Pen & Sword Review: Sex and Sexuality in Ancient Rome, by LJ Trafford

Blurb

From Emperors and empresses, poets and prostitutes, slaves and plebs, Ancient Rome was a wealth of different experiences and expectations. None more so than around the subject of sex and sexuality. The image of Ancient Rome that has come down to us is one of sexual excess: emperors gripped by perversion partaking in pleasure with whomever and whatever they fancied during week long orgies. But how true are these tales of depravity? Was it really a sexual free for all? What were the laws surrounding sexual engagement? How did these vary according to gender and class? And what happened to those who transgressed the rules?

We invite you to climb into bed with the Romans to discover some very odd contraceptive devices, gather top tips on how to attract a partner and learn why you should avoid poets as lovers at all costs. Along the way we’ll stumble across potions and spells, emperors and their favourites and some truly eye-popping interior décor choices.

My Review

I’ve reviewed a couple of these ‘Sex and Sexuality in…’ series already, Georgian Britain and Victorian Britain, and I’m reading ‘Stuart Britain’ and ‘Tudor England’ at the moment, and I have ‘Medieval England’ on my TBR pile. I also have another book, ‘Sex, Love and Marriage in the Elizabethan Age’ on my TBR pile, which isn’t part of the ‘Sex and Sexuality’ series, but it seems to fit in chronologically.

LJ Trafford writes fiction and non-fiction and I reviewed her other Pen & Sword book, How to Survive in Ancient Rome in November last year. In her earlier book, she covered the basics of life in the city. Now, we get into specifics of people’s not so private lives.

Her writing is entertaining and easy to read. It is also fairly in-depth, covering the way people thought about sex and sexuality in Rome. She also covers Roman attitudes to marriage and the social implications of private behaviour. She tries to explain virtus and other Roman concepts such as infamia.

LJ Trafford makes a clear case that sexuality was about what a person did, not who they did it with. There were clear rules about what was acceptable and what was not. We might find some of the rules and social mores bizarre or downright vile (it was fine for a free adult man to have penetrative sexual relations with slave boys, but not be penetrated himself or to have penetrative anal sex with another adult free man), the rules were misogynist and often hypocritically applied. Women weren’t supposed to have sex with anyone except their husband. Divorce was fairly common, although unfairly applied to men and women.

The focus is on the well-known and the Imperial family, since they were often written about and gossiped about. I disagreed with some of the conclusions made, because I’ve read biographies about individual Imperial family members by experts on those people, but generally things are accurate. The author makes it clear that many of the sources are gossiping and have reasons to dislike the subject of their gossiping. The assumption was that bad political behaviour meant bad sexual behaviour, and that good personal behaviour excused bad political behaviour. It’s important to remember this when reading original sources.

The author draws on translations of primary sources. It has a decent bibliography for further reading and an index.