My talk for PolyColumbus last month has now made it to YouTube! It is age restricted due to its sexual content. A transcript is underway. I will add a link for that to this post (and announce it in comments, so if you want, subscribe to comments below to be alerted when that happens). But you can read the bullets or a full transcript, and for those who want to study further, I have provided my bibliography. Note also that this event was co-sponsored by the Humanist Community of Central Ohio and PolyColumbus, and a talk on this subject might never have happened but for them.
The full title of the talk is “Sex and Sexism in Ancient Rome: Crossroads of Sexual Freedom & State Oppression,” and the official talk description is:
Richard Carrier, Ph.D. (ancient history, Columbia University) will discuss several aspects of open sexuality and the policing of sexuality in Ancient Rome, and their connection to the stark sexism and mild homophobia of this pre-Christian time. Sexism and homophobia in this era were less products of religion and more products of secular attitudes. Even in the face of state and social attempts to oppress sexual expression, the universality of fascinating human sexual choices still shined through.
Carrier will illustrate these points with intriguing and (at times) ribald stories about demonesses in the Talmud, priestesses with strap-ons, bisexual MMFs, and how many men the law said you had to sleep with to be legally qualified as a whore (with the attendant consequences). Yet many things, such as consensual, public, gender-equal non-monogamy, remained taboo. “When in Rome…” the saying goes, but what were the common features of what (or who) you could do while in Ancient Rome, without risking severe sanction?
Note: This talk will include explicit discussions of human sexuality and sexual thoughts and practices, given from a sex-positive, consent-focused, GLBT-inclusive perspective. Given the nature of the talk, we respectfully ask that you leave the kids at home.
The backstory is that PolyColumbus asked me to give a talk about polyamory in ancient Rome, and I said at first I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a thing back then, but I’d research the hell out of it for them. I knew a lot about ancient sexuality and marriage. I knew the Hollywood myth of ancient Rome as all orgies and free love was bollocks, that in fact it was a far more prudish and sexist time than now. But to deliver the truth in depth, I applied my Ph.D. research skills and learned a great deal more. And what I convey about my findings in this talk, summarizing and drawing on the published research of numerous ancient sexuality experts, is both illuminating and disturbing. It definitely puts our present time in perspective.
-:-
P.S. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to get into the sexuality festivals, like Lupercalia, in which naked boys run through town and spank young women with leather straps who want to be blessed with fertility, or the naked prostitute wrestling that attended Floralia, or the annual ‘days of the whore’, when in connection with Vinalia, a wine celebration, was also a day for honoring female hookers, followed by the Robigalia, a grain celebration, also linked to a day for honoring male hookers. And I only get to the demonesses in the Talmud in Q&A. Which was not recorded. Sorry.
Ehrman believes a man, Jesus Christ, lived back in the day, although he isn’t convinced the N.T. quotes a single word he says. Odd. Why then does he write, promote and increase his considerable wealth claiming he’s been misquoted?
Just as strange, he says he’s in general agreement with Metzger, convinced that the entirety of errors in the N.T. doesn’t alter its major themes.
“It would be a mistake… to assume that the only changes being made were by copyist with a personal stake in the wording of the text. In fact, most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology.”
Why then does he deny the virgin birth, the sacrificial death, the resurrection and the appearance of the holy spirit at Pentecost?
… ancient Rome … a far more prudish and sexist time than now.
The one moment of shock I had when reading (in English translation) Ovid’s Ars Amatoria came where the poet advises romantically-inclined young men to attend public games, as occasionally one might be so lucky as to glimpse a shapely ankle in the stadium. That kind of year-round wrapping up, considering local summers, signals possessive patriarchy at its most prudish.*
It might not have taken much – one widely-emulated empress, say – for Rome to have adopted, then mandated, veils for women and thus made them a traditional Christian value.
* Down the coast at Pompeii, of course, they celebrated the exact opposite of prudery – while still, I gather, seeing women as property. I tangentially have to wonder: did Christians ever claim Vesuvius as an instance of Godly Wrath™? If so, why didn’t it stick?
Sort of. It’s widely believed Revelation 18 is just such a commentary. But we have almost no writing from Christians until half a century later, and even then only a trickle for half a century more. By then it was a distant memory, of an event that had too trivial an effect on an Empire spanning three continents.
P.S. We know head scarves (hijab) were a common (but not universal) cultural expectation of women in the Middle East in Roman times (Paul argues for Christian women in Eastern churches to continue wearing hijab at least when at services).
Your characterization of Octavian’s victory and the establishment of the Principate as “the final triumph of the 1%” surprises me
(1) Would it really have been that much different if Antony had won at Actium? — I’d always thought he and Octavian were basically the last two billionaires left standing; that even in the alternate universe Antony would have had to do something similar (modulo the possibility he would have been less intelligent about it and gotten himself killed the way Julius Caesar did) and
(2) I’d always thought the Republic was designed from the very beginning as a means for the 1% to keep control; the main point of it originally was a way for the patrician families to share power and not kill themselves fighting over who’d be king with the Etruscans sitting right there waiting for them to fail. They may have created other assemblies as a way to let off steam but there never a time that the Senate didn’t hold all of the cards that mattered.
In the same way that Obama beating Romney was “different,” but also in many ways still a victory for the establishment. But of course that disparity was even starker than between Antony and Octavian. Like you say, they were both kind of the last two top billionaires; they also agreed on a lot more than Obama and Romney did. Antony was just the guy the “democrats” of that era backed; but yes, these were pretty elitist democrats by our standards. So it wasn’t exactly “the people’s man” in any Ridley Scott sense. But the people backing Antony expected him to preserve the Republic, not destroy it (Cicero certainly expected Antony to be sort of the best bet against the path of Caesar, although I think Cicero was aware the bet was dodgy—it was just all they had). Whether Antony would have actually done the same things Octavian did is a different question. Although I think your contrafactual as to his relative stupidity and fate is plausible.
You are also correct in your estimate of the political situation. Several civil wars had already been fought over the century before that resulted in conceding more power to the public, by extending the vote to all free male citizens of Italy. The structure of the democracy was intended to maintain the class system, but it was also done to ensure the public didn’t feel disenfranchised, because that caused bad things. Even the Athenian democracy did this (even there access to significant offices was limited explicitly to the rich). And, to be honest, so did the Founding Fathers, in a sense (the electoral college was a sneak circuit to disenfranchise “the mob” without their noticing; they were also aware that getting elected to anything required wealth in practice, so they didn’t have to signal that fact by making it required in law).
Sex and Sexism. How many topics is that and are they related?
Is that some sort of koan?