by Paul Bahn
Strabo, the Greek geographer of the first century BC, said Corinth had more than 1000 prostitutes; he tells of a Corinthian courtesan who was reproached for being lazy and refusing to do wool working. In her bawdy reply, she punned on the word ‘histos’ which can refer to anything erectable, including a loom: ‘Such as I am, in this short time I have taken down three looms [erections] already’.
A fragment by the fourth-century playwright Alexis of Thurii provides a catalogue of tricks whereby an artful madam prepares her novice slave prostitutes for business, including elevator shoes and false buttocks to satisfy customers who were partial to women’s rear ends. They must also have charming manners: ‘Does she have healthy teeth? By force she’s kept laughing, so that the customers see what a dainty mouth she has. If she doesn’t like to laugh, she must spend the day indoors, with a twig of myrrh upright between her lips, just like the goats’ heads displayed in this way at the butcher shops so that the customers will buy them. That way in time she smiles whether she likes it or not.’
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Prostitutes in the ancient port of Ephesus wore sandals with reversed lettering on the sole, so they stamped ‘Follow me’ on the sand as they walked. A carved stone footprint of this kind can be seen in the city ruins (18).
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In the entrance hall of a Pompeii brothel is a painting of a man holding a double penis, maybe one for action and one for luck. Pompeii had 12,000 inhabitants and 34 brothels. One Roman word for a prostitute was ‘Nonaria’ — ninth hour — which, as they counted time from dawn, meant 4 pm, the time when brothels opened. One painting of sex in a Pompeii brothel has ‘Lente Impelle’ written above it, ‘Push Slowly’ (19).
MISOGYNISTS
According to Herodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century BC, the women of ancient Egypt were all unfaithful. When a son of Ramesses II had been blind for 10 years, an oracle from the city of Buto declared to him that the time of his punishment was drawing to an end, and that he should regain his sight by washing his eyes with the menses of a woman who had never had intercourse with any man but her own husband. Pheros made a trial with his own wife first, but still remained blind, even though he tried with all women, one after the other. When he finally recovered his sight, he took all the women whom he had tried, gathered them in one town, and burnt them and the town — but he married the woman by whose means he had recovered sight.
In a Mesopotamian Cuneiform wedding contract testimony, arguing about the return of the house as part of the dowry, Iddin-aba backs out, saying ‘Your daughter I shall not marry. Tie her up and throw her in the river’ (a reference to the river trial of truth-telling).
An Egyptian papyrus in the British Museum, ‘The Instruction of Ankhsheshonq’, contains rules written by a priest for his youngest son — including the following:
He who sends spittle up to the sky will have it fall on him;
Let your wife see your wealth — do not trust her with it;
Do not open your heart to your wife — what you have said to her goes to the street;
Instructing a woman is like having a sack of sand whose side is split open;
When a man smells of myrrh, his wife is a cat before him;
Do not laugh at a cat.
Hesiod, a Greek poet of the eighth century BC, was very anti-women, seeing them as a necessity but an economic liability with vices: ‘Do not let a woman with a sexy rump deceive you with wheedling and coaxing words; she is after your barn. The man who trusts a woman trusts deceivers.’
Semonides, a poet-philosopher of the seventh century BC, compared women to different creatures: (20)
From the beginning the god made the mind of woman
A thing apart. One he made from the long-haired sow;
While she wallows in the mud and rolls about on the ground,
Everything at home lies in a mess.
Another doesn’t take baths but sits about
In the shit in dirty clothes and gets fatter and fatter .…
The next one was made from a dog, nimble, a bitch like its mother,
And she wants to be in on everything that’s said or done.
Scampering about and nosing into everything,
She yaps it out even if there’s noone to listen.
Her husband can’t stop her with threats,
Not if he flies into a rage and knocks her teeth out with a rock .…
Another woman is from the stumbling and obstinate donkey,
Who only with difficulty and with the use of threats
Is compelled to agree to the perfectly acceptable thing
She had resisted. Otherwise in a corner of the house
She sits munching away all night long, and all day long she sits munching at the hearth
Even so she’ll welcome any male friend
Who comes around with sex on his mind.
Another kind of woman is the wretched, miserable tribe that comes from the weasel.
As far as she is concerned, there is nothing lovely or pleasant
Or delightful or desirable in her.
She’s wild over love-making in bed,
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But her husband wants to vomit when he comes near her .…
Another one is from the monkey. In this case Zeus has outdone himself
In giving husbands the worst kind of evil.
She has the ugliest face imaginable; and such a woman
Is the laughingstock throughout the town for everyone.
Her body moves awkwardly all the way up to its short neck;
She hardly has an ass and her legs are skinny. What a poor wretch is the husband
Who has to put his arm round such a mess!
There are even traces of prehistoric violence to women. A prehistoric skeleton from South Africa, dating to within the last 2000 years, is that of an adult woman who was shot at close range by two arrows in the back. And the oldest evidence of interhuman violence, recently published, is the skeleton of an adult female from the late Ice Age with an arrowhead in her pelvis — and she was in Sicily! Perhaps a horse’s skull was found with her .…
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ANIMAL LOVERS
From the sixteenth century, chroniclers like Cieza and others refer to clear cases of zoophilia as practised by the natives of Peru the habit of copulating with llamas seems to have been a widespread habit among the natives of the Andes. Early in the twentieth century there were pottery pieces, representing cases of coupling with llamas, in museums and collections in Lima, but they were destroyed by ‘cultured’ persons’ due to a mistaken patriotism, in an effort to erase proofs that showed the presence of a practice considered abominable.’ They have been systematically destroyed (21). The Incas were said to have collected pornographic Moche pottery.
Herodotus was shocked by the sexual relations between men and animals in Egypt — he says a woman had open intercourse with a he-goat; this was probably a ritual act, as when the virility of the Apis bull was strengthened by women showing their privates to it.
In the dream books, there are various combinations of animals and people — men may copulate with jerboas, swallows and pigs, while women have a choice between mouse, horse, donkey, ram, wolf, lion, crocodile, snake, baboon, ibis or falcon. One Egyptian curse was ‘May a donkey copulate with your wife and children’.
According to Meleagros, ‘female eros’ now finds favour with him, and ‘the squeeze of a hairy arse’ he leaves to ‘herdsmen who mount their goats’.
In the Graeco-Roman world, ‘Satyrs’ were ugly, earthy, drunken creatures; they masturbated constantly if no living being with a suitable orifice was available, but they preferred mules, horses or deer and even the neck of a jar might be pressed into service. One Greek vase shows a satyr about to mount an unsuspecting sphinx from the rear!
In the Roman games and shows, sexual relations between a woman and an animal were often exhibited ‘under the stands’, and occasionally in the arena, but the trouble was in finding an animal that would
perform on schedule. A jackass or even a large dog that would voluntarily mount a woman before a screaming mob was rare, and of course the woman was forced to cooperate — a willing woman destroyed most of the crowd’s fun. With a bull or giraffe, the victim usually didn’t survive the ordeal; they would use old women from the provinces who didn’t fully realize what the job entailed until it was too late.
Apuleius, a Roman writer of the second century AD, tells of one woman who had poisoned five people to get their property; she was sentenced to be thrown to the wild beasts in the arena, but first, as additional punishment and disgrace, she was to be raped by a jackass. A bed was set up in the middle of the arena, inlaid with tortoise shell and provided with a feather mattress and an embroidered Chinese bedspread. She was tied spread-eagled on the bed. The jackass had been trained to kneel on the bed, otherwise the business could not have been concluded successfully. When the show was over, wild beasts were turned loose in the arena and quickly put an end to the wretched woman’s suffering.
Apuleius also tells of a wealthy noblewoman who asked a trainer to bring one of his trained jackasses to her room at night, promising him a fabulous sum of money. She made elaborate preparations — four eunuchs placed a feather bed on the floor, with soft pillows at one end. She ordered the trainer to lead the jackass to the bed, get him to lie down, and then she rubbed him with oil of balsam. Then the trainer was told to leave and return the next morning. She demanded the jackass’s services so often that the trainer was afraid she might kill herself, but after a few weeks his only concern was that she might totally exhaust the valuable animal.
Mythology saw some hybrid monsters as the product of a union between a mortal woman and an animal, as in the famous story of Pasiphaë, the wife of Minos king of Crete, who became enamoured of a bull. In lovesick despair at her failure to achieve congress with the object of her passion, Pasiphaë sought the help of the famed craftsman Daidalus, who manufactured a marvellously lifelike heifer, inside which the queen then hid. The unholy coupling took place, in consequence of which Pasiphaë gave birth to the Minotaur…… (22)
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The first discoveries of rock art in the Sahara were made in 1847 by two soldiers (Dr François Félix Jacquot and Captain Kook of the Foreign Legion), part of General Cavaignac’s expedition against the Ksour tribes. Jacquot published two engravings of rock figures (‘a family out hunting’ and ‘a warrior’s lesson to his son’) but noted that others were of appalling indecency which would prevent them ever emerging from his files (23):
One can see, in full view and with no secrecy, the unnatural intercourse that brought the storm of fire down on the cities whose names you know well; a hideous coupling..…the strange perversion of desire which, according to Theocritus, brought together the shepherds of Sicily and their goats, also has its analogues at Thyout, only here that peaceful animal is replaced by the lion.
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There are lots of other depictions of bestiality in prehistoric art — our favourite is the Italian petroglyph at Naquane, Valcamonica, showing a man buggering some poor animal while waving happily to the viewer!
REAL PERVERTS
Herodotus claimed that in Egypt the wives of notable men, and women of great beauty and reputation, were not given to the embalmers immediately, but only after they had been dead for three or four days, so the embalmers could not have carnal intercourse with them — one was found doing it with a newly dead woman, and was denounced by his fellow workmen. Xenophon of Ephesus says that a man kept the embalmed body of his wife in his bedroom… we don’t know why.
The Roman emperor Tiberius was invited to dinner by Cestius Gallus, a lecherous old spendthrift, and he accepted on condition that the waitresses should be naked. On retiring to Capri, Tiberius made himself a private sporting house where sexual extravagances were practised for his secret pleasure. Bevies of girls and young men, whom he had collected from all over the Empire as adepts in unnatural practices, would perform before him in groups of three to excite his waning passions. A number of small rooms were furnished with the most indecent pictures and statuary obtainable .… and erotic manuals from Egypt. He had nooks of lechery in the woods and glades of the island, and had boys and girls dressed up as Pans and nymphs.
An ingenious torture devised by Tiberius was to trick men into drinking huge draughts of wine, and then suddenly to knot a cord tightly around their genitals, which not only cut into the flesh but prevented them from urinating.
Similarly, the emperor Nero (AD 37–68) invented a novel game; he was released from a den dressed in the skins of wild animals, and attacked the private parts of men and women who stood bound to stakes. And after working up sufficient excitement he was screwed by his freedman Doryphorus, who later married him — on the wedding night he imitated the screams and moans of a girl being deflowered.
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According to a papyrus in Berlin, King Sneferu of Egypt got bored, and asked his chief magician Djadjamankh what he should do. The magician suggested he go to the palace lake, order a boat, and call for some young girls from his palace — watching them row up and down would cheer him up. He ordered twenty women with beautiful limbs and breasts and braids, twenty young women who had not borne children. And twenty fish nets as well. ‘Let the nets be draped on the women, when they have taken their clothes off.’ (24)
At the beginning of his reign, Domitian would spend hours alone every day catching flies, and stabbing them with a needle-sharp pen.
The Greek sculptor Praxiteles (fourth century BC) carved a nude Aphrodite, using his mistress Phryne, a famous hetaira (courtesan), as the model .… Pliny relates that one man became so enamoured that he embraced the statue during the night and left a stain on it.…
(Phryne, incidentally, became enormously rich, as Praxiteles was not her only lover. On one occasion she was charged with profane behaviour and put on trial: defending her was another of her lovers, the orator Hyperides. Seeing that he was making no progress in the case he suddenly decided to take a completely different line of defence so he pulled down her dress, revealing a pair of perfect breasts. Confronted by such beauty, the judges could only acquit her — though a new law was passed immediately afterwards, forbidding the accused to be present in court while the verdict was under consideration .…) (25)
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Elagabalus, the Syrian-born emperor of Rome (AD 218–22), was bisexual and a transvestite. He would frequent taverns at night, wearing a wig, and there ply the trade of a female huckster. He also frequented the notorious brothels, drove out the prostitutes and played the prostitute himself. He ‘married’ a slave who was allowed to beat him like a wife. He also wished to be transformed into a woman, and asked physicians to contrive a woman’s vagina in his body by means of an incision, and promised them large sums for doing so. Another story tells of his delight in a man with peculiarly large private parts, but he lost interest when this man was unable to perform in bed.
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Booze
An ancient Egyptian verse:
When I embrace her
and her arms are open,
I feel like a man in incense land
who is immersed in scent.
When I kiss her
and her lips are open
I rejoice
without even having drunk beer.
An Egyptian papyrus of the nineteenth Dynasty says: ‘Beer robs you of all human respect, it affects your mind, and here you are like a broken rudder, good for nothing.’
There is also an Egyptian fragment of limestone with a drawing on it depicting a king with five-o’clock shadow; In a tomb at Elkab, there is a picture of a high-born woman at a party saying ‘Give me eighteen jugs of wine — I want to get drunk, my insides are as dry as straw’. A painting from Khety’s Tomb, c.2100 BC, even shows guests being carried away from a banquet after drinking too much wine.
In a newly-discovered letter from the Roman fort of Vindolanda, in northern England, a commander of a cavalry section
wrote to his prefect: ‘The lads have no beer — please send some’.
The British Museum has a Babylonian baked-clay plaque of around 1800 BC that shows a man having sex with a woman from behind, while she bends over to drink beer through a straw. Ancient documents from the period include examples of erotic poetry in which strong connections are made between alcohol and sexual activity! (26)
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‘I DID NOT HAVE SEX WITH THAT WOMAN…’
In 1400 BC, there was a political scandal in Mesopotamia — the Semitic Museum of Harvard University has cuneiform tablets showing a corruption and sex investigation. Unearthed in northern Iraq in the 1920s, they record a judicial panel’s impeachment proceedings against Mayor Kushshiharbe of Nuzi. Dogged by an aggressive prosecution, a political leader denies an illicit affair — ‘I did not have sex with her’, although one of his assistants swears to it. The Mayor was accused of taking bribes (one maid, one complete oxhide and wood for two yokes), and abducting people for ransom (two shekels of gold, one ox and two male sheep), and stealing. He even expropriated manure to fertilize his gardens — Mar-Ishtar, a farmer, said: ‘The manure for [one plot] of land the gardener of Kushshiharbe took away from me. So I said “Why did you take away my manure?”, and he said “As for you, the mayor has ordered you to be flogged”.’ The mayor was accused of committing adultery with a woman named Humerelli — he vehemently denied the charge, but one of his agents, Ziliptilla, said it was true: ‘We brought her to the place of Kushshiharbe,and he had sex with her’. The mayor said: ‘No! Emphatically no! Not a word of it is true, I did not have sex with her!’ A second man, Palteya, said: ‘I called to Humerelli and took her over to the brothel of Tilunnaya, and Kushshiharbe had sex with her.’ The mayor said ‘May I perish if Palteya did bring Humerelli over to the brothel of Tilunnaya that I might have sex with her.’ He was also accused of adorning his private home with a gate fashioned from 30–40 pieces of wood taken from the palace gate. The records of the final verdict in the case have never been found … (27)