Disgraceful Archaeology (3 page)

6

The Hyenas:

The British Museum recently spent £1.8m on the Warren Cup, a Roman silver drinking cup from around AD 50, depicting two scenes, each set indoors: one of two males copulating on a mattress, the other of homosexual paedophilia. This is a rarity, because much of the homosexual imagery of the time was either hidden or destroyed.

Around 1260, ‘at Tewkesbury, a Jew fell into a privy, and out of respect for his sabbath, on which day the accident happened, would not allow himself to be extricated till the following day, which was Sunday; and in consequence he died, being suffocated by the foul stench.’

In early imperial times, a very nasty Roman gentleman pushed his long-suffering slaves too far, and they decided to murder him in the bathhouse by shoving the sponge-stick (used for wiping the backside) down his throat — presumably to leave no trace of cause of death, as well as to really stick it to him. When he stopped kicking, they threw him down on the burning-hot floor to make sure he was dead. Unfortunately he recovered consciousness and lived long enough to see them suitably punished .…

In 1326 in England, Richard the Raker was drowned — he entered a privy, seated himself, and the rotten planks of the floor gave way, letting him fall into the deep cesspool filth. There his body was found by a fellow raker.

Another fatal accident occurred in Bread Street Ward: in the courtyard of a house, two men had dug a privy well to the depth of five casks — they had cribbed it with a pile of five casks in which new wine had been kept. As one of the boards from the end of one of the casks had fallen to the bottom of the well, one of the men put down a ladder and began to descend, but was overcome by fumes (carbon dioxide) from the wine-soaked staves, and dropped unconscious to the bottom. The other man descended to rescue him, but he too fell unconscious, and both were asphyxiated!

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The Roman emperor Caracalla (AD 211–170) was suffering from a stomach upset on a journey, and ordered a halt while he went to relieve himself — only a single attendant went with him. The rest of the bodyguard turned their backs in respect for the emperor’s privacy. One officer of the bodyguard killed him with a single sword thrust as he was lowering his breeches (
7
).

The Roman emperor Elagabalus (AD 204–22) was hacked to death by the praetorian guard as he sat on the lavatory, and his body thrown down a sewer. In life, he used to like to surprise guests with rare dishes — sometimes he would serve exact replicas of the food he was eating, but in wood, ivory, pottery or stone. The guests were expected to continue eating as though nothing had happened.

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In England, the Saxon king Edmund Ironside was assassinated while seated on a wooden lavatory — someone hiding in the pit below thrust his longsword up his backside into his bowels, killing him instantly (
8
).

9

Sir Arthur Aston, a Royalist commander during the English Civil war, was beaten to death with his own wooden leg by Cromwell’s men (
9
).

Among the Ancient Greeks, as depicted on vases, male homosexuals did indulge in anal intercourse, but they also often rubbed the penis back and forth between the young man’s thighs — this is known as intercrural intercourse.

Straton, a Greek physicist of the 3rd century BC, compared girls unfavourably with boys: ‘They’re all so dull from behind, and the main thing is, you’ve nowhere to put a roaming hand’.

Dioskorides, a Greek doctor of the first century AD, recommends a friend to ‘delight in the rosy bum’ of his wife when she is pregnant, treating her as a ‘male Aphrodite’, and Rhianos rapturously talks of the ‘glorious bum’ of a boy, so beautiful that even old men itch for it.

The fifth/fourth century BC Greek playwright Aristophanes, in
Birds
, has a character say ‘Where the father of a good-looking boy will meet me and go on at me as if I’d done him a wrong:

And in
Knights
, the Sausage-Seller says ‘..here’s a folding stool for you, and a boy (he’s no eunuch) who’ll carry it for you. And if you feel like it sometimes, make a folding-stool of him!’.

Greek vases often show old men fingering the genitals of young men. In the play
Clouds
by Aristophanes, it is recalled that when
boys ‘were sitting in the trainer’s, they had to put one thigh forward in order not to show anything cruel to those outside. Then, when a boy got up again, he had to brush the sand together and take care not to leave an imprint of his youth’ for the old men to look at. This means that the sight of the boys’ genitals would torment the spectators, while the old men might brood longingly over the mark in the sand where the genitals had rested (
10
).

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It was said that Julius Caesar had been King Nicomedes’s catamite — and this was frequently quoted by his enemies. For example, Licinius Calvus wrote ‘The riches of Bithynia’s King Who Caesar on his couch abused’, while Dolabella called him ‘the Queen’s rival and inner partner of the royal bed’, and Curio the Elder ‘Nicomedes’s Bithynian brothel’. Bibulus, Caesar’s colleague in the consulship, called him ‘the Queen of Bithynia’. When his own soldiers followed his decorated chariot
in the Gallic triumph, they chanted ribald songs, as they were privileged to do (
11
):

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Caesar also had numerous and extravagant affairs with women, including several queens, and was called ‘every woman’s husband and every man’s wife’.

Mark Antony alleged that Julius Caesar made Octavian (Augustus) submit to unnatural relations as the price of adoption; Octavian was also said to have sold his favours to
the Governor-General of Spain for 3000 gold pieces, and it was claimed that he used to soften the hair on his legs by singeing them with red-hot walnut shells.

Once, while sacrificing, the emperor Tiberius (42 BC–AD 37) took an erotic fancy to the acolyte who carried the incense casket, and could hardly wait for the ceremony to end before hurrying him and his brother, the sacred trumpeter, out of the temple and indecently assaulting them both. When they protested at this, he had their legs broken.

The emperor Caligula persistently teased Cassius Charea, who was no longer young, for his supposed effeminacy. Whenever he demanded the watchword, Caligula used to give him ‘Priapus’ or ‘Venus’; and if he came to acknowledge a favour, always stuck out his middle finger for him to kiss, and waggled it obscenely.

Aristophanes’ comedy is rich in obscene and scatological invective, and abounds in abusive terms alluding to anal sex — ‘Wide-assed’ (
euryproktos
) was a common insult that he expanded into’with gaping ass hole’ (
chaunoproktos
). The politician Cleisthenes was evidently known as a passive homosexual, and Aristophanes never tired of making fun of his effeminate ways and his hospitable rear end.

The concept of anal penetration as demeaning and humiliating is perhaps best seen in what may be termed the ‘radish treatment’ (see below, p.88).

One Greek vase shows a Persian captive about to submit to anal penetration by a Greek.

Eubolos, a comic poet of the fourth century, said of the Greeks who spent ten long years in capturing Troy: ‘No one ever set eyes on a single
hetaira
(harlot); they wanked themselves for ten years. It was a poor sort of campaign for the capture of one city, they went home with arses much wider than the gates of the city that they took.’ (
12
)