Homosexuality in ancient Rome is a subject of research and scholarly debate. Conceptions of homosexuality in ancient Rome differed from the contemporary West. Latin lacks words that would precisely translate "homosexual" and "heterosexual".Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality (Oxford University Press, 1999, 2010), p. 304, citing Saara Lilja, Homosexuality in Republican and Augustan Rome (Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1983), p. 122. The primary dichotomy of ancient Roman sexuality was masculine and feminine. Roman society was patriarchal, and the freeborn male citizen possessed political liberty (libertas) and the right to rule both himself and his household (familia). "Virtue" (virtus) was seen as an active quality through which a man (vir) defined himself.
In a lot of accounts from the Roman era, the conquest mentality and "cult of virility" shaped same-sex relations. Pederasty between males was documented, and such relationships were accepted as long as the Roman man took an active/dominant role and passive younger male partner was not a freeborn youth/boy. Acceptable male partners were slaves and former slaves, prostitutes, and entertainers, whose lifestyle placed them in the nebulous social realm of infamia, so they were excluded from the normal protections afforded to a citizen even if they were technically free. Freeborn male minors were off limits at certain periods in Rome. It is difficult to know up to what extent homosexuality in general and pederasty in particular were practiced in ancient Rome.Amy Richlin, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (Oxford University Press, 1983, 1992)
Same-sex relations among women are far less documented and, if Roman writers are to be trusted, female homoeroticism may have been very rare, to the point that Ovid, in the Augustine era describes it as "unheard-of".Skinner, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, p. 69 However, there is scattered evidence—for example, a couple of spells in the Greek Magical Papyri—which attests to the existence of individual women in Roman-ruled provinces in the later Imperial period who fell in love with members of the same sex.
Overview During the Republic, a Roman citizen's political liberty (libertas) was defined in part by the right to preserve his body from physical compulsion, including both corporal punishment and sexual abuse.Thomas A.J. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality and the Law in Ancient Rome (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 326. See the statement preserved by Aulus Gellius 9.12. 1 that "it was an injustice to bring force to bear against the body of those who are free" (vim in corpus liberum non aecum ... adferri). Roman society was patriarchal (see paterfamilias), and masculinity was premised on a capacity for governing oneself and others of lower status.Eva Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World (Yale University Press, 1992, 2002, originally published 1988 in Italian), p. xii. Virtus, "valor" as that which made a man most fully a man, was among the active virtues.Elaine Fantham, "The Ambiguity of Virtus in Lucan's Civil War and Statius' Thebiad," Arachnion 3; Andrew J.E. Bell, "Cicero and the Spectacle of Power," Journal of Roman Studies 87 (1997), p. 9; Edwin S. Ramage, "Aspects of Propaganda in the De bello gallico: Caesar’s Virtues and Attributes," Athenaeum 91 (2003) 331–372; Myles Anthony McDonnell, Roman manliness: virtus and the Roman Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2006) passim; Rhiannon Evans, Utopia Antiqua: Readings of the Golden Age and Decline at Rome (Routledge, 2008), pp. 156–157. Sexual conquest was a common metaphor for imperialism in Roman discourse,Davina C. Lopez, "Before Your Very Eyes: Roman Imperial Ideology, Gender Constructs and Paul's Inter-Nationalism," in Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses (Brill, 2007), pp. 135–138. and the "conquest mentality" was part of a "cult of virility" that particularly shaped Roman homosexual practices.Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World, p. xi; Marilyn B. Skinner, introduction to Roman Sexualities (Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 11. Roman ideals of masculinity were thus premised on taking an active role that was also, as Craig A. Williams has noted, "the prime directive of masculine sexual behavior for Romans".Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 18. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, scholars have tended to view expressions of Roman male sexuality in terms of a "penetrator-penetrated" binary model; that is, the proper way for a Roman male to seek sexual gratification was to insert his penis into his partner.Rebecca Langlands, Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 13. Allowing himself to be penetrated threatened his liberty as a free citizen as well as his sexual integrity.For further discussion of how sexual activity defines the free, respectable citizen from the slave or "un-free" person, see Master-slave relations in ancient Rome.
It was socially acceptable, though not necessarily respected, for a freeborn Roman man to want sex with both female and male partners, as long as he took an active role and the appropriate partner was a prostitute or slave.Amy Richlin, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (Oxford University Press, 1983, 1992), p. 225. Outside of marriage a man was supposed to act on his desires with only slaves, prostitutes (who were often slaves), and the infames. It was immoral to have sex with another freeborn man's wife, his marriageable daughter, his underage son, or with the man himself; sexual use of another man's slave was subject to the owner's permission. Lack of self-control, including in managing one's sex life, indicated that a man was incapable of governing others; too much indulgence in "low sensual pleasure" threatened to erode the elite male's identity as a cultured person.Catharine Edwards, "Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome," in Roman Sexualities, pp. 67–68. Some scholars argue that a law, Lex Scantinia, protected freeborn boys from sexual advances of men.
Homoerotic themes are introduced to Latin literature during a period of increasing Greek influence on Roman culture in the 2nd century BC. While in ancient Greece, pederasty between freeborn male citizens of equal status was idealized by some classical greek elites, such an attachment to a male outside the family, within Roman society threatened the authority of the paterfamilias.Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World, p. xi; Skinner, introduction to Roman Sexualities, p. 11. Since Roman women were active in educating their sons and mingled with men socially, and women of the governing classes often continued to advise and influence their sons and husbands in political life, homosociality was not as pervasive in Rome as it had been in Classical Athens, where it is thought to have contributed to the particulars of pederastic culture.Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World, pp. xi–xii; Skinner, introduction to Roman Sexualities, pp. 11–12.
In the Imperial era, a perceived increase in passive homosexual behavior among free males was associated with anxieties about the subordination of political liberty to the emperor, and led to an increase in executions and corporal punishment.Amy Richlin, "Sexuality in the Roman Empire," in A Companion to the Roman Empire (Blackwell, 2006), p. 329. The lower classes (humiliores) were subject to harsher penalties than the elite (honestiores). The sexual license and decadence under the empire was seen as a contributing factor and symptom of the loss of the ideals of physical integrity (libertas) under the Republic.This is a theme throughout Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton University Press, 1993).
Homoerotic literature and art Love or desire between males is a very frequent theme in Roman literature. In the estimation of Amy Richlin, out of the poems preserved to this day, those addressed by men to boys are as common as those addressed to women, with most of them directed towards slave boys.Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, p. 33. "Whatever the relationship between the poetry and the reality, it is a fact that poems to pueri are as common as poems to mistresses, and are similar in tone."
Among the works of Roman literature that can be read today, those of Plautus are the earliest to survive in full to modernity, and also the first to mention homosexuality. Their use to draw conclusions about Roman customs or morals, however, is controversial because these works are all based on Greek originals. However, Craig A. Williams defends such use of the works of Plautus. He notes that the homo- and heterosexual exploitation of slaves, to which there are so many references in Plautus' works, is rarely mentioned in Greek New Comedy, and that many of the puns that make such a reference (and Plautus' oeuvre, being comic, is full of them) are only possible in Latin, and can not therefore have been mere translations from the Greek.Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2nd ed., pp. 36–39.
The consul Quintus Lutatius Catulus was among a circle of poets who made short, light Hellenistic poems fashionable. One of his few surviving fragments is a poem of desire addressed to a male with a Greek name.Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World, p. 120; Edward Courtney, The Fragmentary Latin Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 75. In the view of Ramsay MacMullen, who is of the opinion that, before the flood of Greek influence, the Romans were against the practice of homosexuality, the elevation of Greek literature and art as models of expression promoted the celebration of homoeroticism as the mark of an urbane and sophisticated person.Ramsay MacMullen, "Roman Attitudes to Greek Love," Historia 31.4 (1982), pp. 484–502. The opposite view is sustained by Craig Williams, who is critical of Macmullen's discussion on Roman attitudes toward homosexuality:Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2nd ed., pp. 16, 327, 328. he draws attention to the fact that Roman writers of love poetry gave their beloveds Greek pseudonyms no matter the sex of the beloved. Thus, the use of Greek names in homoerotic Roman poems does not mean that the Romans attributed a Greek origin to their homosexual practices or that homosexual love only appeared as a subject of poetic celebration among the Romans under the influence of the Greeks.Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2nd ed., pp. 70–78.
References to homosexual desire or practice, in fact, also appear in Roman authors who wrote in literary styles seen as originally Roman, that is, where the influence of Greek fashions or styles is less likely. In an Atellan farce authored by Quintus Novius (a literary style seen as originally Roman), it is said by one of the characters that "everyone knows that a boy is superior to a woman"; the character goes on to list physical attributes, most of which denoting the onset of puberty, that mark boys when they are at their most attractive in the character's view. Also remarked elsewhere in Novius' fragments is that the sexual use of boys ceases after "their butts become hairy".Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2nd ed., p. 24. A preference for smooth male bodies over hairy ones is also avowed elsewhere in Roman literature (e.g., in Ode 4.10 by Horace and in some epigrams by Martial or in the Priapeia).Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2nd ed., p. 19.