Sex and eroticism played an important role in the history of ancient Rome. The word porn itself comes from the Latin word porne, which means prostitute, and if you add the word graphie (drawing), the genre of pornography is done.
However, the attitude of the ancient Roman citizens towards sex was controversial. On the one hand, there were officially strict moral standards on the life of society. On the other hand, the history of the ancient Rome is full of rape and orgies. Sexual perversions by emperors and their families were a favorite theme in antiquity.
The difference between men and women
Typically, men were not expected to have a high degree of purity in their sexual life in the ancient Rome. Society expected Roman women to be obedient and healthy, with as many boys as possible. However, the husbands could easily go to brothels and have a single lover
Married men could have sex with other men without shame. However, this only applied to the penetrating man, because the passive role was considered to be a female role, and the man who took such a role was considered and despised.
Sex between men was accepted with some restrictions, but not among women. Because the woman who penetrated was male, which was severely punished for a woman.
Augustus
Emperor Augustus, who came to power in the last years of the republic, believed that the morals of the Romans who had a relatively free sex life should be improved. Even though he was no stranger to adultery, he regularly spoke out against it and enacted strict laws to steer the Romans on the right path. It’s funny that her daughter, Julia, was one of the freest morals of her time. Occasionally she had sex on the pedestal where Augustus used to talk about morals.
Ceasar and Tiberius
It was disgusting to wear clothes of the opposite sex and to perform accordingly. Julius Caesar, for example, has been accused throughout his life of living in women’s clothes when he was in the court of IV. Nicomedes (king of Bithynia). And there he was a lover of everyone.
Tiberius was also rumored to regularly wear women’s clothes on Capri Island.
Nero
Of the first Roman emperors, of course, the greatest scandal hero was Nero. Stories circulated that he had kicked his pregnant wife to death and had an incest relationship with her mother, Agrippina. Supposedly that two liberated male slaves had also married them. For example, they castrated Sporus, a teenager, who was very similar to Nero’s late wife. And then he regularly appeared as an empress on Nero’s side.
Messalina
Also known were the notorious orgies of Emperor Claudius’ wife Messalina. The Empress regularly escaped from the palace in the evenings to work in a notorious brothel known as “Lycisca”. She once challenged one of Rome’s famous prostitutes to a 24-hour sex marathon duel. Plinius noted that the Empress had won the competition by sleeping with 25 men in one day.
Heliogabalus
In the work “The Majesty’s Stories” (Historia Augusta) we read about the “unspeakably disgusting life” of Emperor Heliogabalus. He came to power at the age of 15, and at the age of 18, he was the victim of an assassination. During his reign, for three years, he caused a scandal by trying to introduce an Eastern sun cult to the religious life of the Romans, placing the new God before Jupiter.
The young emperor was openly gay, but his perversions increased his unpopularity. He allegedly “used every opening of his body to delight and sent men to find men with the largest penis … A man’s genital size often influenced how high he was in the imperial court.” Later, Heliogabalus went even further, offering a huge fortune to any doctor who would give him female genitalia.
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