The Joy of Sexus

by León, Vicki

  After the Greek city-states fell into decline and were swallowed up by the Romans in 146 B.C., the victors saw the silky spoils as great gifts to bring home to their wives and lovers. In no time, Roman women were sashaying about in diaphanous splendor. (By this era, Rome already imported Chinese silk and highly prized it, although it lacked the sheer quality.)

  Male writers, however, while busy ogling its female wearers, fumed over the alluring new trend. Pliny called Koan silks “the vestments that cover a woman while at the same time revealing her naked charms.” He and others obsessed even more over the fact that men began dressing in Koan. Guys pointed to its lightweight fabric, claiming it was ideal to beat Rome’s summer heat. But conventional Roman males stoutly, sweatily stuck to the well-swathed, head-to-foot woolen toga. Anything lighter or looser spelled decadence. Or the E word: effeminate.

  Thargelia of Miletus:

  Mistress of the marriage-go-round

  As the top-tier professionals of Aphrodite, the Greek sex goddess, heterae had their own stringent rules for business success: don’t fall in love with the johns, and (Hera forbid!) don’t marry the customers!

  For years during the era of Persian king Cyrus the Great (576 to 530 B.C.), a spectacular courtesan named Thargelia topped the hetera popularity charts. Hailing from the Ionian Greek city-state of Miletus on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, Thargelia was gorgeous and then some. She also had a solid reputation for charisma, shrewdness, and brains; nevertheless, she kept ignoring her coworkers’ advice about marriage. According to the Greek sophist Hippias in his book A Collection, Thargelia tied the knot fourteen times!

  Ms. T. wed a variety of well-known men and rulers, including Antiochus, the king of Thessaly. But all that pillow talk garnered her quite a bit more than wedding rings. The Mata Hari of her time and place, the spice in Thargelia’s life largely came from double-agenting, not sex or marriage proposals. Among her male allies (if not her spouses), she was said to have included Cyrus the Great, for whom she did spying and intrigue.

  Greek historian Plutarch, in his Parallel Lives biography, noted that “Thargelia, a great beauty, extremely charming and at the same time sagacious, had numerous suitors among the Greeks. She brought all who had to do with her over to the Persian interest, and by their means, being men of the greatest power and station, she sowed the seeds of the Median [that is, Persian] faction up and down in several cities.”

  Since the Greeks and the Persians were at each other’s throats for centuries, notably the fifty-year (with time-outs) Persian War, from 498 B.C. to a peace treaty in 449, small wonder that the Athenians and other citizens of Greek city-states came to regard Thargelia’s name as synonymous with “traitor.”

  Like Thargelia, her fellow citizen of Miletus, Aspasia was an independent female who lived for philosophy and politics. Athenians loved to slander this intimate companion of Pericles.

  The Athenians had extra-long memories. Nearly two hundred years after Thargelia, another beauteous and clever woman from Miletus came under deep suspicion for her role in politics—and her influence on men of power.

  Her name was Aspasia; although a well-educated woman and the longtime live-in lover of Pericles, Athens’ top politician and general, she was a non-Athenian and therefore a metic, or resident alien. As such, she was accused of persuading her man to wage war against the Greek island of Samos. Her alleged motive? The Samians had refused to call off their war against Miletus.

  It helps to know that the city-states of the ever-belligerent Greeks fought nonstop with one another. Their quarrels often flamed into actual warfare, with resultant loss of life, atrocities, enslavements, and other gruesome outcomes. They hardly needed women such as Thargelia and Aspasia to incite them—but outspoken, sexually independent gals did make very convenient scapegoats. (And doubtless excellent spies, if they chose to be.)

  Thargelia doesn’t seem to have incurred official wrath. But Aspasia, invariably compared to her countrywoman Thargelia, certainly did. During her twenty years with Pericles, she got slandered onstage and off by poets, playwrights, and politicians galore.

  When Athens went to war with Sparta in 431 B.C., the political climate got even nastier. Accusers lobbed a trumped-up charge of impiety against Aspasia. This delightfully vague accusation about ticking off the gods could legally be made by any citizen. Someone found guilty of impiety could receive the death penalty. As a non-Athenian, Aspasia couldn’t even testify on her own behalf. Instead, her lover Pericles made an emotional plea regarding her innocence, and the case was dismissed.

  Contempt for metics (and women who did not keep their lips buttoned) ran deep among the Athenians. Sadly, most of what little we “know” about Aspasia is malicious gossip, invention, and mud-slinging largely aimed at her dedicated love partner, Pericles. (More details about Aspasia in the entries Mediterranean on kissing and on Pericles and Aspasia as a couple.)

  Mystery Cults:

  The origin of the orgy

  Ancient orgies were not merely banal gatherings of horny civilians, eager to engage in group sex. Long-ago orgies involved initiation rites, strong intoxicants, wild dancing, spiritual secrets, religious ecstacy, and at times earthy debauchery, all of it focused around a deity or two.

  The rites of these orgiastic cults, often called “the mysteries,” were not free-for-alls or open to the public, either. Groups tended to be membership only. Members, called orgeone, were overseen by an adept called the orgiophant, who revealed the secrets and attempted to direct the activities.

  Mention “orgy deity,” and the name that immediately comes to mind is the wine god Dionysus and his Roman counterpart, Bacchus, but there were many other orgiastic cults and mysteries in ancient times. (Bacchus and the Bacchanalians also romp through another entry in this book.)

  The great mystery religion at Eleusis, for instance. From time immemorial, this pilgrimage was made by thousands of Greeks to Eleusis, a hilltop village about fourteen miles from Athens. There, amid the strictest secrecy, rites were held, new members were initiated, and the ancient story of the vegetation goddess Demeter and her search for her lost daughter Persephone was reenacted.

  The mysteries at Eleusis flourished for over 1,700 years, during which time hundreds of thousands of individuals from every corner of the Greek-speaking world were initiated into its secrets. The membership included emperors and slaves, women and men. To this day, most of what went on remains unknown. What few clues we have come from modern archaeology rather than the ancient literature.

  This was the temple complex of Eleusis, most famous and mysterious of the Greek mystery cults. The rites, still largely unknown to us, were carried out for 1,700 years.

  To belong, individuals lodged in Athens for six months to attend the spring rites, called the Lesser Mysteries. In September, for the Greater Mysteries, initiates walked the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis. As they walked, they called out to bring Persephone back from the Underworld into the realm of the living. After they arrived outside the sanctuary, they danced all night without sleeping, then entered the Telesterion, the initiation hall, which held as many as three thousand people. There, initiates saw visions. Anthropologists have researched extensively and spun numerous theories as to the cause of these visions. One plausible scenario builds on the known fact that celebrants drank kykeon, a special potion that contained barley grain, symbol of Demeter, and ergot, a well-known fungus. Consuming ergot-laden grain produces symptoms of vertigo, visual distortions, and intense hallucinations.

  Other psychotropic plants, including opium poppies, have also been suggested as the active ingredients of kykeon. Unlike other orgiastic mysteries, the one at Eleusis produced exaltation more spiritual than carnal. Members experienced ecstasy, Greek for “the flight of the soul from the body.”

  In his day, Plato wrote about another orgiastic group devoted to the moon cult of the Thracian goddess Bendi. It gained traction in Athens; originally as wild as the Bacchic rites, it became a watered-down
festival for Athenians, featuring naked lads in a horserace by torchlight.

  Not all orgies involved sexual congress. In fact, one of them removed sexual temptation in the most literal way. The cult of Cybele—later called Magna Mater by the Romans—had a huge following for six centuries. Its hardcore male adherents, called galli, paraded while high on mystical love for their goddess. In the throes of ecstasy (and possibly with a buzz on as well), the brand-new members of the galli chopped off their genitals and threw them into the crowds of parade watchers. (Veterans in the cult would have had no equipment to sacrifice but took part anyway.) Their three-day festival included one flagellation-filled day of blood, followed by Hilaria, the day of hilarity, where everyone shared a good laugh about the preceding day’s mutilations. Scarcely anyone died during these do-it-yourself activities, or so the stoic galli claimed.

  Other orgiastic cults centered around the worship of Orpheus, Adonis, Eumolpus, and the Cabeiri. Certain cults, such as the mysteries held on Samothrace, made snake handling part of the festivities; so did the snake-worshipping cult of Dionysus and earlier still, the Minoan goddesses on Crete.

  By the time decadence-loving imperials such as the emperors Caligula, Nero, Domitian, and Commodus came and went, orgies were often secular vulgarizations, madcap parties of sexual frenzy for participants and voyeurs. Nevertheless, the mysteries great and small continued to exert a powerful attraction—one in which countless initiates found solace and spiritual ecstasy.

  Prostitution:

  Love for sale, O.B.O.

  As that venerable maxim of movie producers proclaims, sex sells. And it has sold since the misty beginnings of recorded history, with demand always outstripping supply. And sometimes stripping the supply as well.

  Long-ago bawdy bodies of all genders were in the business of buying, selling, renting, loaning, and time-sharing sex. In fact, sex workers of one sort or another have been on the job even before the medium of exchange called money existed. The oldest profession indeed. Think about it: How do you suppose that hookers in Sodom and Gomorrah got paid?

  The ancient world was also crawling with hierodules, temple slaves affiliated with hundreds of different temples, often called “sacred prostitutes” in service to that deity. Egypt had scads of religious harlots but few secular sex workers; music, however, was thought to be very erotic, so female musicians and dancers often had a sexual sideline.

  In the Mesopotamian lands, ancient Sumer had ritual prostitutes from 2400 B.C. —and job offerings for secular entertainer-hookers both male and female. In addition, at the main ziggurat in the city of Ur, the head priestess and reigning male ruler performed a “sacred marriage” each year. A thousand years later in the same part of the world, Assyrian hookers had to abide by stringent dress codes, meaning they could not wear veils in the street like other women. If a prostitute defied the ordinance and got caught sashaying around in a veil, her punishment was a stinging fifty blows. Nearly as dismaying, she also had bitumen (a tarlike substance) poured on her head.

  About 600 B.C. or so, sex worker slaves received official status in Athens under lawmaker Solon, who set up the first state brothels. He also began a gladsome revenue stream for the city by taxing other prostitutes (called pornai) on their earnings. Pornai wore special clothing, follow-me shoes, and wigs or other distinctive hair signals.

  Sex workers paid taxes and came in all price ranges, from eye-candy courtesans to brothel slaves and streetwalkers.

  Hooking, called “browsing” in ancient Greek street slang, had a gamut of options and pricing levels. Among them: the plain vanilla brothel slave at one obol, the smallest coin; the street freelancers; the intermediate “sex optional” flute players, dancers, and musicians hired as entertainment at the all-male drinking parties. And on up the scale to sleek courtesans and, at the top, the educated and witty heterae or “companions.” The latter, mostly resident aliens from other parts of Greece, were educated freeborn women. Ideally, a hetera strove to have a circle of well-heeled men friends, each of whom picked up the tab for the different cost centers of her life: rent, clothes, jewelry, and so forth.

  Some heterae, such as one of the two famed seductresses named Lais, chose to time-share. In her case, she charged top drachma to a wealthy philosopher named Aristippus for her time and services two months of the year, then spent an equal number of sleepovers with the raggedy, outrageous Diogenes of Sinope. She must have had a real passion for Cynic philosophy, since Diogenes’ “home” in the Athens marketplace was a pithos, a large clay jar that once held wine or olive oil. Lais may have shared quarters with Diogenes’ pack of stray dogs as well!

  Athens’ nightlife was dull compared to that in the lively Greek metropolis of Corinth, located on the skinny isthmus joining the two parts of the Greek mainland. A mecca for prostitution, it boasted crowds of hierodules and equal numbers of secular call girls called the “colts of Aphrodite,” the sassy, stratospherically high-priced courtesans of that city.

  Athens and many other Greek city-states in Greece, Italy, Sicily, and Asia Minor also had a significant number of young male sex workers. Like their female competition, in Athens the boys tended to congregate on the Lycabettos hill, around the Ceramicus district, and in the port of Piraeus. They also favored cemeteries, which provided nice flat surfaces for al fresco bedding down and lots of “facebook” space for advertising one’s services.

  Athens’ most outrageous citizen, Diogenes, often shared his earthenware digs with stray dogs and famous floozies.

  Rome, and later the entire Roman Empire, provided the same staggering variety of paid sexual services as the Greek-speaking world, just a tad more bureaucratic. From 180 B.C. on, taxes were assessed on prostitution and brothels. Freelance entrepreneurs had to register, giving their given name, place of birth, and hooker handle, plus declaring the amount they intended to charge. Failure to officially register carried a fine, plus a good whipping. Despite that possibility, venturesome freelancers might have outnumbered the street-legal hookers. (Check out the entry on adultery for other details.)

  Throughout Italy, brothels and X-rated businesses abounded, from tavern-cathouses to other joint ventures where sex on demand was readily available. There were also streetwalkers of both genders who specialized in stand-up business, shall we say, beneath many of the smaller triumphal arches in Rome’s central district. Since the arches were called fornices, the activity generation in their vicinity became known as fornication.

  Then as now, middle management often muscled its way into the flesh for cash trade. Roman whores both male and female were often managed by a leno, or pimp; in Greece, it was the hated pornoboskos, or “whore-shepherd.”

  Although long-ago ladies (and a few gents) for play and pay were often celebrated in song, verse, art, and literature, you will look in vain for their own words about happiness (or lack of it) in their own lives.

  Male Garb:

  Clothes made the man—& the hooker

  One of history’s intriguing puzzles: the world-famous Roman toga, a prestige garment, could only be worn by freeborn males who had reached the age of fifteen, when manhood officially began for Romans. The sole exception to that rule? The fashion-forward female prostitutes of Rome, who proudly wore the toga as well. How this contradiction came to be is lost to us, but one can easily see why the hookers took to it. Like the garb of a nurse, the toga made services on offer instantly recognizable.

  The typical toga, an off-white hemisphere of wool, contained yards of material. Its thickness and weight would have done a good job of keeping streetwalkers warm on windy street corners, and could also have served as a comfy ad hoc trysting spot.

  Even in later imperial centuries, the most sophisticated era of Roman times, togas would have been difficult to clean, post-tryst. Since no effective soap existed (and Romans disdained the early “soap” used by the barbaric German tribes), woolen garments were “washed” in stale urine and potash, then given a sulfur treatment to whiten them.


  Another minor mystery: American universities have long maintained fraternities and sororities galore, all of them using Greek letters and names. Traditionally, frats have long been fond of throwing what they call “toga parties,” named after a garment that was distinctively Roman. The Greek, elite or not, wouldn’t be caught dead in a toga. Instead, males wore the himation, a billowy, bedsheet-shaped piece of wool, casually tied or wrapped around the waist and over one shoulder, allowing air to circulate and room to dangle, if you know I mean. Since the Greeks tended to scoff at the notion of briefs, unpremeditated frontal nudity was commonplace. In sharp contrast, Greek slaves and working-class men doing hard physical labor wore loincloths, separating them from men of leisure.

  Our humble but ubiquitous T-shirt also had its beginnings in ancient Greece. Men, especially the manual laborers, often wore a sleeveless muscle tee that varied in length. Their tee was called a tunic; at times, it was referred to as a gymnos.

  The word gymnos, however, had dual meanings. The Greek gymnasium took its name from gymnos, which could mean “dressed only in the gymnos,” since it sometimes served as workout gear back then. But most of the time and in most contexts, gymnos meant “naked.”

  The classic woolen toga exemplified a man of leisure but it also served as an identity badge for Roman prostitutes.