by Paul Bahn
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The record for intercourse with the greatest number of partners over a twenty-four hour period was held by Claudius’ wife Messalina, whose total of 25, sarcastically described by Pliny as a ‘royal triumph’, beat the record of the reigning champion, a notorious prostitute (50).
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For Roman shows and games, dwarfs often paraded, dressed in extravagant costumes, many with huge, brightly coloured phalli strapped to their loins. They ran about tumbling, doing handstands, and performing simple acrobatic tricks. Sometimes there was a fight between women and dwarfs — as Statius (the first-century AD Roman poet) wrote, ‘It was enough to make Mars and the Goddess of Bravery split their sides laughing to see them hacking each other.’
The Brooklyn Museum has a famous limestone piece from Ptolemaic Egypt (late fourth century BC), officially called a ‘Symplegma’ or group of intertwined figures, but nicknamed ‘Snow White and the seven dwarfs’. The main figure is a large naked white woman in a curled wig. Around her are a number of smaller red-coloured men with enormous phalluses; she is seated on one phallus, while a second is penetrating her from the front!
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LOOSE WOMEN
At the Roman games, women sometimes broke into hysterical spasms — or had orgasms — and not only the commoners in the upper tiers. When one handsome young gladiator, until recently a farmboy from the Apennines, was paraded before the podium with his bloody sword upraised, a great lady screamed uncontrollably and flung her brooch and necklace into the arena. Then she stripped off her rings, threw them onto the sand, and finally ripped off her undergarments and threw them also. When he encountered the crumpled garments, he thought the lady had simply thrown him her scarf or cloak. As he picked up the clothing to toss it back, the underwear unfolded. The simple boy stood gazing horrified at what he was holding. Then he dropped the garments and fled from the arena ‘more terrified of a woman’s underwear than he had been of his enemy’s sword.’ The crowd thought this was killingly funny and nearly died laughing. The patrician lady’s husband, however, was not amused (51).
Hippla was a noble lady who left her husband and children and fled to Egypt with a gladiator named Sergius. As Juvenal, the first century poet, says, ‘Sergius was maimed, getting old, had a battered face, his forehead was covered with welts from his helmet, his nose was broken and his eyes were bloodshot. But he was a swordsman!’ Many great ladies enjoyed the company of famous gladiators in their private apartments. At Pompeii, a series of crude sleeping rooms were discovered which turned out to be a gladiators’ dormitory; and there, frozen in time, was a gladiator who was holding in his arms, and no doubt protecting her from the hot ashes, an upper-class woman still wearing her jewels.
LECHERS
In later life, the Roman emperor Augustus was a womanizer, and as an elderly man he is said to have still harboured a passion for deflowering girls — who were collected for him from every quarter, even by his wife!
The Roman emperor Caligula used to invite a selection of married women to dinner with their husbands; he would slowly and carefully examine each in turn; then, whenever he felt so inclined, he would send for whoever pleased him best, and leave the banquet in her company. Later he would return, showing obvious signs of what he had been doing, and openly discuss his bedfellow in detail, dwelling on her good and bad physical points, and criticizing her sexual performance.
The Roman emperor Domitian was extremely lustful, calling his sexual activities ‘bed-wrestling’, like a sport. He preferred to depilate his concubines himself and would go swimming with the commonest of prostitutes.
CESSPITS AND LATRINES
In ancient Rome, there were public latrines, but no privies attached to houses. There were basins and tubs, which were emptied daily by servants detailed for the purpose. No closet-paper was in use, none having yet been invented or introduced in Europe, but in each public latrine there was a bucket filled with salt water and a stick having a sponge tied to one end, with which the passer-by cleansed his person, and then replaced the stick in the tub (52). Seneca describes the suicide of one barbarian captive, a German slave, who rammed one of these sticks down his throat.
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In the thirteenth century, a Roman bandit Matteo Orsini had the electing cardinals locked up in a small, ruined temple, with no food or water. His soldiers were instructed to urinate and empty their bowels on their Eminences through the holes in the roof until they agreed to nominate the candidate of his choice. But it made conditions so bad in the temple that the new Pope and two of the cardinals died two days after the election.
Before ‘garderobes’ were built corbelled out from castle walls, they were within the thickness of the walls, so that the filth flowed down the outer face of the building into the moat! The King’s privy chamber at Westminster was built on an arch over the water of the Thames — in 1238 the clerk-of-the works was ordered to bar the entrance to this arch with strong iron bars so that no one could enter there!
The records exist of one Henry Ivory, a privy cleaner of fourteenth-century London — he was paid by the number of pipes (one pipe = four barrels) of filth taken away. For 31 pipes he got 51 shillings and 8 pence. The work was probably done at night, with the filth carted to the river where the dung-boats took it away (53). In 1281, the cloaca of Newgate Jail had to be cleaned and repaired — thirteen men worked for five nights, cleaning the cesspool, and a breach was made in the stone wall for the filth to be taken out. Four watchmen, hired for four nights, stood at the gap in the wall to prevent prisoners escaping!
In ancient times, the belief was once widely diffused of the power possessed by sorcerers over the unfortunate wretches whose excreta, solid or liquid, fell into their hands. So some scholars think the introduction of latrines and urinals was not for purely hygienic considerations, but also to prevent one’s being open to sorcery by these means.
According to Captain Cook, while the New Zealanders had privies to every three or four of their houses, there were none in Madrid until 1760 — the determination of the Spanish king to introduce them and sewers, and to prohibit the throwing of human ordure out of windows after nightfall, as had been the custom, nearly precipitated a revolution (54).
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Some public cesspools were so big that, when they were cleaned out, they filled 100–120 barrels. The bodies of murdered people were sometimes thrown into these deep wells, because they took several years to be filled, and by the time they were cleaned out the murderer was long gone.
Until the nineteenth century, people often preferred the cool, sparkling waters of city wells to the piped water of the city companies; but the very sparkle of the waters was due to the presence of ammonia and other organic matter in solution — much of this contamination was caused by the frequent pollution of wells by privy filth, and led to outbreaks of cholera and fevers.
The oldest toilet in Japan is of the late seventh century AD, found in 1992 at the Fujiwara Palace site in Nara — it was filled with black mud and mokkan, inked wooden tablets used to record various transactions in the bureaucratic state. There were also lots of fruit seeds, and numerous parasite eggs.
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The famous dispute between King Richard the Lionheart and the Arch-Duke of Austria, which led to the English monarch being incarcerated in a dungeon, arose from the insult caused when Richard threw the Austrian standard, the Duke’s banner, down a privy.
In medieval London, a ditch in Holborn, next to the inn of the Bishop of Lincoln, was blocked with the entrails of animals, dung, dead dogs, and other putrefying matter. The city moat itself was called Houndsditch because it had often been used as a dumping place for dead dogs!
GRAFFITI
From the Roman world, there are also lead sling-bullets with things like ‘Get Pompey’ written on them, rather like the ‘love to Saddam’ that was chalked on laser-guided bombs in recent years (55).
The graffiti of Pompeii include soldiers and gladiators boasting about their love-li
ves; there is material about gay sex at the palaestra; there are curses, such as: ‘May your ulcerous pustules burst open and burn like never before’ (56); and Herculaneum has a graffito by a doctor (?) who wrote ‘I had a really good crap here’. Pompeii also has drawings with written graffiti — such as Fortunata (fellat).
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Deep inside the Ice Age decorated cave of Niaux, France, there is a graffito from a century or two ago saying ‘Here at the age of 13 I lost my virginity’ (57).
UNDERPANTS
A letter found at Vindolanda fort, near Hadrian’s Wall, sent by a mother to her (doubtless shivering and grateful) soldier son, says ‘I have sent you … woollen socks .… two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants.’
It seems the Bronze Age boat found at Dover a few years ago was once saved from sinking by having someone’s underpants shoved in the hole — the ultimate sacrifice.
The excavation of Kingston-upon-Hull’s Augustinian Friary unearthed the shroud burials of six men of 1410–30 who were fashion victims — they were all wearing ‘boxer shorts’, underpants of good-quality wool. This was a new fashion, brought about by the adoption of canvas breeches, which chafed terribly — hence these underpants ‘for chaps’.
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PHILTRE TIPS
An Egyptian papyrus in the British Museum provides the recipe for a love potion to win a woman’s love: the man has to mix some dandruff from a murdered person’s scalp with some barley grains and apple pips, then add a little of his own blood and semen, and finally the blood of a tick from a black dog. This mixture, if slipped into the woman’s drink. should have devastating consequences (58). Another winning formula, designed to make a woman enjoy love-making, was to rub the foam from a stallion’s mouth into one’s member.
A Chinese manual on camel husbandry of the twelfth century says that if your camel suffers from violent wind, the remedy includes ‘powder of centipedes, beans soaked in wine, acupuncture behind the ears, and the letting of a great quantity of blood.’
Various formulas have come down to us from the Classical world for love philters, and cures for them, involving human excrement, perspiration, menses or semen. Human ordure, in particular, was in constant use in the manufacture of these philters, being administered both internally and externally. It was sometimes put in porridge, and in other cases in shoes — for example, a man who made such use of the excrement of his lady love was completely cured of his infatuation, after wearing the defiled shoes for one hour.
Pliny claimed that the urine that has been voided by a bull immediately after covering, taken as a drink, was an aphrodisiac; another was to rub the groin well with earth moistened with this urine. An ointment of the gall of goats, incense, goat-dung and nettle-seeds was applied to the privy parts before copulation, to increase the amorousness of women. And, according to Pliny, ‘They say that if a man takes a frog, transfixes it with a reed entering its body at the sexual parts, and coming out at the mouth, and then dips the reed in the menstrual discharge of his wife, she will be sure to conceive an aversion for all paramours.’
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Philters made with menstrual and a hare’s blood drove the recipient to mania and suicide, but could also be used to make people impenetrable to an enemy’s weapon and to cure burning sores.
Many believed that the ‘magnetic power’ of human seed could be used in philters, and that by it a lover could feed the flame of his mistress’s affections; it was prepared from what was known as ‘magnetic mummy’, which, being given to a woman, threw her into an inextinguishable frenzy of love for the man or animal yielding it.
Chinese emperors were required to keep 121 wives (the number was thought to have magical properties), and make love to 10 every night. A Taoist manual advised that this could be made possible by applying sheep’s eyelid marinaded in hot tea to the imperial penis (59).
Where anti-philtres are concerned, Pliny claimed that mouse-dung, applied in the form of a liniment, acts as an antiphrodisiac; and that a lizard, drowned in urine, has the effect of an antiphrodisiac upon the man whose urine it is. The same property is to be attributed to the excrement of snails and pigeon’s dung, taken with oil and wine. He also wrote that ‘a woman will forget her former love by taking a he-goat’s urine in drink.’ Hen-dung was an antidote against philtres, especially those made of menstrual blood; dove-dung was also used for the same purpose, but was less efficacious.
According to Paullini,’a man was given in his food some of the dried ordure of a woman he formerly loved, and that created a terrible antipathy toward her.’ Hardly surprising, surely?
But to break up a love affair, nothing was superior to the simple charm of placing some of the ordure of the person seeking to break away from love’s thrall in the shoe of the one still faithful, as described above — though Pliny also claimed that ‘If a man makes water upon a dog’s urine, he will become disinclined to copulation.’ Shoes could also be used in other ways — if a man, who under the influence of a philtre was forced to love a girl against his will, would put on a pair of new shoes, and wear them out by walking in them, and then drink wine out of the right shoe, where it could mingle with the perspiration already there, he would promptly be cured of his love, and hate take its place.
Roman magicians, according to Pliny, asserted that ‘the heart of a horned owl applied to the left breast of a woman, while asleep, will make her disclose all her secret thoughts.’
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UNDER DOCTOR’S ORDURES
Pliny claimed that seminal fluid was a sovereign remedy for the sting of a scorpion. Male urine cured gout, and urine also cured eruptions on the bodies of infants, corrosive sores, running ulcers, chaps upon the body, stings inflicted by serpents, ulcers of the head, and cancerous sores of the generative organs .… Every person’s urine is the best for his own case.
Pliny also gives a huge list of remedies involving the dung of different animals and birds (60). For example, badger-dung, cuckoo-dung and swallow-dung, taken internally, cure the bite of a mad dog; cat-dung, rubbed on the neck, removes bones from the throat; poultry-dung — but only the white part — is an excellent antidote to the poison of fungi and mushrooms; it is also a cure for flatulence and suffocations, which is bizarre since if any living creature only tastes this dung, it is immediately attacked with griping pains and flatulence. Ashes of mouse-dung, raven-dung and sparrow-dung were plugged into carious teeth, and used externally for all tooth troubles. Mouse-dung was good for imparting sweetness to sour breath, while pigeon-dung was used as a gargle for sore throats. Moose-dung, used externally, was good for swelled breasts. A dose of goat dung in the nappy could calm hyperactive children.
Dioskorides also had lots of tips involving dung — for instance, crocodile dung was in high repute as a cosmetic, though purchasers were warned that it was frequently adulterated with the excrement of starlings fed on rice.
Sextus Placitus, a fourth century AD author, claimed that the urine of a virgin boy or girl was an invaluable application for affections of the eyes; also for stings of bees, wasps and other insects. As a cure for elephantiasis, the urine of boys was to be drunk freely, while the crust from human urine was useful in burns and in bites of mad dogs.
Paracelsus, a sixteenth century alchemist, wrote:
the olde Physitians made very many medicines of most filthy things, as of the filth of the eares, sweat of the body, of women’s menstrues, of the Dung of man and other beastes, spittle, urine, flies, mice, the ashes of an owle’s head, etc……I call to mind a storie…of Herachio Ephesio, which being sick of a leprosie, despising the help of Physitians, anoynting himself over with cow-dung, set himselfe in the sun to drie, and falling asleepe was torn to pieces by dogges (61).
Other remedies listed by Pliny involved ear-wax; woman’s milk, especially of a woman who had just borne male twins (‘if a person is rubbed at the same time with the milk of both mother and daughter, he will be proof for all the rest of his
life against all affections of the eyes; mixed with the urine of a youth who has not yet arrived at puberty, it removes ringing in the ears’); human sweat (if the perspiration of a fever-stricken patient was mixed with dough, baked into bread and given to a dog, the dog would catch the fever and the man recover); tartar (impurities from the teeth and the dirt from soiled stockings were a remedy for nose-bleed); and human blood — Faustina, the wife of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was anxious to have a child, so she drank the warm blood of a dying gladiator, and then shared her husband’s bed — she at once became pregnant and brought forth the cruel Commodus; epileptics would sometimes drink a draught of the warm blood caught gushing from the neck of a decapitated criminal.