Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (13 page)

Pericles took a chance by defending Aspasia, but that was not the end of their legal struggles. Their next obstacle arose from a law Pericles had championed years earlier, which denied citizenship to children whose parents were not both native Athenians. Some time after the impiety trial, illness killed Pericles’s sister and his two sons by his first wife. With no living heirs, he asked his countrymen to accept his son by Aspasia as legitimate. The Athenians understood that his misfortunes “represented a kind of penalty which he had paid for his pride and presumption,” and granted his request.

LET’S MAKE A DEAL

As the Classical period in Greece gave way to the more cosmopolitan Hellenistic Age, women with money began to demand more equality from their husbands. For example, a marriage contract between two Greeks in Egypt, dated 311 BC, included the requirement that the husband remain sexually loyal to his wife—at least at home. The bride, Demetria, had some bargaining power: She brought one thousand drachmae worth of clothing and ornaments to the union, which was evidently enough to get her husband, Heraclides, to agree to refrain from doing what Greek husbands had done for centuries:

It shall not be lawful for Heraclides to bring home another woman for himself in such a way as to inflict contumely on Demetria, nor to have children by another woman, nor to indulge in fraudulent machinations against Demetria on any pretext.

The contract had sharp teeth. Had Heraclides broken the deal, he would have been forced to return the dowry and also forfeit one thousand drachmae worth of his own property. He was still allowed to visit all the prostitutes he wanted—he just could not bring them by the house or sap the family’s finances in taking care of his stray children.

Of course, the curb on Heraclides’s freedom with other women did not imply matching liberties for Demetria. Any infidelities on her part were still strictly forbidden under the marriage contract—although it is interesting that the husband felt the need to reaffirm this in writing rather than just rely on the law. However, changes were coming, at least with regard to the number of people who were allowed to control her life. Local law still permitted a father to step in and dissolve his daughter’s marriage at will, but as Egypt came under Roman control, married women would be allowed to defy their fathers’ demands and remain with their husbands.
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Rome, of course, was then transforming itself from a backwater city-state on the Italian peninsula into a territory-gobbling war machine. By the mid-second century BC, it had rolled over Greece and was rapidly Hellenizing itself. The Athenian Greek “phallocracy,” as the historian Eva Keuls so nicely puts it, would mix with Rome’s pagan—and, later, Christian—values to create a long-lasting model for modern sexual regulation.

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IMPERIAL BEDROOMS: SEX AND THE STATE IN ANCIENT ROME

O
N THE BANKS of the Tiber River stood a sacred grove of trees where the worship of the wine god Bacchus by his cult had got way out of hand. It was in the shadows of those trees that an episode began—one of many in ancient Rome—in which power politics fed on sexual scandal. The bacchanals might have been morally and sexually corrupt, but they were never a serious threat to Rome. Nevertheless, their orgies and especially the liberties they took with wellborn young men became pretexts for years of jolting government repressions. In 186 BC, the sounds of bacchanalian ecstasies ringing out of the woods were suddenly replaced by the cries of thousands of people being killed.

The worship of Bacchus (Greek: Dionysus) was nothing new in urban Rome or elsewhere in the Mediterranean, nor was the cult’s association with sexual abandon. Dionysian festivals in Athens were famously drunken and lewd. In Egypt the god was honored with parades featuring 180-foot golden phalluses. However, the sect had never been officially integrated into Roman religion, and it was now growing in numbers and in disorderliness. The cult in Italy was previously all-female, but men and women were now worshipping together, greasing themselves up with wine and crossing all sexual boundaries. “Every person found at hand that sort of enjoyment to which he was disposed by the passion predominant in his nature,” wrote the Roman historian Livy, including “frequent pollutions of men with each other.”

The celebrants drifted from sexual vice to sorcery and other crimes. “From this storehouse of villainy,” Livy wrote, they plotted frauds and forgeries, committed murders, and cast dark spells. The men predicted the future as their bodies contorted on the ground. The women, their hair disheveled, ran down to the river, where they plunged blazing torches into the water and then pulled them out still burning. The bacchanals couldn’t hide their revels—bacchanalia—in the crowded city, so they beat drums and crashed symbols to make sure that “none of the cries uttered by the persons suffering violence or murder could be heard.” Those percussive noises had become common of late: The cult’s celebrations had increased to five times per month from three days per year.

Like everyone else, Rome’s senators heard the racket, but they were still shocked when they learned what the cult had got up to, especially with regard to the bacchanals’ initiation of Rome’s favorite sons. Wellborn young men were being hazed into the group with sodomy, and killed if they resisted. The whole matter came to light when the consul Spurius Postumius Albinus, one of Rome’s two top officials, learned that an aristocratic young man named Publius Aebutius was about to be served up to the cult by his parents.

Aebutius’s mother and stepfather had been stealing from him for some time, and wanted him neutralized before he found out. Killing Aebutius was too risky, so they planned to ruin him with bacchanalian sexual disgrace. Ignorant of what awaited him, he told his favorite prostitute, Hispala, that he would have to refuse her affections because bacchanalian rules required him to abstain from sex before his initiation. Horrified, Hispala cried out that he was being set up for a bad fall. She told Aebutius that she knew from personal experience that young men were raped by the cult’s priests and then went on to do “everything that was abominable” themselves. She begged Aebutius with copious tears to promise her that he would steer clear of the bacchanals. He listened to her, and went to his parents to tell them of his refusal to join the cult. They took the news poorly, accusing him of disrespecting them and the gods, and even worse, of being too weak to resist the sexual lure of the “serpent” Hispala even for a few days. Aebutius was literally thrown out of the house.

In gossipy Rome, it wasn’t long before the young man’s problems came to Postumius’s attention. He summoned Hispala to tell him what she knew. Shaking with terror in his presence, she told him that the bacchanals had begun to admit males after a priestess brought her own sons into the rites. Young men all over Italy were now joining. In fact, initiates were restricted to people no more than twenty years old. At such an age, she explained, they were “more liable to suffer deception and personal abuse” and accept the priestesses’ command to “think nothing unlawful.” Postumius checked out the story and realized that he had a whale of a good—and exploitable—scandal on his hands. He got to work organizing the repression of the cult.

This story of Aebutius and Hispala, told by Livy about two hundred years after the events took place, is too dramatic to be entirely credible. An aristocratic boy—the hope of Rome—is rescued from his thieving parents at the last minute by a whore with a heart of gold; a heroic consul takes action to save the boy, and Rome, from perdition. It’s too much. Yet whether or not Livy gilded the narrative lily is beside the point. However the subject of bacchanalian excesses got to Postumius, the cult was made to order as an excuse for a decisive exercise of state police authority. Young male Roman citizens were now involved: That changed everything.

Rome was still reeling from the memory of almost losing a war with Carthage. The city had been thrown into turmoil after losing more than fifty thousand men to the general Hannibal in the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC. Roman control of Italy was still tentative. Nothing was more important than Rome’s military, and nothing would be allowed to weaken it. The army’s ranks were open only to upper-class Roman citizens; Postumius could accuse the bacchanals of enfeebling the men Rome relied on most by taking in youngsters such as Aebutius. In a rousing speech, the consul demanded to know whether Rome’s weapons should be entrusted to “wretches brought out of that temple of obscenity,” and whether those “contaminated with their own foul debaucheries and those of others [should] be champions for the chastity of [Rome’s] wives and children.”

The answer: no. The cult was infecting Rome like a disease, Postumius warned, and had to be put down. The Senate gave him and Rome’s other consul unprecedented powers to root out suspects, and to execute them without the possibility of appeal. Almost immediately, the consuls unleashed a massive wave of terror that lasted two years and claimed about seven thousand lives throughout Italy. The crackdown, which included political enemies as well as fornicators, caused panic and mass suicides. Suspects trying to flee Rome were arrested by guards posted outside the city and thrown in prison. The majority were quickly sentenced to death. The men were executed by the state; the women were delivered to their homes for punishment.

No Roman religious repression had ever reached this scale. Given its scope and the severity of the violence, one would think that the bacchanals actually threatened to “crush the commonwealth,” as Postumius had claimed. However, that was not the case. By the time of the crackdown, the cult had long been tolerated in Rome. A state that had defeated Carthage and Hannibal had little to fear from sex-crazed soothsayers and cymbal-crashers. Had the bacchanals remained a rural, female-only cult, they probably could have continued their celebrations as they had been doing throughout the peninsula for centuries.

The government’s propaganda exploited the cult’s sexual deviance, especially its “feminizing” of wellborn young men. Male-male sex was widespread, but Romans, like the Greeks, still condemned passive homosexuality. Any accusation that sodomy was being forced on noble boys was a sure way to stir up indignation. When the news broke that young men such as Aebutius were getting involved, especially at the age of army service, the conditions became ripe for a power play. The repression was staged to give Postumius and the Senate the chance to flex their muscles and consolidate control over the entire Italian peninsula.

As noted, it is unlikely that the bacchanals were actually orchestrating the mass rape of Rome’s better class of young men. If they had been, the news would have gotten out long before Postumius had his sit-down with Hispala. The cult probably did get to a few youngsters, though, and people were willing to believe the worst—especially if the perpetrators were women. That a cult priestess could deliver up her own sons for such outrages, or that Aebutius’s mother would try to get rid of him this way, was shocking but conceivable: This was a period in which many thought Rome’s women were overstepping their bounds and weakening the state as a result. Rome was in the ascent, but there was the nagging feeling that something was slipping.
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GROWING PAINS: UPPITY WOMEN

Rome was still a republic in the second century BC, but it was already trying on the jeweled crown of empire. Its conquests, especially in the east, had brought in a flood of luxuries, which were engorging the city with wealth. For the fortunate, the hard edges of domestic life were softening. People redecorated their houses with bronze couches and ornate Asian rugs and tapestries. Dinner parties became more elaborate and expensive. No host who truly cared would think of hosting guests without live entertainment from pricey dancers and harpists. Even cooks, traditionally regarded as among the lowest of menial slaves, were now sought after as artists.

Not bad, then, but all that fine living made many Romans concerned that Rome was squandering its essential virtues for luxury and going soft on a diet of misplaced priorities. They feared that their fellow citizens were losing their mastery over their passions, as well as the singleness of purpose that had long defined the Roman ideal character. The conquering Roman armies in the east were already seen as corrupted; their discipline was “completely destroyed” even before they came home, to the point where their general was almost prosecuted. Back home, the newly rich or richer Romans appeared soft, cruel, and sexually unhinged. Though no one could know then how far things would later degenerate under the “bad” emperors, there was a sense that a growing moral rot was setting in, which required energetic countermeasures. The repression of the bacchanals was just one of many such efforts.

Just as Postumius’s witch hunt was dying down, the censor Cato the Elder imposed heavy taxes on boy slaves, expensive women’s jewelry, and fancy carriages. He also expelled seven men from the Senate in one year for immoral behavior. One of them was Lucius Quinctius Flamininus, an admiral from an old family who had successfully commanded a fleet against the Macedonians. For his victories he was elected consul and given authority over Roman Gaul. However, on account of his later lusts and dissipation, he lost everything: Lucius had developed a weakness for a young Carthaginian hustler named Philip and paid the boy extravagantly to accompany him on a trip to Gaul. Philip went along, but complained bitterly that the journey prevented him from attending a gladiator contest in Rome.

The young man’s grousing was most likely a play to drive up his escort fees, but Lucius still felt obliged to give him something extra. One drunken night in the tent they shared, a local nobleman appeared as a refugee with his children to beg the consul’s protection. While the man made his plea through an interpreter, Lucius turned to Philip and asked: “Since you left the show of gladiators, have you a mind to see this Gaul dying?” Phillip said he did, and Lucius grabbed a sword and hit the Gaul across the head. As the nobleman turned to flee, Lucius ran him through with the blade. Another version of the story has Lucius pandering to a female harlot in Rome. During an elaborate meal, while she reclined her head on his chest, she told him that she had never witnessed an execution and would dearly love to see one. Lucius then called a prisoner into the banquet hall and sliced his head off on the spot. In both these accounts, the message is the same: Luxury wasted a good Roman’s reason.