Her book's topics range from orgasm to the long-ago fear of hermaphrodites, from circumcision to the wide acceptance of a variety of gay relationships. With Tip Sheet, she shared some carnal curiosities and extraordinary stories of sex and love, encountered while researching The Joy of Sexus. Most sexually twisted ruler : Emperor Nero? Or Caligula? Mere runners-up.
Those little scraps of information were enough to pique my curiosity though, so when I ran across a book called Sex Lives of the Roman Emperors , I had to read it. As you are about to see, the Romans were even more degenerate than you imagine. For centuries, the Romans had the best military of the ancient world. To take them on meant death, subjugation, and the rape of your women, which was commonplace in those days. After being captured, an enemy soldier might experience the horror of having a dentifrangibus used on them. A dentifrangibus is another word for tooth smasher.
Gay sex in Ancient Rome was not only easy to come by, it was an accepted part of being a Roman — even in the army. They were essentially indifferent to sexual orientation. Instead, they focused their prejudice on the submissive or feminine, or the bottom in gay relationships. Meanwhile they championed the dominance of tops or the person doing the fucking. Because it was perfectly acceptable for a Roman man to have sex with either a man or woman — so long as he was the top.
The idea that Rome was an extremely promiscuous and licentious society is, in reality, if nothing else a massive over-simplification of a complex picture. There may be an element of religious propaganda to this image of Rome too. The Catholic Church took hold in the last centuries of the Empire. These customs did consider sexual excess outside the bounds of ideal behaviour defined by virtus , an ideal state of masculinity that included self-control.
The man in jeans is showing you respect by looking away and not staring at your photoshoot. Good on him! He is probably also respecting his wife because she wouldn't want him to look. The other man appears to be raising his own camera! They are both right of course and life is good.