A peculiar feature of Greek medical thinking on sex and orgasm was an emphasis on the importance of heat to the process, almost as if it were a chemical reaction in a test tube that required help from a Bunsen burner. That is why in Greek writing on sex there is much imagery of fire and water, loosely applied as and when it could illustrate a particular theory. Some held, for instance, that the womb was a dry, painful area that could only be sated by men’s sexual fluid. Others suggested that fertility required extra heat in the vaginal area.
In the Hippocractic Corpus, a writer contends: ‘In the case of women, it is my contention that when, during intercourse, the vagina is rubbed and the womb is disturbed, an irritation is set up in the womb which produces pleasure and heat in the rest of the body … A woman also releases something from her body, sometimes in the womb, which then becomes moist, and sometimes externally as well, if the womb is open wider than normal.’
The Hippocratic belief that women’s sexual pleasure ceases promptly when the male ejaculates is similarly explained in terms of heat and combustion: ‘What happens is like this: if into boiling water you pour another quantity of water which is cold, the water stops boiling … In the same way, the man’s sperm arriving in the womb extinguishes both the heat and the pleasure of the woman. Both the pleasure and the heat reach their peak simultaneously with the arrival of sperm in the womb, and then they cease. If, for example, you pour wine on a flame, first of all the flame flares up and increases for a short period when you pour the wine on. In the same way the woman’s heat flares up in response to the man’s sperm and then dies away. The pleasure experienced by the woman during intercourse is considerably less than the man’s, although it lasts longer. The reason that the man feels more pleasure is that the secretion from the bodily fluid in his case occurs suddenly, and as the result of a more violent disturbance than in the woman’s case.’
Another Hippocratic theorist avers that if a woman is too excited before intercourse, she will ‘ejaculate prematurely’, meaning that her womb will close and she will not conceive. ‘Like a flame that flares when wine is sprinkled on it, the woman’s heat blazes most brilliantly when the male sperm is sprayed on it … She shivers. The womb seals itself. And the combined elements for a new life are safely contained within.’ Another Hippocratic argued that the need to have fluid inserted into the womb to quench its thirst ensured that a woman could not turn to her female companions to free her from sexual dependence on her husband.
For Galen, writing long after the Hippocratics, heat during sexual climax is crucial to conception; simultaneous orgasm generates enough heat to ‘commingle the seed, the animate matter, and create new life’. Later texts also recommend mutual simultaneous orgasm as the best way of dealing with the unfortunate consequences for fertility of a woman being too cold or too hot.
In her anxiety to conceive, or at least to convince her husband it was important for him to satisfy her so she might better do so, it is easy to forget female masturbation and the role – considerable in fact – that it played in the sex life of Ancient Greeks. Female masturbation was discounted by Greek medical writing. For the usual reasons of sexual politics, the Hippocratic authors would not countenance the notion of women being able to dispense with the need for their husband through masturbation. One writer announces, quite spuriously one would guess, that women do not get stones in the bladder as often as men do ‘because they do not masturbate’. Even if a wife used a dildo on occasion, in Hippocratic medical thought it could not benefit her because of its inherent inability to introduce semen into her womb. Masturbation simply could not fulfil women’s sexual appetite.
Female masturbation is equally glossed over by most Greek painting and literature, but this is largely because women were so rarely portrayed in Greek art. Hans Licht, a classics professor at Leipzig University, nevertheless came to the daring deduction in a 1932 book, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, that Ancient Greek women were avid masturbators.
But even though Licht was writing in the licentious atmosphere of Weimar Germany, on the subject of Ancient Greek womanhood and masturbation he was still careful only to mention their ‘mysterious conduct’, and a characteristic form of Ancient Greek leather-based dildo, known as olisbos, as depicted in many vase paintings, as well as references in Lysistrata to women lusting after them. Women described, however elliptically, in Ancient Greek literature as using olis-hos are often portrayed as wearing the things out in frustration.
Licht writes of a bowl in the British Museum in his time showing a contented-looking naked woman with two olisboi in her hand. Similar items were held by the Louvre and the Berlin Museum, which also had a vase showing a woman douching after use of the olisbos. Lucian and Plutarch write about a Lesbos full of olisbos-wielding lesbians, including Sappho, who in her own work describes one of her solo orgasms, obtained (after due prayer to Aphrodite) during a sexually fallow patch:
When I but glance at thee, no word from my dumb
lips is heard
My tongue is tied, a subtle flame
Leaps in a moment o’er my frame,
I see not with mine eyes, my ear can only murmurs hear,
Sweat dews my brow, quick tremors pass
Through every limb, more wan than grass
I blanch, and frenzied, nigh to death,
I gasp away my breath.
Dildo-making became a specialised commercial cottage industry around 500 BC in one particular city, Miletus, in Ionia. Miletus olisboi, which were exported across the Greek world, were manufactured by shoemakers from wood and padded leather, and were designed to be used with olive oil for lubrication. The shoemakers’ skill was to sew the kid leather carefully so the stitches would not hurt women users.
The olisbos was used by both heterosexual women and lesbians, or tribads as they were known. The device was used either alone in privacy, or communally by two or more women together. A passage in Lucian’s Erotes alludes to the latter use. A character called Charicles, who is outraged by the olisbos, complains about ‘the invention of such shameless instruments, the monstrous imitation made for unfruitful love, lest a woman embrace another woman as a man would do; let that word which hitherto so rarely reaches the ear – I am ashamed to mention it – let tribadic obscenity celebrate its triumphs without shame.’
In other works, there is less implicit criticism of the practice. The third-century BC writer, Herondas, in The Two Friends, or Confidential Talk, describes how the friends discuss their olishoi without embarrassment. The play’s complicated, gossipy and always risqué storyline would be far from out of place in a modern Sex and the City episode – or at an Ann Summers party.
Just as, in the modern world, we have bought a bit too readily into the idea of the dreamy, philosophical Greeks as out-and-out hedonists, we have cleaved a little too much to the notion of the technically savvy, sophisticated Romans as sexually a bit perverted and debauched. The situation is similar in many ways to how perceptions might be a few hundred years from now of twenty-first-century Britain and the US. From the evidence of contemporary popular culture, it could appear that old-fashioned Britain is rather refined in sexual matters, while technically advanced America, home of 90 per cent of Internet pornography, is brash, sexy and liberated. In practice, however, America is in many ways more modest and prudish about sex than the UK.
Rome had always been a city where prostitution flourished, fed by the ravenous orgasmic appetites of its men and women. According to a 1920s English scholar, W. C. Firebaugh, who is thought to have coined the expression that prostitution is ‘the oldest profession’, there was a complex grading system for prostitutes, and the women who practised this calling were by no means all from the lower levels of society.
The highest grade were the Delicatae, the kept women of the wealthy and prominent men, the direct equivalent of the Greek hetairai. Next down were Famosae, daughters and even wives of wealthy families who simply enjoyed sex for its own sake. Next came the well-respected Meretri
x, the career, paid harlot; Prosedae, who waited in front of their brothel for passing trade, Nonariae, night walkers forbidden to appear before the ninth hour, Mimae, mime actresses, who were invariably prostitutes on the side, Cymhalistriae, cymbal players, Ambubiae (singers) and Citharistriae (harpists) who also moonlighted as prostitutes.
Further down still were the Scortum, whom Firebaugh defined merely as ‘common strumpets’, Scorta erratica, peripatetic, travelling strumpets who walked the street, Busturiae, who hung around funerals to service miserable mourners, Copae, bar maids who could be hired for the night by travellers as bedmates and from who we get the word ‘copulation’ as well as the still less delicate ‘copping off, Doris, harlots of particular beauty who worked naked, Lupae, ‘she wolves’ known for the peculiar wolf-like cry they uttered when they came, or pretended to come, to orgasm, or alternatively for their tonguing skills (remember how a she-wolf licked Romulus and Remus better when she found and nursed them).
At the bottom of this substantial heap were Aelicariae, girls in bakers’ shops, which were generally regarded as brothels, particularly where phallus-shaped cakes were sold (the Aelicariae would slip clients in when the bread was in the fornix – the oven – from whence comes our word ‘fornicate’), Noctiluae, another grade of night walker, Blitidae, lower-class bar girls who got their name from a cheap drink sold in the tavern where they worked, Forariae, country girls who frequented highways, Gallinae, prostitutes prone to steal your wallet (so named after hens because of their propensity take anything and scatter everything), Diobolares – girls who would have sex for the bargain price of just two obols, Amasiae, enthusiastic amateurs whose reward was sexual pleasure alone, and finally, the bargain basement Quadrantariae, the lowest grade of all, whose charms were no longer merchantable.
So evidence of the Romans’ debauchery is not exactly lacking, yet it is easily forgotten that same civilisation did also advance further than the Greeks ever did the cause of equitable marriage and the more equal distribution of orgasmic pleasure between the sexes. Musonius Rufus, a Roman Stoic of the first century AD, indeed, created the modern marital ideal seized upon later by Christianity. To paraphrase his words, Musonius’s idea was that marriage should be a communion of souls with a view to producing children. With his strict ethical doctrine came a then rare sexual equality, with neither partner being allowed to have sex outside wedlock or before marriage. It was as a result of Musonius’s beliefs that in the fourth-century AD, adultery was made punishable by a fine. On the other hand, the revenue from this taxation was so great that the state was able to build a temple to Venus with it.
But there are many examples too, as evidence of the novel Roman concept of Mr and Mrs Right, the perfect partners, of married couples putting up their own heterosexual erotic domestic sculptures. On the Roman-owned Aegean island of Delos there is a statue in a Roman house of a married couple locked together symbolically, part of the same piece of stone. What is most striking about this is that the statue was erected and paid for by the wife. More generally, too, in the Roman world, the matriarch was a commonplace figure, and one inconceivable to the Greeks. Middle-class and noble women seen in Pompeii frescoes give every impression of enjoying quite remarkable equality with their menfolk.
It is true to say that some of the old Greek fear of female sexuality pervaded Roman society also. Pliny believed women’s sexual feelings such a threat that he advocated dousing them by applying to the labia mouse droppings, snail excrement and ‘blood taken from the ticks on a wild black bull’ – a combination that must have quenched both female and male lust. Juvenal in his Satires complained: ‘And remember, there’s nothing these women won’t do to satisfy their ever-moist groins: they have just one obsession – sex.’
But Roman sex manuals betray a more modern, less misogynist view of women. They portray the female orgasm as something all men should strive for, even if Ovid, in his first-century AD Ars Amatoria, does not quite strike the tone of a modern Cosmopolitan article. ‘Use force. Women like forceful men,’ writes the poet. ‘They often seem to surrender unwillingly when they are really anxious to give in. When you find the spot where a woman loves to be touched, don’t be too shy to touch it … You’ll see her eyes sparkle … She’ll moan and whisper sweet nothings and sigh contentedly … But be careful that you don’t gallop ahead, leaving her behind. And make sure that she doesn’t reach the finish before you do.’
The fairest assessment of Roman sex is that it was a bit of a mixed bag. Venus, the goddess of love, appears in Roman life simultaneously as the guardian of honourable marriage, the matriarch of the Roman nation, the patroness of prostitutes – and the persuader-in-chief against licentiousness.
No appraisal of Roman society can be complete without a voyage round the more grotesque manifestations of the Roman male’s lust for exotic orgasmic delights. The Romans’ predilection for a high-octane sexual thrill may go back to the Bacchanalia tradition that originated in the far south of Italy and moved northwards. The Bacchanalia festivals, a debased form of the Greeks’ Dionysia, were a distasteful hive of violence, high emotion and sex, in that order.
The immediate ancestors of the Romans celebrated marriage with a wedding orgy in which all the husband’s friends had intercourse with the bride first, in the presence of witnesses. This is thought to be a survival of a so-called state of ‘free prostitution’ that preceded marriage in earlier times in which the idea of stable-coupledom was unknown. ‘Natural and physical laws are alien and even opposed to the marriage-tie,’ wrote Otto Kiefer in his 1934 Sexual Life in Ancient Rome. ‘Accordingly, the woman who is entering marriage must atone to Mother Nature for violating her, and go through a period of free prostitution, in which she purchases the chastity of marriage by preliminary unchastity.’
Such practices may have co-existed with the Bacchanalia. But by the time of Rome’s greatest influence, Bacchanalia was no longer regarded as a good thing. The historian Livy explained how more discerning later Romans thoroughly disapproved of the occasions: ‘After the rites had become open to everybody, so that men attended as well as women, and their licentiousness increased with the darkness of night, there were no shameful or criminal deed from which they shrank. The men were guilty of more immoral acts among themselves than the women. Those who struggled against dishonour, or were slow to inflict it on others, were slaughtered in sacrifice like brute beasts. The holiest article of their faith was to think nothing a crime.’
Such orgiastic behaviour, according to the historian of the orgy, Burgo Partridge, ‘became, not a purgative, but a habit-forming drug’. The corrosive Nature of Bacchanalia was not lost on Roman legislators, however. Some 7,000 people were prosecuted for taking part in them, many of whom were put to death. A decree issued by the Senate in 186 BC finally outlawed them. Nero’s tutor Seneca was moved by such excesses to state that, ‘pleasure is a vulgar thing, petty and unworthy of respect, common to dumb animals’. Yet the spirit of the Bacchanalia survived in the sex lives of many of the emperors, Nero notably included.
Of the Emperor Galba, we learn from Seutonius: ‘He was very much given to the intercourse between men, and amongst such he preferred men of ripe age, exoletes.’ (Pedicon was the Latin name for ‘a man who exercises his member in the anus’. He was also called a pederast or drawk. The man ‘who allows himself to be invaded in this way’ was called the cinede (cinae-dus). If the cinede was ‘worn out’, and hence a looser fit, he was called an exolete. Domitian enjoyed heterosexual sex more. He described it as ‘bed wrestling’. One of his favourite pre-bout activities was personally depilating his concubines to assist them achieve the pubic hairstyle of the time, which was for women to remove everything by either plucking or singeing.
The Emperor Augustus was the originator of strict and civilising Roman marriage laws, yet he, too, was pretty dissolute. He once instructed the wife of an ex-consul to attend him in his bedroom and sent her back to her husband’s dining room, visibly flushed and with hair ruffl
ed, leaving little to the imagination as to what had occurred. Augustus also got his wife to help him procure virgins.
Tiberius forbade the execution of virgins so that when such women were condemned to death, they would have to suffer the extra humiliation of being publicly deflowered by the executioner just before the sentence was carried out. Of Tiberius, Burgo Partridge, using Suetonius as principal source, writes: ‘At his retreat in Capri he devised an apartment with seats and couches in it, and “adapted to the secret practice of abominable lewdness”, where he entertained companies of girls and catamites who he called Spintriae and who defiled one another in his presence triplici serie conexi in order to arouse his flagging powers … In the Blue Grotto he swam like an old shark amongst a shoal of naked little boys, of an age when “they were already fairly strong but had not yet been weaned”. These he called “his little fishes” and trained them to play between his thighs while he was bathing. The children were encouraged to suck on his penis as if it were a nipple.’
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.
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