10-22-2005, 02:32 PM
Carus - thanks for the UK date. I was wondering what had become of it...
As for the 'too much sex' issue - it's becoming a bit of a cliche to portray the Romans as a pack of lust-crazed bed-wrestlers. Certainly there's enough evidence to show that the Romans had no problems with talking and writing about sex, even looking at pictures of it (i.e. those saucy paintings from Pompeii), but I'm dubious about drawing too much from that. In all societies, the antics of a metropolitan elite will differ greatly from those of the average pleb on the street - even if, in a slave society that amused itself by watching people chopped up in the arena, ideas about the uses and abuses of the human body would be rather different to our own. Sexual morality in ancient times, 'Judeo-Christian' or otherwise, was basically a matter of practicality - without effective contraceptives, fornication could have all sorts of inconvenient outcomes, and for those unable to afford the services of a discrete doctor or two, could prove fatal.
For all their bawdiness, the Romans were great moralisers - the late-Republican poet Catullus wrote some highly lurid stuff about 'Lesbia', but mainly to portray the woman as a monster who had lost all sense of feminine virtue and moderation. Similarly, when Suetonius wrote about the lusty lives of assorted 'bad' emperors and their wives, it was intended to show that power had turned these people into perverts, unable to control their base urges. Dignity and propriety were of the highest importance. Abusing your enemies with sexual slurs was common practice, but that didn't mean that any of the abuse had grounds in fact! Taking Catullus, Ovid, Horace etc as documentary evidence of the mores of their contemporaries might be like some future historian using Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs to determine what went on in 50s America... But perhaps not, who knows?
Interestingly, I see from the online clips of 'Rome' that the writers seem to have gone with Horace's portrayal of Cleopatra as a nymphomaniac dominatrix! Poor old Cleo - always getting a hard time in the movies...
:wink:
As for the 'too much sex' issue - it's becoming a bit of a cliche to portray the Romans as a pack of lust-crazed bed-wrestlers. Certainly there's enough evidence to show that the Romans had no problems with talking and writing about sex, even looking at pictures of it (i.e. those saucy paintings from Pompeii), but I'm dubious about drawing too much from that. In all societies, the antics of a metropolitan elite will differ greatly from those of the average pleb on the street - even if, in a slave society that amused itself by watching people chopped up in the arena, ideas about the uses and abuses of the human body would be rather different to our own. Sexual morality in ancient times, 'Judeo-Christian' or otherwise, was basically a matter of practicality - without effective contraceptives, fornication could have all sorts of inconvenient outcomes, and for those unable to afford the services of a discrete doctor or two, could prove fatal.
For all their bawdiness, the Romans were great moralisers - the late-Republican poet Catullus wrote some highly lurid stuff about 'Lesbia', but mainly to portray the woman as a monster who had lost all sense of feminine virtue and moderation. Similarly, when Suetonius wrote about the lusty lives of assorted 'bad' emperors and their wives, it was intended to show that power had turned these people into perverts, unable to control their base urges. Dignity and propriety were of the highest importance. Abusing your enemies with sexual slurs was common practice, but that didn't mean that any of the abuse had grounds in fact! Taking Catullus, Ovid, Horace etc as documentary evidence of the mores of their contemporaries might be like some future historian using Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs to determine what went on in 50s America... But perhaps not, who knows?
Interestingly, I see from the online clips of 'Rome' that the writers seem to have gone with Horace's portrayal of Cleopatra as a nymphomaniac dominatrix! Poor old Cleo - always getting a hard time in the movies...
:wink:
Nathan Ross
