den”), and the standard form was a building of small lots facing the street, equipped with several small rooms (cellae). At Pompeii there were, as far as confirmed, about 25 lupanaria, indicating a high density for a city of around 10,000 people. Above the entrance of each small room or on the walls were hung small wall-paintings depicting sexual positions, and the price ranged from 2 asses (about the same as a loaf of bread) to a dozen or so asses.

Several strata coexisted: the streetwalkers (scortum), temple prostitutes, courtesans at banquets, and outdoor prostitution around cemeteries, baths, and theatres. The lowest stratum of streetwalker was called the “arch woman” (fornicaria, from standing under the arches of a bridge pier, the origin of the word fornication).

Slavery and sex

In understanding the sexual culture of ancient Rome, the existence of slavery cannot be left out. A Roman citizen held the right of sexual disposal over the body of an owned slave, and using a slave sexually was a legal and socially condoned act. Multiple combinations appear in the sources: a male master and a male slave, a female mistress and a male slave, a slave shared by a married couple.

There was, however, an ethical and social hierarchy. The structure in which the male citizen took the active role and the slave or lower person was placed in the passive role was held desirable, and the reverse was an object of derision. For a male citizen to take a passive role with another male citizen could become an object of punishment as an act damaging the partner’s citizenship and honour.

There are also many cases of a woman of slave origin becoming, after becoming a freedwoman (liberta), the mistress or wife of her former master. Not a small part of the women who have left their names in the sources, such as the mistress of the poet Horace and the concubines of the emperor Claudius, were of slave origin.

Male love and the ethic of “active/passive”

Male love in ancient Rome operated within a framework different from the modern concept of homosexuality. What mattered was not sex but the role of “active or passive,” and so long as the male citizen remained on the active side, the sex of the partner was not much regarded as a problem.

Literary works on the theme of male love are numerous: the love poems of the poet Catullus, the relationship of the emperor Hadrian and Antinous, the depiction of boy-love in Petronius’s Satyricon, among others citation needed. On the other hand, for a male citizen to take a passive role with an adult man was despised as “softness” (mollitia), and the Lex Scantinia of the 2nd century BCE made such acts an object of punishment.

Marriage and the adultery laws

In 18 BCE, the first emperor Augustus enacted the Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis (the Julian Law on the punishment of adultery), putting in place a system by which the state criminally prosecuted the adultery of married women. A convicted woman had half her property confiscated and was sentenced to exile on an island. The man too was an object of punishment, but relationships with unmarried women and registered prostitutes were exempt, giving the law a structure that preserved the sexual privilege of the male citizen.

The Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus (the Julian Law on the orders of marriage), enacted in the same period, encouraged male citizens to marry and raise children and imposed tax disadvantages on the unmarried and the childless. This series of marriage legislation became the core of Augustus’s political reform to correct the moral decay of the late Republic.

The penetration of Christianity and the turn of sexual norms

In the 4th century CE, after the emperor Constantine’s recognition of Christianity (313), Roman sexual culture was dramatically transformed. The Church Father Augustine’s City of God (completed 426) systematised a theology that tied sexual desire to original sin and positioned sexual acts for purposes other than procreation as sin. From then on, European society was placed under a thousand years of medieval Christian sexual norms.

The medieval and later development of the history of European sexual culture is understood with its starting point in this turn from ancient Rome to Christianity. The cheerful, open sex shown by the wall-paintings of Pompeii was long banished to oblivion and did not rise into the consciousness of Europeans until the 18th-century excavations.

See also

• Shunga
• Yoshiwara
• Taisho romance
• History of erotic books