Were the Romans tolerant about sex?

Popular mythology holds that a tolerant and affirmative view of human sexuality prevailed in classical Antiquity until it was crushed by puritanical and repressive Christianity. I passively accepted this view until I read Kyle Harper’s celebrated book, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. Harper shows that, although the standard picture is not entirely wrong, it is so incomplete as to be fundamentally misleading.

It is true that Roman sexual norms were permissive in some ways. In particular, it was entirely permitted for free Roman men to have sex with male and female slaves and prostitutes, including children. No norm of male fidelity existed: male extramarital sex was not merely tolerated in practice but was generally considered completely acceptable as a matter of principle, even if wives found it hurtful. Many men had a general preference for boys or for women, but such preferences were merely personal taste, not a defining identity; most men seem to have been what we would call bisexual. Although only a small minority of Romans owned slaves, the prostitution of slaves was widespread, so coerced sex was ubiquitous. The price of sex in the Roman Empire was about that of a loaf of bread.

Roman permissiveness was highly selective, however. Female sexuality was governed by the same timeless code that we find in most premodern societies: women were required to be virgins at marriage and to be faithful to their husbands thereafter. Lesbianism is seldom mentioned by classical authors, and inasmuch as it was noticed at all, it was described with contempt and ridicule. Women’s behavior was governed by tight modesty norms, and in the Greek-speaking provinces many women seem to have worn face veils in public.

The norms governing sex between men are more surprising. The legal provisions on the subject were set out in a shadowy document called the Lex Scantinia. Though the original text has been lost, we can infer from references by contemporary writers that it likely punished both men who sexually penetrated a free Roman man or boy, and men who consented to being penetrated, who were described as semivir or ‘half man’. In other words, the Romans’ supposed tolerance of homosexuality was strictly a licence for free men to sexually penetrate unfree ones. Being penetrated was shameful and inconsistent with the social status of the Roman man, and permissiveness about the penetration of male slaves flowed from the fact that their status approximated that of ‘breathing furniture’. Norms were only slightly more flexible in the Greek-speaking provinces, where freeborn men might be sexually penetrated during their adolescence but not subsequently.

Christianity overthrew nearly all these norms. Sex within marriage was (somewhat reluctantly) allowed, but all extramarital sex was morally condemned, and many kinds of extramarital sex were violently prohibited by law. One result was the invention of male fidelity. Unusually for an ancient society, Roman men could have only one wife, but, as we have seen, they were not required to be faithful to their wives. Extramarital sex was condemned in Judaism, but men were allowed to have multiple wives. By putting together the Jewish prohibition of extramarital sex with Roman monogamy, the early Christians arrived at the idea that each man should be faithful to one woman, just as each woman should be faithful to one man. The novelty of this innovation is hard to overstate: it is not clear that the ideal of exclusive mutual fidelity has ever been invented independently in any other major civilizations, though it was eventually to spread to many non-Christian cultures. Perhaps we shall live to know if its hold over the European peoples survives Christianity’s decline.

The early Christians had some sense of their radicalism here. ‘I am not unaware that most think it is adultery only to violate a married woman’, said the early Christian teacher John Chrysostom. ‘But I say that it is a wicked and licentious adultery for a man with a wife to have an affair even with a public whore, a slave girl, or any other woman without a husband … Your wife did not come to you, and leave behind her father and mother and her entire household, in order to be humiliated.’ The early Christians were certainly not consistent feminists, but they did occasionally sound like they were. ‘The laws were made by men, and they are disposed against women’, said the humane Pelagius.

In theory, Christianity grounds moral status in people’s relationship to God rather than their social position. One might expect this to have motivated doubts about the position of slaves. In practice, this was only very intermittently true, and most early Christians accepted the existence of slavery unquestioningly (the great exception was Gregory of Nyssa, the first recorded abolitionist in history). But Christians did begin to restrict the worst forms of exploitation.

One example was a sustained campaign by the Christianized Empire to stamp out coerced prostitution. In 428, the Imperial government forbade pimps, fathers, and slave-owners from selling women for involuntary sex. Transgressors were to be arrested and sent to the public mines, ‘which is’, the law ran, ‘less of a punishment than that of a woman who is seized by a pimp and compelled to endure the filth of an intercourse that she did not will’. Remarkably, the law also protected legally free women who were forced into prostitution by poverty, who should be ‘relieved of every necessity of this misery by appealing to the succor of bishops, judges, or even defensors [municipal officials]’.

During the Middle Ages, some Christians started to notice commonalities between desire for human beings and the love that Christians are supposed to have for God, like longing, self-abandonment, a sense of one’s incompleteness, and the will to make oneself worthy. This led them to see desire as a potentially noble and ennobling state of mind. Reading Harper’s book, I wondered whether early Christians shared any of these ideas. 

The answer, with very limited exceptions, seems to be no. Early Christian writers were relentlessly negative about sexual desire: the most optimistic view held it to be a morally neutral animal appetite, and the more common view was that it is intrinsically sinful. Virginity was widely regarded as preferable to marriage, and marriage was generally accepted only as a means to procreation and a concession to human weakness (though of course Christians valued friendship and charity between husband and wife). In this respect, the early Christians emerge from Harper’s book roughly as the austere fanatics of popular mythology.

In other ways, though, the early Christians seem more complex. Christian restrictiveness about sexual behavior was indeed partly motivated by negativity about desire, but also by the extension of moral concern to the rightless people of the classical world. Even at the level of theory, this extension was extremely haphazard, and in practice the vivid, predatory sexual life of Antiquity often continued unabated under a veneer of Christianization. But as George Orwell said, ‘An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face.’ The European peoples were to live under the Christian illusion for almost seventeen centuries, and it has surely not left them unchanged.