Disgraceful Archaeology

by Paul Bahn

  A Javanese rock-shelter near Kadiri, whose decoration dates to the eleventh century AD, shows a story from the Arjunawiwaha. Arjuna is practising asceticism — the gods send down two heavenly nymphs to test his resolve and the strength of his meditation by wrapping themselves around him. He passes the test, and so receives the two nymphs as his wives. For some obscure reason, the carving shows one nymph relieving herself in a stream.

  Down to the early fifth century BC, Greek painters sometimes portrayed disgusting subjects on vases: a man wiping his anus, an explosion of diarrhoea at a party, copious drunken vomiting. In one, a squatting youth simultaneously urinates and defecates on the ground, and the painter has made his penis loll to one side lest our view of the faeces be obscured. On another vase, a man reclines on each side, happily masturbating, while under each handle a dog defecates.

  Diocles, a Roman charioteer, had one horse that had won over 200 races. This horse, named Passerinus, was so revered that soldiers patrolled the streets when he was sleeping to keep people from making any noise. When a rumour went around that Passerinus had been doped by rivals, people hurried to the stable to taste his dung to see if it were true.

  Most Roman charioteers coated themselves with boar’s dung in the belief that the odour kept the horses from stepping on a man if he was thrown from his chariot. And the professional chariot-racers of ancient Rome were encouraged to promote muscle-growth by drinking a solution of dried boar’s dung (39).

  Wild animals were on display at the Tower of London in the seventeenth century — one visitor, Ned Ward, wrote of ‘a leopard who is grown as cunning as a cross Bedlamite that loves not to be looked at. For as the madman will be apt to salute you with a bowl of chamber-lie, so will the leopard, if you come near him, stare in your face and piss upon you, his urine being as hot as aqua fortis and stinks worse than a polecat’s.’

  A scene on a Greek potsherd shows a caricature of a shitting man, about to wipe himself with one hand and holding his nose with the other. His circumcised, droopy penis reaches down almost to his heels.

  Other Greek vases depict a harlot urinating into a chamber pot; a satyr having sex with a startled-looking doe; older prostitutes being penetrated orally and anally at the same time.

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  AMATEUR PROS

  Herodotus says that King Rhampsinitus bade his daughter to sit in a certain room and receive all alike who came; before she had intercourse with any, she should compel him to tell her what was the cleverest trick and the greatest crime of his life — this was so that the king could find a certain thief.

  Herodotus also says that King Cheops of Egypt likewise made his daughter sit in a chamber and exact payment. She, they say, doing her father’s bidding, was minded to leave some memorial of her own, and demanded of everyone who sought intercourse with her that he should give her one stone to set in her work; and of these stones they built the pyramid that stands midmost of the three, over against the great pyramid; each side of it measures 150 feet (40).

  Herodotus also said that the Babylonians have ‘the foulest of customs’: every woman must once in her life act as a prostitute of Aphrodite and offer herself to a stranger for sex outside the goddess’s temple. The ugly ones may have to wait as long as four years before someone takes them up on their offer .… Among the Nasamones of Libya everybody sleeps with the bride at the wedding party. Among other people ‘women took pride in having slept with many men, and placed a ring around an ankle for every conquest’.

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  ATTITUDES TO SEX

  The Egyptians would call sex ‘spending a pleasant hour together’, but outside marriage it could be called ‘ entering a house’ (41). If a single word was required, there were twenty to choose from. Very few erotic scenes are known in their art — one tiny little hieroglyph in a tomb of the Middle Kingdom shows a couple intimately linked on top of a bed. This sign has since been erased from the wall, but it was copied by the mid-nineteenth century.

  Concubine figurines were important in Egyptian funerary equipment — through magic they came alive in the tomb, excited and strengthened the virility of the tomb owner, and gave him pleasure.

  Some think that the notorious Turin papyrus from Thebes, of 1150 BC, depicts the amorous adventure of a priest of Amun and a Theban whore; but in fact it appears to represent a number of different men and women, and is similar to scenes drawn on flakes of limestone or pottery from the workers’ village at Deir el-Medina.

  Vase paintings show that Greeks practised intercourse in many positions. In their literature, and especially comedy, the positions are named, with many names deriving from traditional wrestling postures.

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  The late fourth-century Greek historian Theopompus said of the Etruscans:

  It is customary among the Etruscans to share their wives .… to them it is not shameful to be seen in the nude .… so far removed are they from prudery that when the master of the house is making love and someone calls for him, they openly say that he is having such-and-such done to him, shamelessly calling the act by its name.’ (42)

  CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

  Diodorus, a historian of the first century BC, says that if a man violated a married woman, he was emasculated; if it was adultery with consent, the man got a thousand blows with a rod, and the woman had her nose cut off.

  An eighth-century Irish ‘Table of Commutations’ says of sinners who need to hold prayer vigils that they should, in order to stay awake, lie down not only in water, on nettles or on nutshells, but also sometimes with a corpse in the grave.

  Among the monks of the early Christian church, homosexuality was euphemistically called a ‘special friendship’. Each monastery had its own rules to control the behaviour of the monks, and these featured a variety of physical punishments to deter homosexual activity. Usually, any outward display of affection of one man for another was disciplined as severely as the sexual act itself. Even such innocent practices as tucking a tunic around the thighs while laundering clothes was forbidden as a possible source of temptation for another. Nocturnal emissions were also a source of great concern for the monks.

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  To explain the uncontrollable dreams that brought such intense pleasure, they invented the succubus, a beautiful female demon who tempted men in their sleep. To ward against her attentions, monks would tie a metal crucifix to their genitals before retiring for the night.

  This custom actually originated in the Roman arena, where gladiators tied bits of cold metal to their testicles on the night before a combat — they believed that the metal’s chill would prevent them having an involuntary nocturnal ejaculation that would sap their strength (43).

  And there is much more from the early Celtic church: for example, Cunmean’s Penitential was composed in the seventh century AD and devoted particular attention to homosexual activities between men. It catalogued virtually every potential sexual variation, and the degree of punishment demanded depended on the extent of homosexual contact: passionate kissing earned eight fasts, but a simple kiss only six. Mutual masturbation and interfemoral stimulation received several years of reduced rations. Cunmean reserved the most severe punishment of seven years atonement for anal intercourse.

  However, standards seem to have been slightly different for the ladies. As early Irish Christian nuns, the virgins of Kildare shared with their Roman Christian sisters a loathing for sexual relationships with men. But they may not have been completely celibate. Brigid herself (the Abbess of Kildare) shared her bed with Darlughdacha ..…on one occasion, Darlughdacha looked lustfully at a passing warrior. To punish and purify her, Brigid made her walk in shoes filled with hot coals. Presumably, Brigid took Darlughdacha back into her bed when she felt the woman had suffered enough for this heterosexual flirtation (44).

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  In ancient Greece, a male adulterer could be punished by having a large radish stuck up his rectum, doubtless symbolizing the penis of the injured husba
nd. As a further insult, the adulterer was subject to having his pubic hair singed off, whereby he was made to look like a woman (45).

  In the recently excavated Augustinian Friary of Kingston-upon-Hull, in northern England, some coffin burials of 1340–1360, the time of the Black Death, contained monks accompanied by what seem to be flagellation sticks — they are a metre long, and made of willow or hazel to be extra whippy.

  In the Brehon law of Celtic society, if a man forcibly shaved the pubic hair of an unwilling woman, he was liable for her full honour-price and a ‘dire’ (punitive fine) (46). On the other hand, a woman could divorce her husband if he were clearly barren, impotent or very fat. ‘The Celts believed that extreme male obesity was a barrier to efficient lovemaking and placed an intolerable burden on the female partner.’ Moreover, if a husband revealed his wife’s intimate secrets to another, or displayed such sexual desire for other men or boys that his wife was deprived of his conjugal services, she could divorce him.

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  In medieval London, if butchers were caught selling bad meats (‘putrid, rotten, stinking, and abominable to the human race’), the culprits were punished by being placed in the pillory and having the putrid matter burnt beneath their noses.

  Torture: The ancient Chinese had a curious and horrible form of punishment. Some criminals were enclosed in barrels or boxes filled with building lime, and exposed in a public street to the rays of the noonday sun; food in plenty was within reach of the unfortunate wretches, but it was salt fish, or other salty foods, with all the water needed to satisfy the thirst this food was certain to excite, but in the very alleviation of which the poor criminals were only adding to the torments that would overtake them when by a more copious discharge from the kidneys the lime would ‘quicken’ and burn them to death.

  THE SHORT, THE TALL AND THE UGLY

  The deformed and disabled in the Graeco-Roman world were regarded as outsiders, made (according to Pliny, the first century AD naturalist) by Nature to amuse herself and create wonder in us. Some turned it to their advantage — in fact, major employment opportunities awaited those willing to perform at parties or in the theatre. Some were credited with magic powers (a large penis was a useful qualification — it was thought to attract the gaze of the Evil Eye away from an intended victim). Others might be ‘lucky’ enough to be collected by an emperor, a very popular hobby.

  Aristocratic Roman names commonly denoted disability — Flaccus (Big ears), Naso (Big nose), Crassus (Fatso), Strabo (Cross-eyed), and Peditus (possibly Farter).

  Cicero tells of a midget witness whom Lucius Philippus asked permission to question. ‘Be short’ said the judge; ‘I’ll be as short as the witness’ quipped Lucius.

  At moments of crisis the ugly and deformed, like other marginal groups, often become subject to physical persecution which may result in their death. For example, in ancient Greek society they selected a victim known as a ‘pharmakos’ or ‘scapegoat’, upon whom the blame for any evils afflicting the community was laid. The victim, who was often but not invariably ugly and deformed, underwent a ritual expulsion or, far less often, execution. They chose the ugly or deformed because these people were believed to harbour a grudge against Nature or the gods for making them freaks, as well as against society as a whole for denying them their full human status.

  One account, based on the sixth-century BC poems of Hipponax, tells:

  The pharmakos was in ancient times the expiatory offering as follows. If a misfortune afflicted a city as the result of divine wrath, whether famine or plague or some other catastrophe, they led out the ugliest person of all for sacrifice, to be the expiation and pharmakos of the suffering city. When they had arranged for the sacrifice to take place at a suitable spot, they placed cheese, barley meal and dried figs in the hands of the victim. After beating the victim seven times on the penis with squills [onion bulbs] and branches of wild fig and other wild trees, they finally set light to him on a fire consisting of wild branches. Then they cast his ashes to the winds and to the sea, so that this should be an expiation for the suffering city.

  Deformed slaves are often mentioned in Latin literature — they were very popular. In fact it seems no fashionable household was complete without a generous sprinkling of dwarfs, mutes, cretins, eunuchs and hunchbacks, whose chief duty seems to have been to undergo degrading and painful humiliation in order to provide amusement at dinner parties and other festive occasions (47). The pretentious Zoilus, ridiculed by Martial, was attended by a catamite who supplied him with red feathers to assist him to vomit, as well as by a eunuch who steadied his wavering penis over a chamber pot while he was urinating..…

  In one of Martial’s epigrams, a guest observes how an adulterous pair use a cretinous slave to pass lascivious kisses slyly back and forth by proxy, under the eyes of the woman’s unsuspecting husband:

  Labulla has discovered how to kiss her lover in the presence of her husband. She constantly slobbers over her diminutive cretin. The lover then straightaway grabs hold of him dripping with kisses, and, having filled him up with his own, returns the cretin to his smiling mistress. How much bigger an imbecile than the cretin is the husband!

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  Some Romans were actually prepared to pay more for deformed slaves than for physically perfect ones .… another of Martial’s epigrams has the speaker claiming that he paid a vast sum for a slave advertised by the dealer as being an idiot, and now demanding his money back because the slave is anything but a fool!

  Plutarch says that, in Rome, the demand for freaks was so great that, in addition to the conventional markets where one could purchase run-of-the-mill handsome boys and beautiful girls, there also existed a ‘monster market’ .…

  Pliny even tells of a dealer called Toranius Flaccus who managed to palm off two exceptionally handsome look-alike slaves as twins for 200,000 sesterces in spite of the fact that they came from different parts of the empire and therefore spoke different dialects. When the fraud was exposed, the shrewd Toranius replied that this was precisely why he had charged so much — because, although there was nothing remarkable about fraternal twins looking alike, ‘to find such similarity in persons who belonged to different races was something that was beyond price.’

  The fad for dwarfs sees to have originated in Pharaonic Egypt where confidential positions were assigned to ugly dwarfs, and the practice became widespread at the court of the Ptolemies, from where it travelled to Rome. According to Aelius Lampridus, the emperor Commodus favoured a certain individual ‘whose penis was larger than that of most animals’, on whom he ostentatiously bestowed the title of Onos or Donkey in deference to his majestic member. Moreover, at a dinner party he once exhibited two misshapen hunchbacks, who had been smeared in mustard, on a silver platter .…

  Phenomenally large penises were in great demand in the Roman world a certain Hostius Quadra, described by Seneca as a monstrum, used to cruise round the public baths looking for the man with the largest sexual organ. A glutton for excess, Hostius then underwent sodomy in a room with enlarging mirrors ‘in order to take pleasure in the false size of his partner’s member by pretending that it was really that big.’ It seems the proud possessor of an outsized organ was treated with some respect, as in Martial’s epigram: ‘If from the baths you hear a round of applause, Maron’s giant prick is bound to be the cause.’ (48)

  The emperor Elagabalus (AD 204–22) is even said to have rounded up all those who were endowed with an unusually large sexual organ, presumably for no loftier scientific purpose than that of comparing their respective lengths .… on another occasion he ordered all hernia sufferers to be brought to his baths so that he could have the perverse pleasure of bathing in their company.

  Elagabalus possessed so many living deformities that his successor, Alexander Severus, was obliged to dispose of the entire collection, including the palace dwarfs, fearful that their maintenance would exhaust his treasury. ‘Male and female dwarfs, imbeciles, and catamites, and all the entertaine
rs and mimes Alexander gave to the public.…’

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  The Roman emperor himself was also often regarded as a monster or prodigy of a kind — this belief that the behaviour of extraordinary individuals can be accounted for in terms of some physical aberration is certainly still with us, as in the case of the entertaining theory that Adolf Hitler only had one ball, as alleged in a popular British wartime song.

  Pliny compiled a catalogue of human oddity — about the tallest giants, the shortest dwarfs, record reproductivity, record longevity, etc. He says King Masinissa of Numidia (third century BC) became a father when he was over 86 years old .… Julius Caesar could simultaneously dictate four different letters to four different secretaries.

  Aristotle tells us that the largest number of offspring ever produced at a single delivery was five — a feat achieved by one woman on no fewer than four occasions. In a catalogue of persons of exceptional emaciation, the third-century AD Greek writer Athenaios claims that the poet and grammarian Philetas of Kos, tutor to an Egyptian king, was so thin that he had to wear leaden balls on his feet to prevent the wind from blowing him away (49). Capitolinus, a Roman historian of the fourth century AD, reports that the Emperor Maximinus, who is said to have been 8 Qw ft tall, was so strong that ‘he could drag wagons with his hands, shift a laden cart unassisted, knock out a horse’s teeth with his fist, or break its legs with his heel, crumble tufa, and split saplings. His thumb was so big that he used his wife’s bracelet for a ring. His predecessor Elagabulus once mocked him, saying ‘You are said to have tired sixteen, twenty, even thirty soldiers at a time. Can you perform thirty times with a woman?’