Following is a transcript of my Columbus talk earlier this year on Sex & Sexism in Ancient Rome (video and bibliography and backstory here). Much thanks to Jacob Aliet who did most of the work putting this together.

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TEXT: An event Co-Organized by Poly Columbus (Open hearts. Open minds.) and the Humanist Community of Central Ohio.

NEIL WEHNEMAN: Okay, so, like we said earlier my name is Neil Wehneman, the chairman of the board of directors, PolyColumbus, and I would love to introduce Doctor Richard Carrier.

So, Rick, has a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University. There are a lot of amateur historians on the internet; he is not one of them. [laughter]

He has written numerous books on philosophy, on the question of the historical Jesus, on numerous other questions that he can talk about and that he can bring to bear in this particular talk. But tonight, he is talking on: Sex and sexism in ancient Rome: the crossroads of sexual freedom and state oppression. And this is very consistent with the research he has done, and with his personal philosophy. His subject area of expertise is ancient Rome and that time period. And he is personally polyamorous. He is also a dedicated feminist and speaks often and writes often on those particular topics. And so, for this particular talk, he will be exploring what the sexual norms were in ancient Rome. In doing that, he will be doing it from a perspective that is GLBT inclusive, sex positive and consent focused, even if the ancient Romans were not. [laughter]

So, Rick! You wanna come on up and take it away! [applause]

RICHARD CARRIER: And boy, were they not! [laughter]

Um…yeah, we get to that horrible story later. But… [laughs] Okay. First, some preliminary stuff. Content warning: I am going to be talking about sex. A lot. Some very kinky stuff is going to come up. [laughter]. And…I am…you know, a blue-collar poor boy so I am going to be using some colloquial blue-collar language as it comes out, so just so you know in advance.

Another thing is that, I really had to cut a lot of stuff from this talk. Because there are many cool things I wanted to talk about but there is limited time. So I can’t talk about everything I wanted to. Including one of the things that was advertised, which is the demonesses in the Talmud. I am not going to get to that. I had to cut a whole Judaism-Christianity part of it. But if you are interested in the weird sexual fears and anxieties of Rabbis in the ancient world, you can ask me in Q & A. [laughter] I am also going to have to leave out some complications and nuances. I’ll give you the gist of stuff but there are a lot of other complicated additions and qualifications that one could say. But that would require, like, a whole course in ancient history and ancient sexual history. So, no, I am just going to give you the gist of it. So just so you are aware of that.

Now useful information. There is a Bibliography. I have composed a bibliography of all the works that I consulted. I also consulted a lot of primary sources as well. But, all the scholarship is there. There’s a lot of really good scholarship on homosexuality in the ancient world, sexuality in the ancient world, and so on. If you want that, it’s at my website. You can go there and download that. And on that is including these three books that I have right next to me here, which would probably be classified as pornography. [laughter] Lots of photographs, some of the images I’ll be talking about in my talk. And I’ll allow people to flip through these and look through them after the talk if you want.

Okay. So, also, I am selling my book. I am an independent scholar. I do not have a professorship anywhere. I like it that way, but it does mean I live kind of like a starving artist, so I am dependent on book sales and things like that. So if you want to support me, you want to check out my work on other subjects, Amanda back there at the table is selling my books. And On the Historicity of Jesus primarily is the book I have with me. It’s the latest book that I came out with. So check it out. Buy my book. I’d appreciate it. It would help. And I’d be happy to sign them as well or anything else you want later on.

Okay. So that’s the preliminaries. Now to the backstory. Why am I here? How did this even come up? Neil Wehneman actually asked me, “Could you do a talk on polyamory in ancient Rome?” My first reaction was, I don’t think they had that. [laughter] But I’ll check. And so, I researched the hell out of the subject. I was at first a little worried at the way the moral regime worked in ancient Rome and that it kind of prevented that from happening. But I ended up finding some tantalizing evidence that it probably did. But we’ll get to that. That’s the exciting conclusion of this talk. Nonetheless, that’s where it started.

I have to point out that when I talk about polyamory I am contrasting that with merely being openly non-monogamous. There were of course openly non-monogamous relationships in ancient Rome, but they weren’t entirely consensual all the time. So when I am talking about polyamory, I mean consensual, and accepting, public, gender-equal, non-monogamy. That’s a tall order. Did that exist in ancient Rome? It might have done. We’ll get to that but, the evidence is tough. It’s very difficult to find it.

What I found in fact is complicated by ancient sexism. And I am going to explain why. But also ancient prudery and sex policing. A lot of people assume that Romans were total hedonists and had orgies all the time. That’s actually a nineteen-sixties Christian sort of myth that came out in Hollywood. And it is bogus. Actually, the Romans were very open about sexuality in some respects, but also very closed and prudish in other respects. In some awful ways as well as we’ll get to.

Okay. So, it’s going to be important to understand what I am talking about., what I mean by sexism in this context. Now, sexism can mean lots of different things, certainly, today. But for this talk I want to focus on one of its aspects, which is, the belief that men must be dominant and in charge and that women must be subservient and exist for the needs and pleasure of men. That’s sort of the fundamental idea of sexism, because that is a fundamental secular ideological assumption in ancient Rome. It did not come from the Bible, it did not come from religion: it was a secular ideological idea that was pervasive in their culture. That’s the way things were.

Now, also, when I talk about this, understand sexism is not just choices people make, to speak or behave, the way they talk or act, but also in how they judge. So for an obvious example, if you think less of a man because he does something coded female, that’s sexist. If you look down on, or make fun of a woman doing something coded male, that’s also sexist. The Romans did a lot of these things; both of those things. And it’s relevant to how they policed sexuality.

I will give you an example of how this makes sense. I am going to explain one of the most fundamental things you have to know about ancient Roman sexuality which is, by some scholars, called the penetration/masculinity paradigm. Basically, if you are penetrating, that was awesome; if you are being penetrated, that was terrible. And it was coded male or female in that respect. So, for example, they didn’t have any big deal about gay sex, it was totally fine, it was public, common everywhere. They didn’t have an issue with it, as long as you were a top. [laughter] If you were a bottom, you were emasculating yourself; you were taking the role of a woman, and that would be a loss of dignity, and you were basically treated like a woman; you were basically demoted from male status in that regard.

And that’s the way the sexism played out. So it wasn’t homophobia in the sense that “we are against gays”; it was homophobia in the sense that “we are against men acting the role of women,” and so it really was fundamentally sexist rather than homophobic. And even certain things like cunnilingus—we have a lot of examples to actually come to this conclusion—they also regarded cunnilingus, if a man is performing that on a woman, he is taking the passive role even though technically, you are kind of penetrating with your tongue. Nonetheless, it was coded as being subservient to the female, therefore you are taking a woman’s role and therefore that was emasculating. And so you would never boast of performing cunnilingus, even though you’d probably do it all the time. [laughter]

So this is the way they structured their idea of sexuality. It was all about who is penetrating who, and who is on top, and who is on bottom, and that was completely lined up with their sexist model of masculinity versus femininity.

Also, of course, men were in charge. Right? So men pretty much had total sexual freedom. They could fuck anybody they wanted. Almost. Now, I’m gonna get to some examples of who they couldn’t. But it was a very narrow field who they couldn’t. They pretty much could fuck anybody. Women, no. Women were very tightly controlled, especially women among the elite. You pretty much could only fuck your husband or equivalent, and you had to be monogamous; one guy, one at a time, and it had to be, like, official in some capacity. And that’s the only guy you could have sex with. And I am going to get to lesbianism later, don’t worry. But the idea was, that that was it, your sexuality was very strongly policed if you were a woman, and I’ll talk about why that was.

Now, this had a lot to do with the image of men as dominant. That was crucial to their masculinity, and this gets to lesbianism—I might give another example later—but for example, if a man’s wife was caught having sex with another woman, that would be embarrassing and emasculating to him, and therefore it was classified as a sex crime. Because it was a crime against his dignity. That’s an example of how the Roman sexist legal system operated. But also they were—so there was that aspect of men having this image of being in charge and on top and in control of their woman; that was essential. But also wombs were property.

It was very essential that you control the womb, so you could control your ancestry. And so it was all about, since wombs just happened to be attached to women, you had to control women. And so a lot of the adultery laws that we are going to be talking about shortly are very much based on this idea that you have to control access to that womb and in fact the word adultery is—it comes from—adulterate, meaning adulterating the womb. In other words, spoiling it with someone else’s stuff, essentially. And that’s essential, because it wasn’t just individual men that were concerned about controlling their particular wives’ wombs, for example. But also the father of a woman was very concerned about his control of his progeny. So he was very concerned about it, if the woman was his daughter. He was very keen on controlling access to it.

But also society in general was very concerned about this. Because there was racial anxiety over the dominance of the Italian race in ancient Rome. They were very concerned that the Roman empire was so big and, “oh holy crap, these non-Italians outnumber us,” and the Romans were getting very successful and economically wealthy, and so forth. And what happens when you have a society that is very economically wealthy, well they say, “fuck kids,” and they stop having them. Because they don’t need them. Kids are a bother. And why bother, when you are like rich, and you have tons of cash and you can live it up? And they were very keenly aware of this. And they were very keenly aware that this means well, “God, Italians are going to disappear, and we can’t have that!” So they passed a lot of laws eventually to really force people to have sex—to force Italians, sorry—to have sex and have a lot of good Italian racial babies, so that they can maintain the strength of the empire, and so on.

So there was a social interest in controlling the wombs of women as well. Okay, and then of course there was the elite, the aristocracy, they are very keen on controlling their bloodlines. You don’t want to pollute it with these poor rabble of bloodlines as well. So there are all of these factors that are factoring into how they were and why they were policing sexuality.

There was another aspect to this, too, which was worrying about normalizing things like a man being a bottom. That was a concern to them because—and it was happening too—because there were people who were, like, sort of saying, “let’s flout these laws; let’s do whatever things we want to do.” But certain conservative members of society were saying, “Well, that is bad, because if men all start acting like women, this disease of femininity will spread through the Italian race and then we will be conquered by our enemies!” So there is the very idea that we have to maintain our masculinity, to maintain our dominance over the empire, and this ties all the way back to who is buggering whom and how and somehow all that ties in, and that you have to control it. So, that. That’s the basic idea of what is going on here.

Now, there were women who were allowed the same sexual freedom as men. However, for that privilege—I guess we can call it that—they were ranked the same as whores, which is literally the bottom-most class of the social system. And I am going to talk about them, because they are an important part of the story. Because if you are going to have polyamory, you have to have sexual freedom for women, so these women who got pushed to the bottom of society and yet were given legal sexual freedom, are significant. And like I said, it is literally, this is literally, not just socially—it was codified in law, and there was a very strict caste system, or rather, a class system. It wasn’t a caste system like in India; there was some fluidity. But there was a social stratification based partly on income but largely based on blood and other factors, so that where you were in a social system related to what rights you had and what privileges you have.

This is kind of alien to us today, because we don’t really have that idea. We have the idea of the rich get privileges and benefits and the poor not—but back then it was much more legally codified as being the upper class, the middle class, the lower class, and even lower lower classes. And none of this is based on religion. Like I said, this is all entirely a secular ideology that is running this. Another thing to understand is the honor-shame concept of this. Ancient Rome was an honour-shame society. Anthropologists, sociologists will talk about these concepts, where honor is extremely important, shame is extremely bad. We care less about that today. But it was—and not entirely disregarded today—but back then it was extremely important. And that’s an issue that comes to bear as we talk about these different things.

Alright, now that’s the basic background you have to know. The key thing—because I am going to be talking about ancient Rome as meaning the imperial period. The transition from a republic to the empire, just like in Star Wars [laughter], went from a sort of a pseudo-democracy to an even more blatantly pseudo-democracy. More clearly based on a fascistic system of an emperor pretending there is a great democracy but really he controls everything. When there was that transition, there were a lot of social fears of the lower social classes rebelling. Because they fought a lot of civil wars and stuff based on class—literal class warfare. The Republicans talk about class warfare, but they are not talking about actual people stabbing people and, like, raising armies and fighting. The Romans were dealing with class warfare in a real sense.

Now, to shut that down, the empire was started, and this actually began roughly, well, 31 B.C. is the official beginning of the Roman Empire, because (in reality) that was when the forces for “the ninety seven percent” were defeated by the three percent, and you had the empire begin. Now when that happened, shortly after that, things that used to be just socially enforced—so for example the father of a woman could, was just allowed, to do certain things to her to punish her for behaving sexually in a wrong way, and it was sort of understood. It wasn’t enforced by the state. The state stayed out of it. And it was all just kind of a private thing. Which of course, you know, if you have a liberal father, he lets you do stuff. And well, once the empire was trying to really enforce morals, you can’t have that, so they took these social customs, these assumptions about just the way families were and behaved, and the way families were starting not to behave anymore, and made them law, and made the state responsible for enforcing them, and actually passed laws that made it possible for third parties to prosecute you for a crime, so anybody who caught you engaging in adultery, even if they weren’t your husband, even if they weren’t related to you, they could prosecute you. So they were actually creating a system, kind of like a McCarthyist system, to control your sexuality in this respect. And that happened before the turn of the era.

And then there is one general category of sex crime, the actual word was stuprum, which actually means “sex crime,” they actually made sex crimes illegal. Adultery as a sub-category of stuprum, as a sub-category of sex crimes, but the broader category included being a bottom, included lesbianism, and sex in public, but the worst one of all was adultery. Now, adultery does not just mean having sex with someone when you are married or having sex with someone who is married; it meant those things. But in fact, having sex with any woman who is not your wife was classified as adultery. So any woman who had not yet been married, or a widow, doesn’t matter. If she is not married and you are not married to her, that’s adultery. And they made it illegal.

This sex included non-married—and it also included non-vaginal sex by the way. You might think, “Well, we are not adulterating the woman if you are doing it in her in the mouth, right?” So… No no no. It was still classified as stuprum if you were doing that, and partly because it was still a suspicion of adulteration of the womb, because if you were doing those things, who knows what else you got up to. But also it comes back to the idea that you are emasculating your husband. If someone caught your wife blowing some dude, that emasculates your husband—it’s an attack to his dignity, and therefore it’s a crime. And so they actually made it literally illegal to do that.

Now, that was the system that was going on, but it was largely—no, in fact, it was only defined for citizens of Rome. A lot of people in the Roman empire were not actually citizens of Rome. The largest contingent of people who were not citizens of Rome were slaves. I will get to slavery later. Because it’s pretty awful. But, exempt from all sex crimes, exempt from everything I just said—these laws they passed to prevent you from being a bottom, to prevent you from lesbian sex, to prevent you from adultery, all of that stuff—did not apply to non-citizens. So foreigners and aliens, they were free to do whatever they wanted; and did not apply to slaves, obviously which ultimately was to the negative of slaves, because you could do whatever you wanted to slaves. But it also covered women and men registered with the state as whores.

Literally. There was a state register where you said “I am declaring myself as a whore” and they write you down and you are in there, and now you are actually legally exempt from all sex crime laws. So you can do anything you want. Also pimps were classified in this category. Actors and actresses were automatically [laughter] classified in this category [laughter]. Gladiators and their trainers were classified this way. And interestingly, women owning a shop [laughter]. So, that will become relevant later, so that’s foreshadowing. Women owning a shop were free of all sex crime laws. Interestingly, even if they were not themselves prostitutes.

These groups were automatically assigned the lowest social rank in society. They actually lost most privileges of citizenship, including some rights. Now, the penalty for sex crimes, the penalty for stuprum, varied. It could be a fine. It could be clubbing, depending on your status. But it always left an official mark of infamia. You were infamous. And that means literally—that would be written in the law, into the records of the state: you are infamous. And that meant stuff. It meant you lost a lot of privileges and rights as a citizen. Now the lowest ranked persons I just mentioned were automatically marked with infamia just by virtue of doing those professions.

Now, there were certain things that happened as a result of that. You were subject to corporal punishment. Normally Roman citizens were completely immune to corporal punishment. You could fine them, you could kill them, under certain circumstances if you were tried and convicted, but you couldn’t just beat them up as a punishment for a crime. But if you were marked with infamia they could beat you up for a crime if they wanted to. You were less valued as witnesses in court. You couldn’t represent others in court. And you lost any upper class status and privileges that you may have had before. For example, you couldn’t be disgraced or defamed. So, with defamation laws, you were out of luck. People could defame you all they wanted and you couldn’t really defend yourself. Only people of upper class status had the right to defend themselves in court against defamation.

Now, adultery was the worst form of sex crime. It added a variety of other penalties. One was, half of your wealth. Of course that would be irrelevant to a poor person, but this was very serious to the rich. It also included temporary exile to an island. And it was specifically written into the law that the guy that you are committing adultery with has to be on a different island. [laughter] The worst thing was, if you were a woman and you were caught in adultery and convicted, you were automatically registered as a whore. You were immediately on the registry as a prostitute. You were banned from marrying citizens. You could never marry again. There was a sort of sub-version of marriage that you could participate in but you could never be fully married to someone. It entailed the total loss of social rank and privileges. And so on.

Now, I have to say, that sounds pretty bad. But, the death penalty for adultery was introduced by Christians in the fourth century, so perspective is in order.

Now, some interesting things about this. When you were registered as a whore, whether you did it on purpose or were registered by somebody else because they were in control of you or whether you were caught and convicted of adultery, you were required to dress in public as a low-ranked man. You had to wear the toga. Now, when I say that you had to wear the toga in public, everybody assumes in the movies that it’s this big bulky long white thing. That was actually restricted to certain upper class men. Men of particular status. Or citizen men in general were allowed to wear the white toga. Everybody else could not wear that toga. They had to wear a dark toga. So usually it would be, like, a black or other colored toga. Something not too gaudy. And it could be of a lighter cloth. It didn’t have to be this big bulky, annoying thing. But the point is, women were required to dress as men. They were required to wear the toga. Normally women were not allowed to wear the toga. So in fact if you were classified as a whore, you got to dress as a man, and at the same time you had to dress as a man. So, these two different things. But adulteresses were also required to do this. And there are a variety of reasons why that was. And unfortunately I can’t go to that. But it’s a significant example that it was considered a form of social shaming that you were required to do this. Unless, of course, you were game for having sex with anybody you wanted. Then it was a perfect advertisement that you were available and [laughter] therefore legal, in legal trade for sex.

Now, it’s worse, because if a man—if you were a husband and you caught your wife having adultery and you say “Oh, this is great, let’s have a three way!” [laughter] It was bad because if people knew that happened, you could be prosecuted, her husband, as a pimp. So in fact someone could prosecute you for not prosecuting your wife for committing adultery. This is how strict and bizarre and controlling the legal system was. Also, anyone helping a couple commit adultery was prosecuted as an accomplice to the crime.

So there’s a lot of this sex policing going on.

But notice though, again, for these exempted groups, though they suffer the lowest ranks and the fewest rights, they were sexually free. They were completely free of all sex crime laws. So that means many women and men had total sexual freedom under this system. They were simply treated unjustly as second class citizens—or they were already slaves. Again I will get to that issue later. And this is where it sounds like a really dumb and patriarchal, controlling society. And it was. And yet women could easily divorce. It was so easy to divorce that all you had to do was leave the house and send a letter back saying we are divorced [laughter]. That’s how easy a woman could divorce someone. Now, you might think, “Well, that means serial monogamy is available!” And it was. Technically couldn’t you just marry and divorce each of your lovers every day? And this, really, was gaming the system [laughter] and they anticipated this [laughter]. First they actually started requiring marriage to be “sincere.” There was a juridical standard for this in the same way we police green card marriages today, right? So they had the idea that you have to have proof that it’s a sincere marriage so you can’t game the system. Also, they set an upper limit on the number of lovers a woman can have before she is automatically classed as a whore [laughter]. There were conservative justices and liberal justices, who disagreed on what the number would be.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What was it?

RICHARD CARRIER: The liberal said forty [laughter]…oh, no that’s not right. That was the conservatives [laughter]. They said forty. The liberals said sixty [laughter]—alright, you give em twenty more [laughter]. I have to say that that’s more generous than actor Jeremy Renner who said that it was four, so… (for those who know that story).

Anyway, so the law, what we learn here is, that the law gave men near total sexual freedom. The only thing they couldn’t have sex with was [upstanding] citizen women, essentially. Certainly other men’s wives, but even women who hadn’t been married yet or had been married and were divorced or widowed. You had to stay away from them or you had to marry them. Those were your only choices.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Animals?

RICHARD CARRIER: [laughs] There were no crimes as far as I know against that unless it was classified as stuprum, it’s an interesting question, but we don’t have clear evidence on what the law was on that. But, I will get to an example of that later. (Fictionally though, however.) As long as you stayed away from, certainly high status women or citizen women, except your wife, you could do whatever you wanted as long as you, as a man, didn’t take it in the butt or the mouth: that was a sex crime.

And yet at the same time, it completely forbade women from having sex with basically anyone except their husband. And yet, the lowest class of men and women were totally free. Alight, so that is the regime we are talking about.

Now, we are going to go slightly toward the positive angle with this because the Romans were actually very open about sexuality. They weren’t prudes in the sense that they hated it. Right? They were in many ways more open about sexuality than we are today. For example, penises were everywhere [laughter] in ancient Rome. There were herms, which were statues, basically these blocks of stone with literally very hyper-realistic penises sticking out of them, all over various cities in Greece and Rome, and other towns like that, because they were considered, actually, good luck charms, in a sense, for the community [laughter]. There were winged phallus charms. You could be eating at a sandwich shop in Rome and there could be these penis chimes, dangling around you making sounds [laughter], because that was good luck. They really thought that was good luck. If you went to the apothecary, if you needed some drugs or something like that, their sign might actually have a dwarf with a gigantic throbbing hard erection—completely naked, completely realistically depicted. That was a sign, and you said “Oh, virility, power, potency… apothecary of course!” [laughter]

So, that. That was going on. Now, sex in public was disgraceful. In fact, that was a sex crime. You couldn’t just fuck somebody in public. That was, like, “Oh, okay, come on.” But paintings of sex in public were not a crime. In fact, they were everywhere. In fact, no sex act was forbidden to be publicly displayed in art. And that includes, that means that, gay and straight sex, almost in equal proportions, were on tableware; you went to a party, they would just be on your cup, your plate, whatever. It’d be on a home’s walls, when you go visit somebody, and it would be right there in the living room. There’d be this sex scene, right on the wall. “Uh, okay.” Right on the wall of the home. Street signs, statues. There is an example from Pompeii, we found a stone, a really realistic stone statue of Pan fucking a goat. Really hyper-realistic and accurate depiction of the god Pan having sex with a goat. And it’s clear that this was actually in a garden. Someone just had this, they were proud of it, they displayed it publicly when people showed up at their house. “Look at this, isn’t this great?”

So this stuff was everywhere. Now, amongst the pictures that we have, one of the most famous examples are the paintings at the Roman Baths in Pompeii. Now, the baths were frequented by both men and women, possibly at different times of the day, but they would be frequenting the same rooms, and therefore seeing the same scenes of sex depicted. So they weren’t shy about letting women see sex. Now, these scenes were of basically every conceivable—basically every porn scene you’ve ever seen in life is depicted in some form. Including bisexual MMF threeways—a guy is fucking a guy while he is fucking a girl while she is in a prone position, for example. We have an example of a picture of a fully bisexual four-way, where there is a guy fucking a guy, being blown by a girl who is being eaten out by another girl.

Now, these kinds of pictures, we see a lot of these things, they are extremely realistically depicted. In fact, so much so, that—there are things, I have looked at them, and you go, “You know, there is no way they would know of the actual biokinetics of that physical sexual position if they had not seen it.” [laughter] So this isn’t…they are not just making this up in their head. This looks like stuff they have seen and are depicting. In addition to all these pictures of different sexual configurations, cunnilingus was depicted in the baths, too, as well. A woman fucking another woman with a strap on is depicted. There are all of these things. The use and display of dildos and strap-ons in fact was an open industry. They were usually made of red leather, we know. It was a booming industry, women could go to market and procure them. There is so much evidence, in fact, of women pegging men—and each other—but of women pegging men as well, and it was clearly popular. This was a thing that Romans were doing a lot. And it is kind of interesting to note as to whether anyone was prosecuted for a sex crime for receiving that. Technically you should have been. But we don’t have any cases on record. That’s an evidence issue. But people would do it in private, I guess.

A lot of people have talked about the Pompeii bath house paintings as being humorous—the idea of trying to present them as, these sex acts, as the crazy things that no one would do. But I think it’s very obvious to me that the joke is that people actually do those things. I think that’s the humor going on there. But yeah, they depicted everything. Cunnilingus, blow jobs, double and triple penetration are depicted in these things. All positions you can think of. All different configurations of group sex are in paintings all over Pompeii, but especially in the baths, that you know. They were regarded as laughably disgusting. We know, we have, some literary discussions of these kinds of pictures, but we also know we have lots of literary evidence of people, it was well known that people did them.

And also anal sex was also very popular. Largely because of the birth control aspects of it. We have an example of a tavern in Pompeii, there was a vestibule there for a shift worker, to work the tavern. Above the bed where she would do her work was a painting of a man having anal sex with her. Written in Latin above that was the command, “put it in slowly” [laughter].

Now, evidence in art and literature of group sex is important because this the first step we are getting toward something like evidence for polyamory. Not quite. But it’s…we are getting there. We are heading in that direction now, because it’s at least, open, multi-partner sex that we can confirm. Now, though most of these things would involve prostitutes—so if you are doing group sex, usually you are hiring someone to do it for you. But there is some evidence of free persons, men and women, participating in it, because it was fun. They liked it. Even though it would technically be illegal for citizens.

Okay. So that’s sort of the positive angle of it. They were doing everything you could think of. It was going on, even when it was illegal.

But there is another darker, shadier side to this, which is the problem of consent. Key to the definition of polyamory is “consensual,” right? That makes it really hard for a historian like me to find polyamory in antiquity because it’s really hard to find a consensual sexual relationship in ancient Rome. Even allowing for degrees of consent. Right? Even if you make it a gray area of consent, rather than an absolute yes or no. Even allowing for that, most sex in antiquity was not consensual.

There were three problems in descending worseness, especially for women and teenage boys. Now I will get to this more a little bit later. But…

First of all, even free women and men could find themselves in situations where you don’t really get the opportunity to give your consent. For example, you effectively—the laws confined you in some respects—it’s like you were almost forced to marry. There were laws that would actually penalize you if you didn’t get married. So you had to marry. Your father had a lot of say in who you got to marry. Often unlimited say in who you got to marry. And you had to fuck them. There was no such thing as marital rape. So even what looks like consensual free choice to marry someone, that’s still a gray area as to how much consent is actually going on there. And it can be difficult for us at this distance of 2000 years to determine which marriages were actually consensual and which not, because of the situation.

Lower class parents could also pimp their free born kids. They could basically set them up as prostitutes. “Technically” they are free. They can do what they want. But you can kind of understand that it would be very unlikely that they would actually be able to consent to this arrangement. So there are a lot of ways, even when you were a free person and a citizen of Rome, if your parents could just register you as a prostitute and start pimping you out, you might not have had consented to that. So there’s a lot of these kinds of gray areas where we don’t know who is consenting to what.

There is the example of young men, especially teenage boys, who need to accept well-placed lovers for advancement. Basically, you would pick a lover who is rich and successful and let him fuck you and then he would advance you in society. So commonly, in fact, that this was just understood to be a way to advance yourself up the social ladder. How consenting can that be? There are these questions there as well.

And there is the classic case of women who turned to prostitution because they have no other options, how much is that consensual?

But all of these—so there’s these issues of free, even free people—you can’t necessarily tell who is consenting to what. But we do know at the same time that you could go and pick up willing girls at festivals and have sex with them. So there were women out there flouting the law, having sex in back corners, because they wanted to. So we know that there was consensual sex occurring. But it’s very difficult to tell who is doing it when, or what.

Now, okay, so, that—you think that is pretty bad. It’s getting worse.

So here is the second worst thing. Next level of hell. The age of consent was twelve.

Although it appears that most sexual activity started at fourteen, nevertheless it was legal to start fucking someone at twelve. Women, in fact, typically got married at the age of fourteen or not far from it. But it wasn’t a sex crime unless they were under twelve. So at least they classified under twelve as a sex crime. Even having sex with a slave under that age was a sex crime. And, I mean, you could grant that teen boys and girls were granted more autonomy then than now, they were treated almost as adults, or half as adults, most of the time. But nonetheless no one—we have no evidence of anyone anguishing over the mental competence of teenagers to consent to sexual relationships. And slaves of course had no choice. And in fact this idea of having sex with teenagers was so normalized that it was—it had to be just a thing that boys and girls had to develop the skills to cope with. It was just a normal status of the way of how the society worked. And many maybe pursued their sexual autonomy at that young age. But still, this raises serious questions as to which relationships are being started under consenting terms.

Okay. That’s bad. Here is the next level of hell.

Slavery. Sex trafficking and sex slavery were normal and ubiquitous. In fact, they were a fundamental part of the economy and social system. We think sex trafficking and sex slavery are pretty awful. Imagine it being just a normal and ubiquitous part of your society. It’s kinda scary. Slave brothels came in two different kinds you could compare. By the time of Rome you could often have full time sex shops where all they did was serve customers all day long. And I am not sure if that’s worse or better than the model that you often see earlier in history, and also probably still going on later—even in Pompeii we have examples of these going on—which are called ergasteria which means workshops where women basically weaved cloth when there were no customers to service, but if a customer showed up, they’d say, “Okay, get off the loom, you’ve gotta service this guy.” So you had to work, you know, crazy hours in a sweat shop while being pimped out as a sex slave. This is pretty horrible.

But anyway, so that’s going on, and this is totally legal, and the law kind of pushed people there, right? So if you couldn’t have sex with your equals—you couldn’t have sex with citizen women unless you married them—where else are you going to go to get off? You are going to go to the brothels. So there’s going to be a lot of nonconsensual sex going on. So when you see depictions of prostitutes engaging in things like group sex and stuff, you have to, like, seriously consider, is that a consensual relationship? Where does it fall on the spectrum of consensual relationships? We don’t know.

Also, using and gifting private slaves for sex was completely normal. In fact, it was so normal, that the common advice for men who wanted to commit adultery, like they would say “Don’t commit adultery, don’t cheat on your wife; just fuck your slaves, it’s totally okay!” Like that’s a safe outlet for your sexual urges. That’s an absurd and terrifying concept today, but that was so normalized at the time. So, that’s awful as well. And men frequently did that, both slave boys and slave girls would be used as sex toys, legally. And there is also evidence of women of the house doing that as well. And that would be illegal, but there is evidence of women using slave boys or even slave girls as lovers at the same time.

Now, the slaves of antiquity were slightly better off than in America; they had some rights, they had even a limited right to marriage—they had a kind of, not full marriage, but something similar to it. And slaves could autonomously have sex with each other. That was one thing you could do, we have evidence of individual slaves choosing, voluntarily, lovers within their own class. And there is evidence of lifelong loving relationships between slave and master, including between women and female slaves. So, a woman basically having as a regular lover, a female slave. And triads, both male-male-female and two women and one man. But we can’t know how consensual these were; the lines were so blurred. Even if they had been living together happily supposedly for their whole life. It’s still a master-slave relationship.

Now, the really disturbing thing, and problematic thing, about this is if you wanted a polyamorous relationship, you almost had to do this. This is because it was legal to have sex with your slaves. But you couldn’t have sort of a proper polyamorous relationship amongst equals. You kind of had to have slave lovers in a sense, because then it was legal to have a triad, for example. So that blurs the issue of who is consenting to what. How is the system being gamed? We don’t know. We don’t have a lot of discussion of this in the sources, beyond just a little.

Now, when all three violations of consent are considered—pressured sex among the free, underage sex, and sex slavery—even the best fantasy possibility is still 99% horrible. That makes things difficult. But, if we are going to look for polyamory in antiquity, prostitution is still the place to start.

Prostitution was legal, it was just stigmatized. But not all prostitutes were slaves. Many free women did it. They registered as citizen prostitutes. Normal prostitutes, the only source for legal consensual lovers, all people who were infamis, all people that had infamia that I mentioned earlier, were available as girlfriends or boyfriends. All aliens, foreigners, were available as such. Because they were exempt from all sex crime laws, which, now, if you were a person who was exempt from all sex crimes laws, you also—that meant that you had the opportunity for sexual freedoms that other people did not have. And the best off in this category, especially of prostitutes, were women with the means to become educated and market themselves as an upper class courtesan. Now, I use the word courtesan to distinguish them from the common variety of prostitutes that were available at the time because this kind of woman could put herself in a class apart, even though technically she was of the same bottom class as other prostitutes.

There is evidence that these educated high class courtesans had a lot of choice and autonomy and power in their lives. We know that’s a fact. They were constrained by vulnerability and the need to secure a living, of course. They were pursued by wealthy men hopefully who didn’t beat them. That was like the ideal. Whether the men were married or not did not socially or legally really matter. But also whether we are talking about street workers, brothel workers, or courtesans, remember, I have to point out, men and boys were also in these roles. Because gay sex was legal in that sense, a lot of prostitutes were men. Gay sex was normal, accepted, and common in that regard. And the law, because you couldn’t be a bottom if you were a citizen, that created a demand for legal bottoms. Right? So there was a big demand for male prostitutes who could bottom for people.

We also have evidence of women as customers for prostitutes, for both male and female hookers. Most commonly, I assume these would be women exempt from sex laws, like actors and actresses, or whatever the case may be. Adulteresses? Who knows? Aliens. Etc. Since for other women it was illegal, so there was a huge risk of blackmail. Generally it would be safer to pursue illegal liaisons outside of public space. Outside of such a public and shady system as a brothel you didn’t, you wouldn’t, just expose yourself to blackmail like that if you were a woman of upstanding status. And yet what you would do is you would sneak around, essentially, right?

And we have a lot of evidence that women did that, and men were keenly aware of this, terrified of the fact that their women were hunting sex on the sly. We have, oh, a funny line, a description of what women were into—what free women were into in pursuit on the sly. Here’s an example. This is a quotation from Petronius’s Satyricon:

When you admit you were a base slave, you set your desire alight. For some women lust after common filth. They cannot feel aroused except when they see slaves or serving men with their tunics hitched up. Gladiators set some of them on fire. Or a muleteer covered in dust. Or an actor disgraced by appearing on stage. My mistress is one of those, disdaining the first fourteen rows. She looks in the back of the crowds seeking out a man to love among the lowest plebs.

I think that’s an accurate description of what would go on. Right? You would look for private secret liaisons amongst the lower classes and sexually available people. And we have more evidence than that that that was going on. So there were women who were pursuing their sexual autonomy despite the laws against them.

Okay. So, that doesn’t get us to polyamory though.

Another aspect of this is jealousy in multiple-partner relationships. Big issue in terms of how you define polyamory. Because another requirement of polyamory that I said, it’s not just consent, but acceptance. Right? And evidence for that is hard to find. Even when we see open multi-partner relationships in antiquity.

The difference between accepting versus putting up with is what I am talking about. The evidence is fairly pervasive that most women did not like their husbands’ sexual freedom. Oh, they tolerated it, basically. But also, men in love with courtesans, like deeply in love with courtesans, whom they knew had other lovers, had the same issue. Ironically, these love-sick men were in the same position as their wives. Courtesans taking many lovers was legal, just as it was for husbands, and it was as much the social norm as it was for husbands, and these men who were in love with these courtesans had no power over these women. Just as wives had no power to stop their husbands from having sex with other people. So, it is interesting to see the roles reversed in this regard when courtesans get guys falling in love with them.

Nonetheless, we have lots of writing about men anguishing about the fact that they are in love with other people and they don’t like the fact that they can’t have the girls for themselves. So men of means would try to get some courtesans into “love contracts” for exclusive access. We know some contracts were joint, occasionally two men would openly share a courtesan because they couldn’t afford her all by themselves [laughter]. And yet, even when they were in these contracts, there’s evidence of continued, constant anxiety that the courtesan was cheating on the contract. So acceptance is difficult to see in this thing.

Now, though these variations, of men loving courtesans, is another approximation to poly, we are not there yet. It’s not entirely consensual. Courtesans had some but not total autonomy. It’s not entirely accepting. These men didn’t like sharing. But still at least it’s open and agreed to by all parties. And both the men and the women had the same freedom. Which is interesting.

However, all I have said so far, the evidence might be skewed, because we don’t get to hear from any of these courtesans themselves. Much less a large number of them, to see the range of feelings, because there wouldn’t necessarily be one stock arrangement or feeling about it. And that’s because almost all literature written by women, like literally 99.99 percent of literature written by women—of which there was tons and tons of it in antiquity—was destroyed by the medieval Christians. I could do a whole talk on how horrible that is. But anyway, we only get to hear from elite males. Not just males, but elite males. And only a super small select number of them. And that selection was made by medieval Christians. So if there were any men saying that, say, “it is totally awesome that my courtesan has multiple lovers,” it’s likely the Christians would not preserve that text. So we are actually seeing, not the whole pagan attitude, we are seeing through, in a sense, a filter, a Christian filter on pagan attitudes, so we probably have been denied access to evidence of accepting multi-partner relationships.

Now, these losses are significant, because there is evidence of free love literature—including written by women—but it all dates before Roman times. And though it was known in Roman times, no defenders of it are preserved. Again, that could be the filter problem. Because the same Christian bias that destroyed these books about advocating free love may have also destroyed any advocacy of it from Roman life and literature as well. Now, unfortunately, I have no time to survey Pre-Roman evidence. You can ask about it in Q & A if there is time later. But I just studied it. And there were women, actual women  philosophers who wrote books on the subject as far as we can tell.

Okay. So. Well. That’s where we are. Where was polyamory?

So by now we know, all men had freedom to have multiple lovers socially and legally, but only the lowest socially ranked women had the same freedom, and this was a huge barrier to forming polyamorous relationships. We know many men did allow their female lovers to have many partners and probably this was true of male lovers and male courtesans as well. But it appears they didn’t like it. And being mostly with courtesans, genuine consent and love is hard to ascertain from this distance that we are at. But at least it shows gender equal, and public, and allowed multiple partnering, as opposed to secret cheating, which of course everyone was doing. There’s tons of evidence that that was going on.

Now, of course polyamory could also exist by violating the law in private, and we wouldn’t get to see that. That evidence might not survive. We don’t hear much about it. There is one example, near example, that’s illuminating.

Lucian of Samosata wrote a satirical Dialogue of the Courtesans. It sounds, in my opinion, too realistic for fantasy. In fact, it sounds like he was overhearing a conversation of courtesans and said, “This is too good, this is too good, I gotta write this down!” Whether that may be the case or not, it’s interesting, because, in one of these conversations he writes down, whether he is making it up or not, it includes what appears to be transgenderism, and a couple hiring a female hooker to play with together. A hooker whom they appear to have genuinely adored.

Now, it plausibly represents the story of those courtesans that I was talking about. It plausibly represents a biologically assigned woman, living and identifying as a man. Not merely so as to legally marry her female lover and be a public couple—right, so they are tricking the system in that regard—but it also makes clear what I would describe as sincerely identifying with a gender. So that’s interesting, we don’t have a lot—we have some other examples of transgender people in ancient Rome, usually being made fun of, but that tells you that it at least probably existed in any case. But as evidence of something getting closer to polyamory, this couple regularly hired their favorite hooker for threeways in their home, and took good care of her. Now, the hooker just did it because she was paid to. Because she thought it was weird [laughter]. That was her reaction to it. So, it’s still not a proper triad [laughter]. But at least it’s a glimpse of sexual sharing between loving partners. That means, the couple that was hiring the hooker, was totally fine doing three-way sex together.

Alright, is that the best we have? Because that’s really weak tea [laughter]. Well, no. We have two pieces of evidence, suggesting genuine polyamorous relationships did sometimes exist. We can’t tell how commonly, however. We don’t have Barna Polls or anything like that from ancient Rome. (Ooh, do I wish we did. Those kinds of statistics would be wonderful!)

Now, the first piece of evidence is that…I told you about those adultery laws earlier, right? That you were free of those laws if you registered as a hooker? Well, it turns out, we have a lot of evidence that many elite women exploited the loophole in that law—by just registering as prostitutes. Not to be prostitutes, but to have all the lovers they wanted. Just to be free—to freely and openly have multiple lovers. Possibly even lesbian lovers, because once you registered as a prostitute, you were free of all sex crime laws, and you could have sex with women, and it’s not a sex crime. In fact, so many were starting to do this, so many elite women were doing this just to game the system that, decades later, another emperor closed the loophole and made it illegal for anyone of the upper classes to register as a prostitute. “We are putting a stop to that!” [laughter]

This tells us a couple of things. One thing: this means a lot of elite women wanted multiple lovers, and were exercising their autonomy to acquire that right. And in fact they were taking a huge hit. They were deliberately downgrading themselves socially, and losing, sacrificing, many other rights to obtain this right to just have as many lovers as they wanted. So, it must have been very important to them. That’s significant. Moreover, this had to be public. If you’ve registered as a prostitute, it’s public. So these women were advertising that they wanted multiple lovers. Which means any man who then sought them out must have known this. Right? And thus many must have been okay with it. Not necessarily, as we see with the men reluctantly sharing courtesans. But remember, that evidence is skewed, like I mentioned earlier. Now, we would most want to hear from these women and their lovers. Right? That’s what we are looking at. There’s probably some polyamory going on there. But they have no surviving voice. Nothing any of them wrote, poetry or prose, was preserved. So, all we have is that tantalizing hint of something going on. And that’s it.

Okay. That’s one piece of evidence.

The last bit of evidence we have is a little bit better. It’s the best we have of polyamory being a thing. And that’s because it’s the only time we actually get to hear from them. In this case a poly triad just outside Rome. And none of these people that we are—that I am gonna talk about—are not, they are not from the elite. They are from the middle class. Technically the bottom class by social rank. But they were wealthy enough to own their own shop and buy expensive stone epitaphs for eachother’s graves.

Now, the two percent elite were really only policing each other’s sexuality mainly. Right? For reasons of masculine dignity and control of elite wombs, sex crimes were policed because of proximity to power and rivalry for it. Right? But the remaining tens of millions were either not governed by these laws or could easily ignore them because there were no incentives to enforce them. No one cared if some random couple in Ostia just outside Rome were having a triad. There was no political game there. And here we have evidence of that. We have an epitaph in Ostia, which was the port city access point right next to Rome. An epitaph that appears to describe a polyamorous triad, of a woman sharing two bi male lovers: her husband and a male live-in friend. And I am going to read a description of that and the actual inscription, the epitaph itself.

Okay, so the epitaph has an image carved into it. It shows two men at work in a shoe shop on one side, and the same two men sexily dancing together on the other side. The inscription then reads:

We Lucius Atilius Artemas and Claudia Apphias dedicate this sarcophagus to Titus Flavius Trophimas, incomparable and trusted friend, who always lived with us. We have given his body a place to be buried together with us, so that he will always be remembered and find rest from his sufferings. The straightforward one, the cultivator of every art, the Ephesian, sleeps here in eternal repose.

The author who I get that from, John Clarke, one of the experts on ancient sexuality, makes the point that this seems to be clearly describing a proper polyamorous triad. These are citizens, they all have citizen names. They clearly seem to have some sort of very close intimate long term live-in relationship with each other. I think that’s what it’s looking like. I think it’s what we see here. I think this is the one example of an actual triad that survives from history. Notably, this is a shop. Remember? So what I think is going on here, is you have a woman, a citizen, who owned her own shop [laughter]. She is free of all sex crime laws, right? Taking two lovers, who also evidently loved each other, while those men worked in her shop to support their family unit, and they lived this way until death. After all the destruction of evidence of 2000 years, we are lucky enough to hear the voice of one poly triad in Roman times. Statistically, they must represent thousands of others.

Thanks for listening.

[Applause]