The Joy of Sexus

by León, Vicki

  In the aftermath of the Mark/Cleopatra suicides, in 30 B.C. Octavia showed her most compassionate side. Although her brother Octavian (now Rome’s first emperor) fought her on this issue, Octavia stepped up to become the sole caretaker of her children with husbands one and two, plus all of Antony’s children with Fulvia. Not only that, this deeply forgiving and maternal woman volunteered to become the guardian of the three surviving progeny of Mark and Cleopatra; toddler Ptolemy Philadelphus and the ten-year-old twins Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios.

  Octavia took great care that all of her children, whether adoptive or blood kin, married well; they became the patrician backbone, an imperial dynasty of sorts, for the next generation of Julio-Claudians.

  One standout was Cleopatra Selene, who blossomed under Octavia’s care, growing up smart and emotionally stable. Her marriage to Juba II, king of Mauritania, was a long-lived success on both sides.

  The greatest tragedy to befall maternal Octavia? The unexpected and sorely lamented death of her oldest son, Marcellus, at that time the golden boy and heir apparent to her brother, Octavian Augustus.

  Vestal Virgins:

  Cut to the chaste

  The vestal virgins of Rome, aged six to ten when they took on the thirty-year obligation of the position, were always very much in the public eye. They led ritual cleansings of the city, opened solemn ceremonies, and graced official state banquets and religious festivals. They had secular tasks, too. Their lives were neatly divided into thirds: the first decade, learning to be a vestal; the second, doing duties as one; the last, teaching newly selected young vestals.

  The vestal virgins were Rome’s lucky rabbit’s foot, guarding the safety and moral stability of the city through their sacred duties and their own exemplary behavior.

  Along with other secret sacred obligations, they had the crucial task of maintaining, night and day, the sacred fire of Vesta, the virginal patron goddess of Rome. Their priestess order might sound quaint to modern ears, but the morality and stability they represented were the lucky rabbit’s foot of Rome, a city of a million people. As a result, they were well loved. During the thousand years in which their institution held sway, almost all the vestals led exemplary lives and did much for the city.

  In several ways, being a vestal was a rare opportunity for a female, once mature, to use her intellect and make important decisions free of male interference. The post was in essence the best job a woman could hold in Roman times. And hold it they did, for an entire millennium.

  Occia, for example, began as a youngster in 38 B.C., and worked as a Vestal for fifty-seven years, though she was only required to serve thirty. She won a reputation for her dedication, even during the civil war decades in Italy.

  Another standout was Junia Torquata, who later became head of the order, a post called Virgo Maximo— Maximum Virgin. The vestals had powers that extended to special pleadings to the Roman senate and emperor. They also had the power to intercede and extend mercy to any condemned person who happened to cross their path. During Junia’s tenure, she had ample opportunity to test her powers, since two of her brothers got into trouble with the law. One, accused of extortion and treason, got exiled to a crummy uninhabited island off Italy. After she pled his case to Emperor Tiberius, he wasn’t freed—but was upgraded to a nicer island. Her other brother had gotten himself into really hot water; his crime was adultery with Julia, the sexually voracious granddaughter of Emperor Octavian Augustus, no less. He quickly fled into voluntary exile, but it took fourteen years and all of Junia’s persuasive abilities with the emperor to get her brother back to Rome. She was an old woman by that time, having served the goddess Vesta for sixty-four years.

  Not only did the vestal virgins have the respect of society, political influence, and independence from male guardians, they also gained financial independence when they retired. The parents of new vestals had to hand over dowries when they were accepted, just as though they were getting married. After thirty years of service, a vestal could retire with a generous pension. (Or she could, as many did, remain in vestal quarters, semiretired for the balance of her life.) The record shows that a vestal named Cornelia did extremely well in the investment department. When she took her post in A.D. 23, she received a dowry of two million sesterces. When she retired, still fairly young, it was as a very wealthy woman.

  Imperial Branding:

  Gotta love that emperor—he’s everywhere

  So much ink (to say nothing of blood) has already been spilled over Octavian Augustus, Rome’s first real emperor-CEO, there would seem to be little left to say. But this young man—a general at eighteen, and Rome’s leader and “restorer of the republic” at nineteen—was astute at more than war and politics. He foresaw the power of imperial branding and even the value of mass production, ideas that seem far-fetched and too “modern” for the first century B.C.

  In 44 B.C., a short time after the assassination of Julius Caesar, Octavian’s adoptive father, a huge comet appeared over Rome. Priests immediately identified it as Caesar’s soul in heaven, and called it sidus Iulium, “the Julian star.”

  About eighteen months later, with the full consent of the Roman senate and the people of Rome, Octavian put on a solemn and extravagant apotheosis for Caesar, officially making him a god— divus Iulius. Octavian’s next brilliant move? On the very site of Caesar’s cremation, he dedicated a temple to Julius the god. As a result, he was then able to call himself divi filius, “son of the god.” What cunning modesty! And what a lineage to point to.

  When Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra in 31 B.C., and now in sole command, he began his diplomatic, low-key transformation of Rome’s “republic.” Instead of calling himself a dictator and/or imperator (as his adoptive father Julius Caesar had done), he insisted on being called princeps, a vague and soothing term meaning “first man” or “leading man.”

  After the bloody decades of power struggles following Caesar’s assassination, Octavian wanted a return to law and a senatorial framework in which to exert his influence. Accordingly, he made the big decisions but almost humbly presented them to the Roman senate for their approval. That adoring body soon voted him a new title: Augustus, the majestic, awe-inspiring one. (Well-behaved empresses would later get to be called Augusta.)

  In other parts of the Roman Empire, in places where kings traditionally had been given godlike attributes, people clamored to deify the man who still refused to call himself emperor. Although Octavian and his wife and political adviser Livia publicly protested and stoutly refused all efforts to deify them, little by little they allowed provinces from Greece to Asia Minor to have their fun and hold apotheosis ceremonies.

  This fit in quite well with Octavian’s long-term plans for an imperial brand, one that extended to his entire family. He wanted all of them to become well-loved; adored. In an age without printing presses, photography, or photocopy capabilities, he engineered various ways to replicate, replicate, replicate his image and theirs.

  Coins bearing Octavian’s name and face were the perfect propaganda tool. During his forty-one-year tenure, tens of millions of coins with his portrait were issued. Not simply in Rome, either, but from a variety of mints established throughout the growing empire. Each new batch told another story: of Rome rebuilt in marble; of new lands conquered; of army veterans given land, and the hungry fed. All of his good deeds and qualities were immortalized on coinage, the most important advertising medium of his day.

  Some might argue that an even more ingenious marketing plan fed Octavian’s imperial love cult. During his long lifetime, more than 20,000 bronze statues of “the son of god” poured out of workshops around the empire. In addition, there were cheap plaster casts as well as larger-than-life-size marble statues of Augustus in heroic poses.

  The creation of elegant yet visually accurate images in such huge numbers was a difficult trick. How was it solved?

  During his forty-one-year reign, Emperor Octavian Augustus distributed thousands of his
statues and millions of his coinage portraits throughout his far-flung empire.

  Even without photography, Rome’s first emperor made his face instantly recognizable. How? Clever mass production of his image.

  Art historians and archaeologists knew it must have been done via mass production techniques that maintained the quality and standardized the likeness of the originals. They finally solved the mystery when some unfinished marble statues turned up. On the heads of each piece, they found twenty-four or more wart-like protuberances. After consultations with working sculptors, they realized these were puntelli or checkpoints. Using calipers and the puntelli, a sculptor two thousand years ago could achieve startling accuracy in the copying of an original bust or statue.

  Thus statues, busts, and other imagery of Emperor Octavian Augustus remained uniform and readily identifiable throughout the empire. Art featuring Augustus and his family members was everywhere—near theaters, in the forum of each town and city, and, as the years went by, in growing numbers of temples where the cult of imperial worship was held. The busts and statues were also a fixture in every one of the Roman army camps, where legionaries could daily behold their commander-in-chief even while on bivouac or at war.

  Besides his other astonishing accomplishments, Octavian knew how to play the unassuming man of the people while imposing his brand on the marketplace. Becoming the literal love object for millions of people may have contributed to his long and largely peaceful reign. He certainly kick-started the cult of emperor worship, which after Augustus grew to obscene levels. It served a good purpose, however. Perhaps the Romans, always happy to add to the plethora of gods and goddesses, also needed a flesh-and-blood figure to admire, love, and lean on as their godlike protector.

  Divas Livia & the Julias:

  Not easy, becoming a goddess

  There’s a modern trend regarding popular female singers. Even if they aren’t opera stars, the ones who feel the love of millions are often called divas. An Italian term meaning “prima donna” (literally, first or lead singer), diva is closely related to the words divine and divinity.

  Several thousand years, however, if you wanted to become a real diva—a goddess worshipped and loved by everyone—you generally had to be dead. Still worth it, most gals would argue, as the apotheosis of a woman did not happen all that often.

  In the first century B.C., one extraordinary woman, queenly in manner, razor-sharp in intellect, and expert in manipulation, managed to gain apotheosis—goddesshood—in her lifetime. Her name? Livia. Like many modern celebrities, she was known by one name. She was the wife of Rome’s first emperor, Octavian Augustus, and saw him out of his long life.

  One especially memorable scene in the classic I, Claudius series on BBC television years ago featured Roman empress Livia as an old woman, pleading with her slimy young grandson Caligula, “I want to be a goddess—promise me that when I die, you’ll make me a goddess!”

  Caligula responded as you might expect, with spite: “You’re a disgusting, smelly, wicked harridan! Why would I do that? You murderous old bag, you belong with Hades!”

  In spite of Caligula’s scoffing, Livia got her wish. And she didn’t have to die to get it. She had the most splendid luck; by A.D. 14, she’d become a goddess with cults in cities around the empire: on Lesbos, on the island of Cyprus, in the city of Pergamum in Asia Minor, even in Athens. Not only was she worshipped there, coins were issued from various mints with the words Thea Livia—Goddess Livia—on them, with her profile. What could be more heavenly? When she died a decade later, in A.D. 29, she also received apotheosis from Emperor Claudius and the Roman senate. Modern diva-hood just can’t measure up to that.

  Livia was the first but not the last lady of Rome to be deified.

  When Julia Drusilla, the favorite sister of Caligula, died at age twenty-two, he deified her, adding panthea, or “all goddess,” to her title, and mourning in highly dramatic fashion. Was it love? Or guilt? Probably both, since Caligula was thought to have molested all three of his sisters from childhood.

  Another Julia, this one a Flavia, the daughter of Emperor Titus, was married to one man and ostentatiously sleeping with another—that sick puppy known as Emperor Domitian. Julia, dead at twenty-three, may have expired from an abortion forced on her by the emperor. Domitian had her deified; later, for his treatment of Julia and other crimes and cruelties, he was murdered.

  The wildest quartet of diva-loving Julias hailed from Roman Syria. After they hit Rome around 218 A.D., the city was never the same. Julia Domna and Julia Maesa were sisters from a family of wealth and importance in Syria; the former married Septimius Severus and became empress. When Julia Domna’s “bad apple” son Caracalla murdered the other apple, lovable son Geta—in her arms, no less—Julia had to suck it up. To survive, she became co-regent and handled Caracalla’s paperwork, including all that hate mail about brotherly slaughter. When he in turn was assassinated while taking off his pants, she took it hard—following him in death within a few weeks.

  Her sister Julia Maesa had grand plans to restore the luster of the dynasty—and who better to do it than her darling fourteen-year-old grandson Elagabalus? After paying a grotesque sum to bribe the Roman legions, she and her daughters, Julia Soaemias and Julia Mamaea, left Syria and headed for Rome with the teen in tow. At first he was no trouble, too busy with his flowery gowns and his jeweled shoes and touching up his eyepaint. They entered Rome to cheering crowds that soon were scratching their heads at this goofy kid, running in front of a four-horse chariot pulling a large black stone, symbol of the Syrian sun god.

  Soaemias, his mother, soon tired of her son’s bizarre activities: getting up at dawn to sacrifice a herd of cattle to the sun god. His insistence on marrying one of the vestal virgins—what a stink that raised! His nightly outings, too, sometimes in drag, sometimes playing a whore. She and her mom Julia Maesa tried to reason with him, but it was hopeless. She never knew if he was dating a girl or a fellow or an orangutan, for that matter. Once Elagabalus fell for a Carian slave and played the female—even encouraged the fellow to abuse him physically.

  Luckily, Julian Soaemias and her mom had gotten some nice honors in Rome; they were given honorific Augusta titles. They even got invited to attend meetings of the Roman senate. Until they’d sat in the Senate once, they didn’t realize how dull this governing business was. Just for giggles, she and her mom put together a Senate of Women, but stuffy Romans looked crosseyed at it as well.

  Before long Romans from senators to plebeians were completely steamed at the antics, sexual and otherwise, of the teenage Elagabalus. The Julias, mother and daughter, agreed he was troubled, but they were sure he’d grow out of it. Just in case, they forced Elagabalus to “adopt” his twelve-year-old cousin, Severus Alexander, and name him the heir.

  During his reign as emperor, this transvestite teen demanded sexual reassignment surgery. Unfortunately his medicos lacked vagina-building skills.

  A good thing too, because within two years Elagabalus and his mother Julia Soaemias were brutally rubbed out by irate Roman soldiers. Young Alexander, with his mother Julia Mamaea and his grandmother Julia Maesa as co-regents, wasn’t nearly as outrageous as the late unlamented Julia Soaemias and her son. Romans breathed a grateful collective sigh of relief. Thus in A.D. 223, when Maesa the matriarch died, she was given diva goddess status. She joined her older sister Julia Domna, who’d been made a goddess by Elagabalus—the one almost normal “deed” he’d accomplished in his short reign.

  Now the last Julia standing, Julia Mamaea set out to restore order and moderation to the regime. Since acting as regent for young Severus Alexander took no time at all, she had ample opportunity to dream up and then assume the most grandiose titles ever given to a Roman woman. She began with “mother of the emperor, the army, the senate, and the homeland” but finally settled on the pithy and less cumbersome “mother of the whole human race.” (It sounds even better in Latin: mater universi generic humani.)

  Kee
ping in mind the fates of her Julia kinfolk, Mamaea picked some wise advisers, amassed an indecent amount of wealth, kept a tight leash on son Alexander’s sex life, and—wisest move of all—without fanfare of any sort, sent Elagabalus’s detested sungod and his shiny black stone back to Syria. Nevertheless, she and son Alexander were not fated to live long and prosper; assassination by soldiers also awaited them in 235.

  Animal Worship:

  Fishy love stories & feline tales

  We live in a pet-worshipping, animal-venerating world, from the astonishing amount of supermarket square footage devoted to dog and cat food to television programs extolling the high-priced wisdom of horse and parakeet whisperers. We support environmental causes to save whales and songbirds. We even have a national bird that we’ve managed not to extirpate.

  But we weren’t the first when it came to serious animal adoration.

  Take the she-wolf of Rome, legendary mother of the city who suckled those crazy human twins, Remus and Romulus. Early in Rome’s history, she was immortalized in bronze by an Etruscan master sculptor. A symbol of fierceness and intelligence, the wolf was also sacred to Mars, Apollo, and Silvanus and worshipped accordingly. The Lupercalia festival, described elsewhere in this book, had the wolf as its totem. In the Roman army, special troops called signifers wore wolf’s heads and pelts as part of their uniform while carrying the battle standards of the legion.

  Although lizards, parrots, snakes, and tropical fish have their ardent followers today, few modern pet lovers share the Roman fetish for large eels of the lamprey and murena species. Although some were kept for consumption (eel flesh being high-status gourmet seafood), many were treated like members of the family. Living in elaborate man-made ponds along the Bay of Naples, feeding on delicacies and at times wearing gold jewelry, such eels were unlikely love objects. When his lamprey died, a Roman senator named Lucius Crassus wasted no time in putting on full mourning. As one writer put it, “He grieved for it as though for a daughter.”