When the Roman Empire became Christian the temples of the cult of Antinous were destroyed – though many of the statues ended up in the Vatican art collections where they were seen by the artist Raphael, who used his likeness when painting angels as his model of male perfection.īoth the Greeks and Romans could appeal to religion in their belief that their behavior was moral, though we might have a different view on what is proper today.įor the Greeks, Zeus had his male lover Ganymede, and Plato rated this love as higher than that found in marriage.
Heartbroken, Hadrian had Antinous declared a god, built temples to him all over the empire, named a star after him and built a city in Egypt, Antinopolis, in his honor. Some have suggested he killed himself to avoid shaming the emperor as he grew older. Hadrian and Antinous were lovers for five years until Antinous fell from a boat in the Nile and drowned. Thus when the emperor Hadrian took a male lover in the form of a Bythinian youth named Antinous, as a foreigner it was perfectly acceptable for Antinous to appear in public next to the emperor and his wife Vibia Sabina as his lover. But in truth any slave was a sex slave if their master so desired, and it was primarily through master-slave relationships that sex between males occurred in Ancient Rome. Male and female prostitutes openly plied their trade on the streets of Rome. But slaves and foreigners were all fair game.
Having sex with a free born Roman male could see you up on charges for ruining the youth’s future reputation. In comparison, sex between men in the Roman world was a mostly more sinister affair. Sex between women wasn’t illegal, but, like the Victorians, the Greeks and Romans simply refused to believe it happened.
In both societies youths were considered to be able to consent to sex from around their mid teens, which was similar to the age that girls were considered ready for marriage, and it was acceptable for youths to be in same-sex relationships until they could grow a full beard – and for this reason, there were all manner of depilatory products on sale in order to help you keep your boyfriend respectable!Īfter this age in Greece, the young man was expected to find a wife and go about starting a family, having been mentored by his older partner, with the two men staying friends. Where sex between males was deemed acceptable to occur was between men and youths, and in theory it was only supposed to be inter-crucial (where one partner grips the other’s penis between his thighs) though from the writings the Greeks and Romans have left to us, it was often not. There was no taboo on it occurring between men and women and it was the most reliable form of contraception available so would have been a regular part of the sex lives of any married couple. The only act considered more taboo was cunnilingus – to the Ancient’s minds as dangerously close to a man being penetrated by a woman as was possible.Ĭontrary to popular belief, anal sex for the Greeks and Romans was primarily a heterosexual act. Of greater taboo still was for an older man to allow himself to be penetrated by a younger man – the modern word ‘pathetic’ derives from the Latin for such a man. Indeed if the Greeks and Romans did not outlaw it, it was because the shame of the act was punishment enough – though the weight of shame fell mostly on the penetrated. In this world the notion of sex between two grown men was deeply taboo as it was seen to reduce the passive partner to the level of a woman.
Men were assumed to be attracted to both males and females, and to express a preference for just one sex was considered eccentric.īut as both societies were intensely patriarchal what was important in sexual relationships was the status of who did the penetrating and their age.
Neither the Greeks or the Romans had a concept of homosexuality or heterosexuality. But how tolerant were the ancient Greeks and Romans? It turns out they weren’t nearly as tolerant as you might like to think. Most of us know that the ancient pagan world was more tolerant of homosexuality than the one god religions that would follow. Sexuality is a topic often whitewashed out of our history books, and we rarely see the place of LGBT people in the ancient world mentioned in television documentaries.