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Caligula, according to Partridge again, would avail himself of any woman he fancied, regardless of whether her husband was there or not. After having sex, he would come back into the room and give a critical appraisal of his partner's charms or lack of them.

Nero would sail down the Tiber to Ostia with special debauchery booths erected on the shore in case he got caught short with the need for an orgasm. As he sailed, hopeful (or, more likely, nervous, given his unpredictability and boundless sadism) hostesses would stand in the booths and beg him to alight at their particular mobile boudoir.

Nero also had an incestuous relationship with his mother. It was rumoured that when he travelled with her in a litter he would have sex with her. At least, that was the usual explanation for the stains seen on his clothes when he ended a journey, but which were not there when he started it. Nero
also invented a charming ‘game' in which he put on one of a variety of wild animal skins and had himself ‘freed' from a cage to launch himself on to the genitals of men and women who were trussed up in not-very-eager anticipation.

The Roman bourgeoisie had its own, slightly more discreet, charms. Archaeologists recently discovered a bathhouse in Pompeii with locker paintings depicting erotic sex scenes. Pompeii, and nearby Herculaneum too, had a classic Hamburg-type mix for an erotic city, a combination of wealthy merchants and visiting sailors which ensured a prosperous prostitution industry. Pornographic images from Pompeii and Herculaneum were stored in a secret room
(camera segretta)
in the Naples Archaeological Museum for several hundred years, until the public was recently allowed to see the artefacts by special request.

The material on show is creditable pornography, too, rather than mere graffiti. Among the well-executed paintings are one depicting a man having anal sex with a woman, several pictures of men with the kind of semi-erection favoured by modern porno magazines (it is achieved today by male models masturbating a few moments before the photo session), a half-man half-goat masturbating a (male) full-goat, women astride men, enormous penises framed by a temple's columns, a woman fondling another woman's breasts (the only lesbian scene found at Pompeii), an extremely graphic cunnilingus scene, and a curious threesome in which a male is having anal sex with a women, while receiving anal sex from another man.

Male masturbation was largely acceptable in the Roman world. The judgemental Juvenal deprecates the habit amongst schoolboys of mutually masturbating one another. The Latin poet Martial warns, ‘What you are losing between your fingers, Ponticus, is a human being.' But it is Martial too who pronounces,
‘Veneri servit amica manus' -
‘Thy hand serves as the mistress of thy pleasure'. He also describes Phrygian slaves masturbating themselves to overcome the lust occasioned by seeing their master having sex with his wife. In
mythology, Mercury teaches his son Pan to masturbate when he is upset by the loss of his mistress, Echo. Pan later instructs the shepherds in the art of sex for one. The love poet Pacificus Maximus writes: ‘Is there no boy nor girl to hear my prayers? No one comes? Then my right hand must perform the accustomed office.'

As for homosexuality, the Romans did not accord anal intercourse the same moral and institutional respect as the Greeks, but their enthusiasm for it appears to have been almost as fierce. Fellatio, curiously, was not greatly admired in Rome as it was seen as ‘unnatural'. Some Romans, however, practised a form of fellatio in which the penetrating partner stayed still and declined to thrust his penis, leaving the receptive partner to do the work.

Poets meanwhile lauded anal sex, even while gently mocking well-known adherents, spreading rumours about who did and who didn't – and giving useful snippets of advice for the uninitiated. ‘Stretch the foot and take your course, fly with soles in the air, with supple thighs, and nimble buttocks and libertine hands,' suggested Petronius in the first century AD. Curio the Elder alluded wittily to Caesar's apparent bisexual-ity by referring to him as ‘the husband of all women, and the wife of all husbands'. Pacificus Maximus, in his ‘Elegy II to Ptolemy', writes: ‘For you, ungrateful boy, I keep my treasures all, and no one shall enjoy them but yourself; my penis is growing; while it used to measure seven inches, now it measures ten.'

One of the best measures of a society's progress towards sexual equality is contraception – whether it exists, whether it is legal, whether it is encouraged – and whether men and women, or just women, practise it. A British social historian, Keith Hopkins, suggested in a 1965 paper, ‘Contraception in the Roman Empire',
Comparative Studies in Society and History
, that Roman men avoided large families principally by being unfaithful to their wives.

When wives felt under pressure to marry and have children,
and this made them feel worn out, Soranus, a first-century AD Greek physician who practised gynaecology in Rome, suggested that they abstain from sex periodically. But, as Hopkins points out, if your woman chose to abstain, the other way of continuing to have a sex life was to have sex with prostitutes, slaves – or men. Prostitutes tended to take steps such as interrupting coitus to prevent pregnancy but what might seem to be a worry with slaves – producing unwanted babies – was not a problem at all. The babies of slaves were raised like pets in Rome.

For women who did not want to give up their sex lives or have children, Soranus suggested the rhythm method, or the option of prolonging breastfeeding for longer than they might do otherwise. This has a contraceptive effect, and is an acknowledged birth-control method in some pre-industrial countries. In the ancient world, a woman was advised to continue feeding for around three years. To get round the practice, powerful Roman men often employed wet-nurses so their wives could start ovulating again and get back to the important business of producing heirs. Another Roman contraceptive method described by the poet and philosopher Lucretius was the custom of loose women to undulate their hips thus not only giving their partners maximum pleasure but also directing semen away from the uterus.

Lucretius, who lived from 96-55 BC, had another influential, and quintessentially Roman, belief that connected mutually orgasmic pleasure with successful conception. He argued that children resembled their parents because ‘at their making the seeds … were dashed together by the collusion of mutual passion in which neither party was master or mastered'.

Heterosexual love? Mutual orgasmic passion? It was the kind of tender, romantic scenario that would have been distinctly alien to the Greeks. But by the second century BC, when the Romans invaded Greece, heterosexual, monogamous love was the modern, revolutionary way of living. Across a Mediterranean world about to be further revolutionised by
Christianity, the Roman legacy of the female citizen as joint head of a stable family was on its way to becoming a universal ideal.

‘Mr Simon Raven finds sex “an overrated sensation which lasts a bare ten seconds” – and then wonders why anyone should bother to translate the erotic textbooks of Medieval India. One good reason for doing so is that there are still people in our culture who find sex an overrated sensation lasting a bare ten seconds'

Dr Alex Comfort, letter to the
New Statesman

All over the modern Western world in the twenty-first century, men have begun looking for strategies to improve their lovemaking, both from their lover's point of view – and from their own. It is one thing to try to be a Casanova and please the ladies, another still to follow the lead of adventurous Victorian British sexual pioneers and study the Indian
Kamasutra
of 1,700 years ago, with its 529 sexual positions, or the Arabic
Perfumed Garden
of the 1500s, with a view to learning advanced techniques of stimulating your partner's clitoris and other erogenous zones.

But in the have-it-all twenty-first century, men started wanting orgasms as good as women's. All too aware that their sexuality tends to be focused on the ultimately disappointing goal of ejaculation, they wanted to be able to delay their climax for lengthy periods during sex, to enjoy more delicious and drawn-out orgasmic feelings when they did finally ejaculate -and to be able to repeat the performance. When a man becomes
multi-orgasmic in this way, it is commonly held, he is able to satisfy himself more effectively, and also much more able fully to satisfy his partner. Becoming multi-orgasmic, twenty-first-century Western men now believe in large numbers, is one of the greatest gifts a man can give his partner.

The favoured source of how this goal might be achieved, of differentiating, as they believe possible, mere ejaculation from an altogether loftier form of ‘dry' orgasm, and thereby enjoying more and better sex, is a society not everyone immediately associates with sexual virtuosity – not India, more commonly acknowledged as home of the famous ‘Tantric sex', but Ancient China, where Tantric sexual practices traceable as far back as 6,000 years coalesced in a broad sweep of Chinese philosophy known as Taoism (aka Daoism).

Whereas in Indian sexual history little is documented before the third-century AD
Kamasutra
, there is documentary evidence that China was as sexually aware as any of the more westerly countries usually regarded as the cradle of civilisation. According to R. H. van Gulik, author of a 1961 book
Sexual Life in Ancient China:
‘[sex] was never associated with a feeling of sin or moral guilt'. The defining feature of Ancient Chinese writings on sex is the emphasis on orgasmic pleasure for its own sake, irrespective of questions of reproduction. The subject of conception barely arises in the literature, so enraptured were the Chinese by the mechanical and emotional subtleties of lovemaking. ‘The difference in subtlety between Ancient Chinese and modern Western views brings to mind the aphorism about the many different Inuit words for “snow”,' comments the feminist author Naomi Wolf.

The Ancient Chinese divination book
Yi Jing
(I Ching) dates from the twelfth-century BC and contains a fire/water-based description of the orgasmic differences between men and women remarkably similar to the kind of concept the Greeks and Romans were musing on a thousand years on. ‘Fire easily flares up,' says the
Yi Jing
, ‘but it is easily extinguished by water; water takes a long time to heat over the fire, but cools
down very slowly.' Thus the Chinese were yet another ancient people to make the observation, based equally on the time taken to reach the female orgasm, its ferocity and its near-infinite repeatability, that women are more carnal than men.

Five hundred years before Christ, and several hundred years before Hindu philosophy came up with their Tantric sex, Chinese devotees of the
Tao/Dao
(‘The Way'), who studied human sexual response as part of a larger philosophical vision, claimed to have discovered a way for men to divert their orgasmic energy up the spine into the brain and back down again several times at will before triggering ejaculation, and also of ‘retaining semen' while enjoying orgasms that did not culminate in ejaculation. A more elaborate version of withholding semen developed by Taoist masters was what is today termed ‘injaculation' – a method of pulling semen up into the body in the reverse of the customary direction. The Taoists believe it is then absorbed into the blood.

According to Wolf, Ancient Chinese followers of the Tao were keen scholars of how to give their womenfolk as many orgasms as possible – but they had an ulterior motive. Their problem was that their male, yang energy, contained in semen, was finite and precious. In all Buddhist philosophy, to ejaculate without a purpose is a waste of spiritual energy. The yin energy women produce during sex, however, is boundless, and could in fact nourish a man's yang. Paying lavish attention to foreplay was additionally supposed to stir the yin, production of which peaked when women had an orgasm. It was ideal, furthermore, if the man remained inside the woman for as long as possible to absorb the maximum of yin. It is in this self-interested way, then, that the Chinese male came to view the female's orgasm as being as important as his own. (Some sages believed, in a rare acknowledgement of the reality of sex leading to conception, that the discharge of yang energy from the male is necessary in one circumstance only – successful insemination leading to pregnancy.)

As a
quid pro quo
, Chinese men explained to women that
sex with orgasm was beneficial to their health too, while unfulfilled sex could threaten a female's wellbeing. On the other hand, the Taoists also held that the more women with whom a man had intercourse, the greater would be the benefit
he
would derive from sex. But even if their culture was as male-dominated as that of any other ancient civilisation, the yin-yang concept ensured that Chinese women got a relatively good deal sexually. K'ung-fu-tzu, the fifth-century BC philosopher known in the West as Confucius, maintained that wives and concubines had sexual rights, and that it was a husband's duty to satisfy them. He suggested that intercourse once every five days should be enough to satisfy a woman under fifty.

As van Gulik implies, alternative sexual practices were not scorned. Fellatio was acceptable so long as not too much yang energy was lost, while cunnilingus was approved of both because it was pleasurable and because it accrued yin essence for the man. Their infinite supply of yin meant women were allowed to masturbate.

A kind of hyper-heterosexuality was the Ancient Chinese male ideal, however. To the middle-class Ancient Chinese male, the equivalent of playing nine consecutive eagles on the golf course was to attempt to have sex with nine women at the same time, making sure that all achieved orgasm, strictly controlling one's own ejaculation, and with lashings of cunnilingus all round. An Ancient Chinese husband had a solemn obligation to provide a regular sex life both for his four or five wives and even more concubines. With the latter, it was considered gentlemanly to have sex a minimum of once every five days. Husbands were allowed to retire from sex at sixty, but one sex manual of 79 AD states that if a man survives to the age of seventy, he should start again.